IT’S TIME I MOVE: Ohio State Buckeyes Coach Ryan Day announce after the…

On Nov. 27, 2022, I wrote that Ohio State needed to fire Ryan Day. One day prior, the Buckeyes had lost their second-straight game to Michigan, and suffered their first loss to the Wolverines at home since 2000.

The response back then was mostly in defense of the head coach. Day’s defenders championed his 45-5 overall record at the time, his dominance on the recruiting trail, and his three College Football Playoff appearances in his five years in charge of the program. Fans of other teams laughed at the idea of wanting to fire a coach who won the vast majority of his games and had even gotten his team to a national title game — which they notably lost by a million.

While I would love to sit here and gloat about being right, it brings me no joy to report that I was absolutely correct, and now we are all paying the price.

Here we are two years later, and not much has changed since the Buckeyes lost that 45-23 contest in Columbus. All of the incredibly obvious flaws under this coaching staff have come home to roost time and time again, culminating in Ohio State’s worst loss in program history on Saturday.

As a 20-point favorite at home, Ohio State lost to a 6-5 Michigan team without its best player on each side of the ball. The group of Wolverines that handed the Buckeyes their fourth-straight loss in the rivalry is the least talented group that program will ever have again, without a single notable quarterback, wide receiver or defensive back on the field for the 13-10 upset. Michigan is only going to get better moving forward, but the talent gap didn’t matter in the slightest because of the coaches on the home sideline.

The only advantage Sherrone Moore’s team had in that game on paper was its defensive tackles, and Ohio State’s offensive game plan was to run directly into their face masks 25 times. The duo of Kenneth Grant and Mason Graham forms the best interior defensive line in the country, and they were matched up against an interior offensive line that just lost its starting center and needed to completely re-form the depth chart.

It doesn’t take a genius to understand who has the upper hand in that battle.

So what was the plan for the braintrust of Day and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly? A steady diet of runs between the tackles, resulting in little to no yardage each and every time and keeping the offense behind the chains for the entire afternoon.

Ohio State ran the ball 26 times for 77 yards, and without the one chunk run by Quinshon Judkins for 17 yards, gained 60 yards on 25 carries — 2.4 yards per attempt. No matter how many times the Buckeyes literally and figuratively rammed their heads into a wall, they just kept going back to the well.