Ryan Day, Chip Kelly explain how trust in relationship helps Ohio State offense

The Ohio State offense currently ranks No. 4 in the country in scoring and No. 9 in the country in total offense, operating at an insanely high clip under new coordinator Chip Kelly.

The cohesion on the staff between Kelly and head coach Ryan Day has made for an easy transition.

“I think that’s probably the biggest word is trust,” Day said. “When you have trust you get through a lot of just wasted time, because you can be direct with somebody and know that you care about them and no matter what is said you can kind of put your arm around each other afterwards. I say that a lot because that’s it.”

Day and Kelly have been arm in arm collecting wins this season, already off to a 5-0 start and sitting near the top of the Big Ten standings.

The pair’s shared experiences before the Ohio State union are something Kelly pointed to as foundational to their relationship.

“I just think we’ve been around each other for so long that we share a lot of the same views of how the game is supposed to look,” Kelly said. “So when he has an idea it’s not something that we’re like, ‘Wow, where did that come from?’ You have an understanding because we spent time together coaching together. And I coached him, but then I also got to coach with him. So I think we shared experience.”

From a practical standpoint, though, Day pointed out how he and Kelly have been able to mesh at Ohio State and what kind of benefits that has provided.

“The other thing I think is having familiarity of just how each other think, you can get through a lot of conversation,” Day said. “Revisiting some things you’ve done in the past, things that have worked, things that haven’t worked, things that you tried together before philosophically. All those things, I think, allow us to work efficiently.”

Ohio State players will even sometimes see the coaches shift into memory mode.

“Sometimes he’ll talk about a route that we may have run when we were together in the NFL,” Kelly said. “‘Remember when we played the Cowboys and we did it this way?’ ‘Oh yeah, let’s get that tape out and look at that.’ So I think our familiarity in understanding how we see the game, it’s similar. I think that makes it so much easier.”

Whatever the case, it’s working. Ohio State is currently putting up 46.0 points per game while ringing up an averaged 510.2 yards of offense.