The past three weeks offered head coach Ryan Day ample time to reflect.
Ohio State didn’t sign anybody on Wednesday’s National Signing Day. The team didn’t start Mickey Marotti-led offseason workouts until Monday. He didn’t have to go out and replace a bunch of assistant coaches or deal with abnormal staff turnover. For the first time in months, he could take a proverbial step back and recalibrate.
So, naturally, he spent hours dissecting the defensive issues on display for the country to see in the national championship game when Alabama laid 52 points and 621 yards in a blowout 52-24 victory. More importantly, he dug into exactly why the poor performance on that side of the ball happened and if he needed to make wholesale changes.
Day’s actions in promoting Matt Barnes to secondary coach and Parker Fleming to special teams coordinator, along with his words at a press conference Wednesday when explaining the decision, both spoke to the same pair of ideas.
He truly believes the guys already in the Woody Hayes Athletic Center – most notably, defensive coordinator Kerry Coombs – can turn the defense around, so he’s putting his trust in them.
He thinks the defensive debacle in the Alabama game had too many extenuating factors to use that as a driving reason for change, saying it was “hard to evaluate with all the different dynamics at play.”
“Certainly the last thing we're doing is making excuses or built-in excuses,” Day said on Wednesday. “But I think the way the season played out with less games, I think that the way that no spring and the preseason being chopped up just didn't help. But now we have a whole year. And I think once we have a whole season and a whole year to evaluate that, I think as we sit here next year, we'll have a much better feel for where we're at.”
His steadfast belief in a full offseason with the coaches already in the facility remained constant as he spoke.
“When you evaluate it, going back to the Clemson game, going back to the Northwestern game, I thought there was really good things there. In that last game, it wasn't,” Day said on Wednesday. “So, do we overreact? No, I'm not going to do that. Not right now. I think that with a whole offseason, a spring ball, a preseason, we're going to get the right personnel in place, we're going to make some adjustments schematically, and then we're going to do an unbelievable job coaching. That's going to be the focus as we head into the spring these next six and a half weeks, and then obviously as we head into the fall.”
So, that’s that.
Co-defensive coordinator Greg Mattison’s retirement gave Day an opportunity to go in any direction he wanted. He could have gone in any direction – whether it be another co-defensive coordinator in the mold of Mattison or something completely different – and considered them all. This is Ohio State, after all. It’s not too difficult to find highly regarded coaches who would jump at the opportunity to work in Columbus for a college football superpower. Yet he didn’t even leave the building to make his next move. Day slid Barnes over to primarily coach the secondary alongside Coombs, made Fleming one of his 10 full-time assistants with a heavy focus on special teams and gave Coombs a quasi-promotion by opting not to bring in a co-defensive coordinator.
In this moment in time, Day is making the biggest bet with a coaching move yet as a head coach. Truly, the bet isn’t on Fleming, what he offers to the secondary and whether he was a good hire. The bet is on Coombs, along with the other defensive coaches, to get that side of the ball back on track after a subpar season.
Day just saw a defense that wasn’t up to snuff on the biggest stage, said on Wednesday that his evaluations showed the primary issues were with scheme and coaching rather than personnel, and proceeded to double down on the coaches already employed at Ohio State. He’s riding with his guys, putting believe in Coombs to get the scheme in order, Barnes to develop defensive backs at a high level, Larry Johnson and Al Washington to coach the heck out of their units while helping Coombs with the defense as a whole and Fleming to master special teams.
“There's plenty of ideas there,” Day said. “It's just a matter of, well, how do we implement it and how do we do a better job of coaching it? That's really what it comes down to. If there was some scheme out there that someone could bring in that we haven't seen before or don't know, then, yeah, I would do that. But there isn't. We know the different schemes. We know the different coverages. These guys are really sharp.
“But now, how do you implement those the right way, and how do you pick the right ones? And I think that's the key.”
