Ryan Day details relationship with Ohio State OC Chip Kelly: 'There's nobody I trust more'

By most metrics, the Ryan Day–Chip Kelly experiment has been an unmitigated success at Ohio State.

Coming into the 2024 season, there were many around the college football world that questioned Kelly’s surprising decision to leave his position as UCLA‘s head coach to become the Buckeyes’ offensive coordinator under Day, his former quarterback pupil at New Hampshire.

Much of the consternation around Columbus revolved around Ryan Day’s ability to hand over offensive play-calling duties to someone else after years of handling it all himself.

But as many around the Buckeyes program can attest, it’s been a match made in Heaven. Through 10 games this season, No. 2 Ohio State has the second- and third-ranked scoring and total offense averaging 37.8 points and 451.4 yards per game — behind undefeated Indiana in both categories.

Day cited the intrinsic trust created through three decades of friendship.

“The first thing is there’s trust there. Any time you’re in a pressure-cooker environment, you want to be around guys you trust. And there’s nobody I trust more than Chip (Kelly) with my life, other than my family,” Day said of Kelly during a Friday appearance on the Pat McAfee Show onsite inside Ohio Stadium. “I’ve known him since I was this tall, he recruited me, he was my coach, he’s been a mentor for me. So, that’s a big part of it.”

Their longstanding friendship aside, Day acknowledged there are the occassional disagreements, especially given the elevated stakes of competing for a national championship year-in and year-out.

“Now, it doesn’t make it easy. What we do every day, you’re chasing the top 1-percent. I think you can have an argument, you can go through things, but at the end of the day you can have your arm around each other because you know you’re working towards the same goal,” Day continued. “And I think he’s done an unbelievable job of just coming in and working with what we have. I think the offensive staff has great chemistry, I think the guys on offense really respect the way he’s come in and added new things, but also incorporated things we’ve done here in the past. So we’ve got to be at our best now.”

That’s because Ohio State (9-1, 6-1 B10) enters arguably its most impactful game of 2024 when undefeated Indiana (10-0, 7-0 B10) comes to Columbus with massive implications. Not only is a chance to play No. 1 Oregon in the Big Ten Championship game in two weeks, but even more importantly — at least for the Cinderella Hoosiers — is an oppotunity to stay in the 12-team College Football Playoff field.

Chip Kelly explains how trust helps Ohio State offense

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.”

Thomas Goldkamp contributed to this report.