Tuesday brought a new round of spring practices alongside a new practice feel for Ryan Day.
With the hiring of Chip Kelly as the team's offensive coordinator, the Buckeyes' head coach is embracing a step back from both the development of the team's quarterbacks and the implementation of its offensive scheme.
Day can now fully embrace a CEO-like role as Ohio State's head coach.
"There's no question," Day said. "And maybe it isn't exactly where I'm walking around on the field, but where I'm able to look, where my eyes are going, just thinking ahead of the message I want to give the team or maybe grabbing a guy on defense and giving a message to him. It just allows me to be more present with the whole operation, which is something that I recognize that I need to do."
His connection with Chip Kelly helps make the switch a seamless one for Day.
Day played quarterback for Kelly when the latter served as offensive coordinator at New Hampshire in the late 1990s and early aughts. When Kelly became head coach of the Philadelphia Eagles in 2015 and then the San Francisco 49ers in 2016, Day served as his quarterbacks coach.
"We've been friends, and we continue to be friends," Day said. "We're both very, very competitive. I could tell you stories – not right now – about when I played or even when we've coached, but then when the meeting is over, we get off the field, we're hugging it out. There's a lot of love there. I owe much of where I'm at right now to him. So this isn't about any of that as opposed to a couple guys part of a great program right now that are trying to go chase some great goals."
The first responsibility that Kelly will take off of Day's plate is coaching quarterbacks. While Day said he'll still be very much involved in instruction and conversations with the Buckeyes' gunslingers – especially given his track record developing first-round NFL draft picks Dwayne Haskins, Justin Fields and C.J. Stroud – he feels much of what he learned about playing the position came from Kelly.
While Kelly hasn’t been a full-time quarterbacks coach in more than 15 years, he's been heavily involved in teaching them in his previous head coaching and offensive coordinating stops.
"I mean, he's coached it all for so long," Day said. "He was my quarterback coach and even back in the NFL he had a huge hand in a lot of the quarterback meetings. He would sit in on the meetings. I think even back when I played, he'd coach all kinds of different positions and I think that's what gave him the point of view of seeing all 22 (players on a field)."
“It just allows me to be more present with the whole operation, which is something that I recognize that I need to do.”– Ryan Day on the role he's embracing with Chip Kelly as OC
Another reason Day wanted Kelly in charge of the quarterback room is to ensure his coordinator built chemistry with the man under center for Ohio State's offense in 2024, whether it be Kansas State transfer Will Howard or someone else.
"When you're the play caller, you want to be lock-step with the quarterback," Day said. "There's just certain things that, when you're calling a play, 'We went over that in a meeting, and I'm calling this play for this reason.' And when the quarterback understands, 'This is why it's being called, for these types of reasons' – it's already been covered in the meeting – and if you're in those meetings, then you have intimate details on what exactly is being said, it allows you call the game with more confidence."
Speaking of dialing up the offense, Kelly feels that Day will still have a hand in that aspect of the game with him, as will other members of Ohio State's offensive staff.
"I still think the play-calling part will be a collaborative effort," Kelly said. "By that I mean, if it's a good play, I called it, and if it's a bad play he called it (laughs). ... We haven't actually discussed game day yet, we'll see how that operates, but everywhere I've been it's been a collaborative effort."
With so much of what Day learned about offense coming from Kelly, the main adjustment for the former UCLA head coach has been learning what Ohio State calls certain plays already in his playbook. Day said Kelly has already added some new wrinkles to the running game, and more innovations will be on the way, but there's a lot of familiarity from both sides.
"In terms of terminology, I think it was important to keep a lot of the terminology because our guys already knew it," Day said. "So in day one in spring, there was a quick learning curve on some of it. Now that being said, what we've done here has been a lot of what I learned from him when I was with him before. So this is not like two different offenses trying to come together."
Kelly can relate to the need to step back and take on a broader-scoping role as a head coach. He experienced a similar phenomenon in the shifting scene of college football while coaching the Bruins from 2018 through 2023.
"As a head coach, you sit in on position meetings, but then you're always getting pulled out," Kelly said. "There's other things that are involved with being a head coach and I think it's more of a CEO operation right now. The job and the landscape, as we all know, of college football has changed."
When it comes to schemes, Kelly said that there are not a lot of specifics that can come about from one spring practice. But he plans to design an attack around the talent in Ohio State's locker room.
"It's funny, some people think I'm an air raid guy, some people think I'm a Wing-T guy, some people think I want to run the ball every down," Kelly said. "We're gonna do what's best for Ohio State and that's what our game plan is right now."
