Ohio State’s wild ride ends with national championship

ATLANTA — He’s a coach who signed up to surf the mad, loud life where lasting legacies hinge on fleeting football plays, and at 12:51 a.m. Tuesday he strolled to exit yet another stadium tunnel. Two Ohio State police officers flanked him, proving the Ohio State police have an expansive jurisdiction. Ryan Day had just finished two TV desk interviews on the field of a cold indoor stadium maybe 90 minutes after a cold Gatorade shower, and now he turned left and headed down a hallway near a locker room with his players cleared out, the attendants cleaning up and the air rich in stogie residue.

Wherever he headed in the festive wee hours to follow, he headed also into an intangible, unmistakable club.

Once Ohio State had jumped atop and then warded off Notre Dame in Monday’s College Football Playoff national championship game at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, once the score came to rest at 34-23 after it had been a more comfortable 31-7 in the third quarter, Day seemed to jettison a pesky sliver of his Ohio State being: that of an outsider in the very kingdom he has headed for six seasons.

There’s Paul Brown, who hailed from Massillon near Canton; Woody Hayes, who came from Clifton near Dayton; Jim Tressel, who arrived from Mentor near Cleveland; and Urban Meyer, who hailed from Ashtabula in the extreme northeast over near Pennsylvania and got a thunderous ovation during an on-field introduction Monday night. Alongside them with a national championship for Ohio State now stands Day, 45, from New Hampshire, which always did feel just that smidgen different, and suddenly he could point out — twice — how Ohio State has three national championships in the past “50-some-odd years,” only 47 shy of fans’ demands.

“After all the things that have been said all year,” he said, “these guys are going to be cemented as one of the best stories in Ohio State history and one of the best football teams ever.” The guys include wunderkind freshman Jeremiah Smith, whose trip up the right side of the field running beside Orange Bowl hero Christian Gray of Notre Dame will breathe on long after the boom of noise from the Ohio State majority of the 77,660 died down. That trip began with 2:45 left on a near-desperate third and 11 from the Ohio State 34-yard line after Notre Dame had clambered back to 31-23, and Smith looked almost like a center fielder as he settled under Will Howard’s pinpoint loft for a 56-yard gain that arranged Jayden Fielding’s clinching 33-yard field goal.

“A huge play in Ohio State history,” Day called it.

It became yet another shovelful of dirt atop the woe of Nov. 30, when the Buckeyes took a fourth straight loss to Michigan, the rival they fancy least of all rivals, a 13-10 final score still oozing with bewilderment. “We had an awful day,” Day says now that the meager 252 yards and zero first downs after the six-minute mark of the third quarter gave way to total yards deluges of 473, 500, 370 and 445. Those 1,788 came in playoff games against teams ranked No. 7 (Tennessee), No. 1 (Oregon), No. 3 (Texas) and No. 5 (Notre Dame), the hardest gantlet in both the newfangled 12-team bracket and the sport’s 155-year history.

“Some unbelievable game plans in these playoffs,” said Howard, the one-season Buckeye who transferred from Kansas State and closed with a 17 for 21 for 231, “and I’ve been so confident going into every single game because I know our game plan is so sound and so thought-out and thorough.”

“You want to play zone, and they’ll find ways to pick you apart,” Notre Dame Coach Marcus Freeman said. “You want to play man, they’ll find ways to get him the ball” — with the “him” meaning Smith.

Back near the beginning, Ohio State spent its first four possessions resembling a symphony with Howard as conductor and with the diabolical drawings of mad scientist Chip Kelly, the longtime head coach and mentor Day brought in last offseason as offensive coordinator. Howard completed his first 13 passes. He made deft throws that rained over outstretched hands but more often found receivers in gaping space from among what Howard called “the best receiver room in the country and it’s not even close.” That included Smith (five catches for 88 yards), Emeka Egbuka (six for 64) and Carnell Tate (two for 35).

Ohio State went 75 yards, 76 yards, 80 yards, 75 yards. It scored on Howard’s eight-yard flip so that a lonely Smith could jog in on the right, on Quinshon Judkins’s nine-yard run, on Judkins’s six-yard reception after Howard stepped out of the pocket, on Judkins’s one-yard run following his 70-yard setup burst through the line’s handiwork. By early in the third quarter, the yardage stood 306-93 with the symphony rich in flourishes and crescendos, in variety and beauty.

The sight of it overwhelmed two realities: that Notre Dame brought in a bruising defense (ninth in the country and fifth in yards per play), and that Notre Dame began the game of longtime empires with a daydream: 18 plays, 75 yards, nine runs from quarterback Riley Leonard, two fourth-down conversions and — wait for it — 9:45 of clock chewed up.

It promised a game that did not materialize once things got to 31-7, but once things got to 31-7, Notre Dame (also 14-2) left reminders about its fantastic year with 13 straight wins and deeply meaningful camaraderie. It had been the kind of year where a sixth-year linebacker, Jack Kiser, ended up with his voice cracking and halting as he said: “What I’ll remember is the people. … To have Coach Freeman” — and then he paused in a way that conveyed words might not suffice before saying, “Yeah, it’s about the people.” It had been the kind of year when Leonard said, “I don’t even recognize the person I was before I got to Notre Dame,” and he’s been at Notre Dame only one season since transferring from Duke. And it had been the kind of year where the 39-year-old Freeman would say, “I’m just sitting here listening [to Kiser and Leonard], like this is one of the greatest gifts in life, to be able to be the leader of this program …”

So of course they got two drives going covering 75 and 80 yards. Of course they got Leonard’s touchdown passes of 34 and 30 yards to Jaden Greathouse, the first weaving through the left and the second hauling one in in the end zone with a defender draped on him. Of course they had two clever two-point conversions on a shovel pass and a receiver pass.

Of course they threatened Ohio State with anxiety with that third and 11.

And then Howard lofted, and Smith fielded, and the Buckeyes majority erupted, and soon Day bathed (in Gatorade) after surfing the plays. Two years prior, he had exited the same field when a 50-yard field goal missed and a 42-41 semifinal loss sighed and a probable national title fizzled. (“I couldn’t quite come to grips for a while with why we just didn’t finish that game against Georgia,” Day said.) Months prior, he had begun with a powerhouse NIL vault and a championship horizon, of which linebacker Cody Simon said, “When we went into the season we knew we had a lot of chips in the pot, and the expectations were really high.”

Fifty-one days prior, he had stood on the field after 13-10 in a near-petrified daze. Thirty days prior, he had stood with his family near the back of the throng looking relieved as the Buckeyes sang “Carmen Ohio” in front of the band after walloping Tennessee, 42-17.

Now the plays had given Jack Sawyer’s legendary 83-yard fumble return against Texas, and Smith’s forever 56-yard catch against Notre Dame, and now Day said of the scrutiny: “When you sign up for this job, that’s what you sign up for. You’ve got to be strong enough to withstand those storms, to come out the back end.” Now as he entered one last tunnel for the long 2024-25, he’d come out the back end and gone smack into the club.