Ryan Day shares takeaways from Ohio State playoff preparation for Georgia

Amid the National Signing Day craziness, Ohio State still had a College Football Playoff game against Georgia to prepare for going into the holidays. Head coach Ryan Day was impressed with his current team getting ready for the defending national champions.

“I see a team that realizes that there’s not a lot of people giving us a chance,” Day said. “And have played really hard in practice or prepped really hard in practice. I think that there’s a good look in our guys’ eyes. I know we’re getting a couple days off for Christmas here and then get back together down in Atlanta, but we know what we’re in for. We know what the challenge is and we’ve been working really hard towards it.”

Georgia is the No. 1 team in the country and hasn’t lost a game since 2020 while Ohio State snuck into the playoff by virtue of USC losing the Pac-12 Championship.

Ohio State certainly has a chance to upend Georgia with its high powered offense. C.J. Stroud was a Heisman finalist after a solid season, despite not having superstar Jaxon Smith-Njigba nearly all season.

The emergence of Marvin Harrison Jr. helped the offense tremendously, coupled with a rushing attack of TreVeyon Henderson and Miyan Williams.

Despite having this team at 11-1 on the year, the Buckeyes had to wait to see if they made the cut. After the loss to Michigan in the final week of the year, Day explained why Ohio State deserved to make it into the final four.

“I thought we were in it,” the coach said. “We were fighting there at the end and it obviously got out of control down the stretch. It wasn’t like we were outmatched in terms of just overall play, I think. As we get to those decisions, I think you’ve got to look at the body of work we’ve done. We’ve got a lot of good pieces on this team and we came up short today. But I think if we were able to get a shot in the top four, we’d be a dangerous team.”

Georgia coach Kirby Smart, who is still flying high off of a National Championship win to cap last season and looking to repeat again this year, was asked what impact that winning the title has had on recruiting.

“I don’t know if you can measure that, I think it gets you in the conversation with more national guys,” Smart said. “But there’s nobody I look at this list and say we wouldn’t have gotten had we not won it or we got them because we won it, I can’t quantify that.”