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Ryan Day Confirms Ohio State is Practicing, Plans to Play Michigan State on Saturday

The Buckeye head coach won't be on the sideline this weekend, but he says the team has gotten good test results and is planning to play Saturday.

Despite being absent from the team facility as he recovers from CoVID-19, The Ryan Day Radio Show on 97.1 The Fan featured it's namesake guest on Thursday.

Coach Day spoke with Paul Keels and Jim Lachey to give a glance into the program and what they're going through this week and shared how he is feeling.

Perhaps the best news he shared - Ohio State is still on track to play Michigan State this weekend after cancelling last weekend's game at Illinois. It was the second cancelled game in three weeks time.

Here are some of the highlights from their conversation this afternoon:

Ryan Day

"I'm doing good, resting comfortably. It's been a tough week, but resting comfortably now and looking forward to getting on the film here and watching how the guys practice this afternoon."

"Trying to do the best we can ... thank goodness we have Zoom ... George can send me the video almost in real time ... still having all of our meetings as scheduled, just virtually."

Day also spoke about how the contingency plans that they put in place over the summer time, in case something like this happened, have worked really well.

"We haven't had anybody that's needed to be hospitalized or needed any medical treatment ... some guys have experienced some of the symptoms, but for the most part guys are resting comfortably."

On Saturday, Day said he can watch and communicate up until game time, but once the game starts that's it. "It will probably be the hardest three hours of my life." The rules are fairly restrictive during the game.

"It was a tough weekend. We were looking forward to Illinois and things happened fast and furious ... good news is we've had several negative PCR tests for the team and staff though since then and we are looking forward to going to East Lansing."

Day also spoke about how proud he is of his team and how they probably don't get enough credit for how well they've handled this entire situation.

In his absence on Saturday, Day said Coach Larry Johnson will be acting head coach and have the final decisions. Offensive Coordinator Kevin Wilson and Defensive Coordinator Kerry Coombs will have a lot of input as well, discussing things like timeouts. "Kevin still has the offense, Kerry still has the defense." Wilson will be down on the field this week to help with game management.

The team will test on campus on Friday, then jump on the plane Friday night to fly to East Lansing.

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