Ryan Day jokes about lower expectations in 2025: ‘Try losing the first game, see how that goes’

What a difference a couple months can make. Just ask Ohio State coach Ryan Day.

Day went from on the hot seat to just the third active coach to have won a national championship. His seat now? Downright chilly.

Still, don’t expect to see the sixth-year coach getting too cozy. Asked after the game what it will be like to operate under a little less pressure now, Day could hardly hold back.

“Yeah, try losing the first game and see how that goes at Ohio State,” Day said. “We’ll see about that.”

But the reality is that Ryan Day is a different coach now than he was a couple months ago. Four straight wins in the College Football Playoff will do that.

Now the challenge shifts from quieting the noise around his job to repeating the feat.

“I think we have a great group coming back, but I think what these guys have had an opportunity to do — we had 145 guys on a team and a percentage of those guys were newcomers, freshmen, and also some of the transfers that are coming in,” Day said. “The thing that I told them is you have to use this time as an opportunity to learn what it’s supposed to look like.”

They should know at this point. Ryan Day has helped illuminate the way, aided by one of the most talented — and expensive — rosters in the sport.

But it’s so much easier to get somewhere when you know where you’re going. And now the Buckeyes know.

“These guys set an amazing example. And I asked the captains, in particular, ‘What do you think about bringing these guys onto the team, because they can be a distraction a little bit?'” Ryan Day explained. “I mean this is a team that’s been together. All the sudden you add 25, 30 new guys to the team, it can be a little bit of a distraction. They said, ‘No, we want these guys around because we want to hand the torch to them so they understand what the brotherhood is like, they understand what this is supposed to look like so when we leave they can take over for that.’ And we do have a talented group coming back.”

As Ryan Day noted in his answer to the question about less pressure, the backdrop doesn’t really change. Win or face heat.

So once again… how can the Buckeyes find a way to repeat?

“We’ll get back there and try to figure that out,” Day said. “I don’t know if spring practice is going to look the way that it usually does. I don’t think it can, quite honestly, with the amount of games that these guys have played. But for the young guys we’ve got to get them going and get them indoctrinated into the program, get the offseason going and then we’ll ramp it back up soon.”