Ross Bjork outlines what Ryan Day, Buckeyes have done since last loss to Michigan
Ohio State is riding its first three-game losing streak to Michigan since 1995-97. When new Buckeyes athletic director Ross Bjork met Ryan Day for the first time in January, he asked the now-sixth-year head coach what he’s been doing since the latest iteration of “The Game,” a gut-wrenching, 30-24 loss in Ann Arbor that effectively dashed Ohio State’s Big Ten and national title hopes in 2023.
“He went through a whole list of all the things that he was working on,” Bjork said last Thursday on the Ultimate Cleveland Sports Show. “And it was an amazing approach to, ‘Look, we got to recalibrate. I’ve got to hire an offensive coordinator.'”
Bjork mentioned how, at the time, both Bill O’Brien and Chip Kelly were candidates for that OC job. Day ended up hiring O’Brien the first go-around before O’Brien quickly left for the Boston College head coaching position. After that, Day brought in Kelly, as the timing worked out better for the now-former college and NFL head coach by that point in the offseason.
Day handed over play-calling duties to Kelly, who was Day’s offensive coordinator when he was quarterbacking University of New Hampshire in the late ’90s and early 2000s. The two worked with each other on staff at UNH, and then Day was Kelly’s quarterbacks coach with the Philadelphia Eagles in 2015 and with the San Francisco 49ers in 2016.
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But before Day made either of those hires, he outlined a whole lot more that he was going to do this offseason, and Bjork continued recalling that plan Thursday.
“‘I’m going to hire an OC. We’ve got to retain the right guys on the roster. We’ve got to be more aggressive in the NIL space, and we’ve got to raise more money for the NIL. We’ve got to have an infrastructure off the field,'” Bjork said, referencing what Day conveyed to him in January.
“And he put a plan together, and he attacked it, and here we are. So, yes, we have a lot of talent, but I’ve been more impressed with how he’s really focused on the culture of the team and the leadership of the team. It’s one thing to have the talent, but it’s another thing to have all the intangibles clicking at a high level.”
Bjork noted how he’s been around teams with “all the talent in the world,” but the culture wasn’t clicking at a high level. He previously was the AD at Texas A&M, one of the biggest players in the early days of the NIL space, which boasted a historic 2022 signing class that finished No. 1 in the country with nine five-star prospects, according to the On3 Industry Ranking. That year, the Aggies — despite ranking highly in the SEC preseason media poll, second in the SEC West to be exact — went 5-7, including a mere 2-6 in league play.
This year, Ohio State arguably has the most talented roster in college football — in large part thanks to 11 draft-eligible and starter-level players who returned, plus a batch of big name transfer additions — and Bjork is confident in all the things Day has done to complement that talent, including facilitating good culture but also transitioning to a higher-level role in the program.
“Whether it’s analytics around two-minute warning — he and I had a conversation about that just this morning — whether it’s Chip calling plays and letting [Coach Day] be the CEO of the program,” Bjork said Thursday, “he has done a masterful job, I think, of just putting the infrastructure in the right places [so] that then, hopefully, that’s where the scoreboard takes care of itself, because you did all these other things correctly, and your culture’s at a high level.”
Bjork added: “I’ve been really impressed with the offseason approach of Coach Day. Now we get to play. And now we get to see it hopefully all come together. That’s what I’ll be focused on as we lead into this new era.”