Ryan Day shares message to players after first loss in new College Football Playoff landscape

Ohio State has had a bye week to regroup after a tough defeat at the hands of Oregon, and coach Ryan Day is doing what he can to make sure his team is refocused going forward.

After all, with such a high-quality loss Ohio State remains a top College Football Playoff contender.

“You come out of the game and you’ve got to identify the things that didn’t work, which we did make some adjustments,” Day said. “Do we need to overhaul everything? No, we don’t need to overhaul everything. But there are some things — the way that we’re coaching things, the way that we’re scheming some things — we needed to make adjustments there, there’s no question.”

Ohio State hasn’t panicked. The Buckeyes aren’t burning everything down and starting from scratch.

Instead, they’re simply recognizing that they faced a top opponent and weren’t quite up to snuff on that particular Saturday.

“But once all that settles you realize that there’s a lot of football ahead of us,” Ryan Day said. “You look ahead at what we’ve got in the second half of the season and then right here with Nebraska. So you quickly move onto that and realize that there’s a lot of teams across the country that have taken a loss and now we’ve got to adjust and go play our best football here in the second half of the season. You could have as many as 10 games from here on out.

“That’s important to make sure that we now move forward. We learn from the game, but we can’t dwell on it. We’ve got to move forward and focus on Nebraska.”

That’s not to say the loss didn’t sting for Ryan Day. Ohio State certainly would have preferred to come out on the winning end. But it can be a blessing in disguise if treated the right way.

After all, sometimes winning doesn’t necessarily shed light on potential problem areas.

“When you come from a loss you just start to, it’s like you put patches or Band-Aids on things, and then all the sudden you go to a loss it gets ripped open and you have a little bit more, harder conversations,” Ryan Day said. “You make bigger decisions and you just drive it harder. It’s just kind of the way it goes after a loss.

“But that’s not anything like we haven’t been going hard or pushing hard. I mean we have been. We’ve been going 100 miles an hour around here. And I say to you guys all the time after every game, ‘The issues are the issues, we’ve got to address the issues, we’ve got to address the issues.’ And we’ve been hammering that home and the players have been going hard, practicing hard. So I don’t think that’s the case, but I do think we’ve got to figure out, and I think we have a really good plan for it, how to play better in that fourth quarter and in those games, go win those games. So that’s been a huge part of this conversation the past week.”