Ryan Day: "There's Enough Blame to Go Around"

The Buckeyes head coach wasn't pointing fingers at anyone after a tough loss.

Author:
Brendan Gulick
Sep 11, 2021 6:29 PM EDT

Admittedly, Ryan Day is pretty good in front of a camera and microphone after a loss.

He acted exactly as you'd hope and acknowledged the deficiencies that today's loss to Oregon spotlighted.

Day shoulder all the blame, answered questions gracefully and patiently, never pointing the finger anywhere but the mirror.

"I felt like it was a game that we were never in control of," Day said. "It felt like they ran the ball, and we didn’t do a very good job of running the football, and we weren’t able to convert on fourth downs. And because of that, we’re always kind of playing catch up. We must learn from this. You have to grow from this and we still have a lot of football left, and figure out where the execution issues were, and get them fixed.”

Ohio State was basically chasing Oregon from the get-go, and despite the fact they once tied the game 7-7 in the first quarter, the Buckeyes never led the rest of the way.

“We have to get things fixed," he continued. You know that’s just kind of how things go. I thought at the end they got missed opportunities on offense. The offense is going to do their part of this thing as well. And, again, I don’t think we established the run, and I wanted the defense to give the offense the ball back. You know we didn’t do anything with the lead to get opportunities to score points.”

As you might imagine, Day was asked (in several different ways) if the blame for this loss fell on defensive coordinator Kerry Coombs' shoulders. The offense racked up 636 yards and still Ohio State couldn't find a way to beat the Ducks.

"There's plenty of blame to go around," Day said. ""everybody on our staff works really hard, we make decisions as a group and it ultimately comes back on me because I'm the head coach."

That may be true, but something has to change ... and it has to change starting tomorrow.

I'm not calling for anyone's job here. Frankly, I really like a lot of things about Kerry Coombs. But something's gotta give here. I'm not sure if the problem is scheme, coaching or personnel. Perhaps its a combination of the three. But for a team to come in and run the ball at will is totally inexcusable. And once the Buckeyes started committing more bodies to the run game, Anthony Brown passed to open targets very regularly.

"When you go through adversity, you find out a lot about your team, you find out a lot about your leadership." Day referenced that adversity puts leadership under the gun, because it can be easy to start pointing fingers in areas where things fall apart on game day. "When things don't go well, you have to show resolve, resilience. This is not fatal, but it certainly hurts."

Ohio State's hopes for qualifying for the College Football Playoff are not completely dashed, but that road certainly just got a lot tougher.

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