Being an offensive coordinator for Urban Meyer is essentially a precursor to becoming a head coach somewhere else down the line. Never before, however, has it been a precursor to being a head coach at the same place and time that Meyer himself is also the head coach.
Such is life for acting Ohio State head coach Ryan Day at the moment, and for the two games following Saturday’s matchup with Oregon State as well.
The gig certainly caught Day off guard — and why wouldn’t it? How often are head coaches even suspended to begin with?
When OSU athletics director Gene Smith told Day that he was going to be in charge during Meyer’s absence, it knocked Day back for a brief second before he realized that the only way to get through it was to move forward. Day by day. Moment by moment.
“I was very surprised,” Day admitted. “It did catch me off guard. It was one of those things where you just wake up the next day and you think, is this really happening? And then you just kind of put one foot in front other. I don’t think anyone could have expected any of this.”
Day has basically been the Ohio State head coach for a month now, and while the day-to-day goings-on went off pretty well from all accounts, Saturday is going to be a different animal altogether.
The whistles will matter more. The decisions will come faster and with more weight. There are no do-overs. The pressure could become too much for some coaches.
Day and fellow offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson will continue to direct the offense, but Day will be down on the field outside of his customary press box. With Wilson’s help, he will be calling the plays and doing everything else the head coach needs to do.
He won’t be alone, he knows that. But he did admit that early on when trying to spin so many plates, he did break a few dishes.
“If you saw me at one of the scrimmages, I don’t know if you would have said I balanced it very well,” he said. “I was trying to coach the quarterbacks, call the plays and organize the scrimmage and I looked like my hair was on fire. So it was a challenge, and there’s been times where I felt like I’ve been drinking through a fire hose, to be honest.
“And the expectation of Ohio State is you win every game and I understand that. So there’s that added pressure there that you feel. But every day it’s become more normal. The first few days it was a lot and then after the first week it became more normal and every day it becomes more normal and I think that the players understand that as well.”
In the end, however, it really became about everyone else other than Ryan Day.
In an effort to keep things as normal as possible, the leaders led and the coaches coached. Day spent his time with the quarterbacks, and the other position coaches did the same thing with their players. Camp waits for no man, and the players and coaches were more than happy to get lost in the impatience.
There was no manual for how Day should have handled things, he only did what he had been built to do.
“It’s kind of learning by getting thrown in the fire a little bit,” he said. “One of the things that really helped me along the way was I got a text message and I get it just about every other day from one of my mentors, Chip Kelly, and he says, ‘you’re built for this.’ That’s what he told me.
“And that’s the thing I keep going to every morning when I wake up is that I’m built for this. Because there is no script, there’s no game plan, and again, my goal was never to make it about me or try to replace Coach, it’s all about the players and the coaches and empower them and that’s what my instinct has told me and so that’s what we’re going with.”
