Ohio State failed to repeat as National Champions despite a loaded roster, proceeded to make poor assistant coaching hires and then started to lose games that it shouldn’t.
I’m actually not talking about this current iteration of the Buckeyes. This is instead a description of Urban Meyer’s Ohio State program from 2015-18. Unfortunately, this description would also fit the 2025-26 Buckeyes under Ryan Day, as he is following in nearly the exact same footsteps of his predecessor.
The comparison begins
during the national title campaigns for each of the two head coaches, which followed eerily similar paths between Meyer’s in 2014 and Day’s in 2024.
In 2014, Ohio State suffered a shocking defeat to Virginia Tech, a team that went on to finish 7-6. The Buckeyes luckily were able to overcome the early loss and ran the table to make the first ever four-team College Football Playoff.
In 2024, Ohio State suffered a shocking defeat to an awful Michigan team that finished 8-5. The Buckeyes had luckily built up enough good wins over the course of the season to make the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff.
Both Meyer’s and Day’s postseason runs featured a blowout win over Oregon and a hotly contested matchup against an SEC program, with a 42-35 win over Alabama in 2014 and a 28-14 win over Texas in 2024. Both would go on to win the first edition of a brand new College Football Playoff format and secure a national title.
The Buckeyes looked primed to repeat in 2015, bringing back almost the entirety of a championship roster that was loaded to the brim with future NFL talents. Instead, Ohio State looked a bit out of sorts for the majority of the campaign, and a disastrous loss to Michigan State ultimately ended any hopes of back-to-back titles.
The Buckeyes also looked primed to repeat in 2025, again bringing back almost the entirety of a championship roster that was loaded to the brim with future NFL talents. While Ohio State looked pretty good for most of the season, it still felt like things just weren’t quite as good as the peak from the year prior.
Eventually, they would lose a lackluster Big Ten Championship Game to Indiana that should have at the very least gone to overtime, setting up a loss to Miami in the College Football Playoff to end their campaign.
For Meyer, the bulk of the issues were a result of poor assistant coaching hires.
Tom Herman did a tremendous job as Ohio State’s offensive coordinator during the 2014 national title run, but with his decision to take over as the head coach at Houston, the Buckeyes turned to Ed Warinner and Tim Beck to lead the offense.
Warinner and Beck weren’t nearly as good as Herman, and they were heavily exposed in Ohio State’s 31-0 loss to Clemson in the 2016 College Football Playoff, spelling the end of their tenure with the Buckeyes. That said, they were far from the biggest offenders on Meyer’s staffs over the next few seasons.
When Luke Fickell left for Cincinnati in 2017, Meyer hired Bill Davis to take over the linebacker room. Davis, who was Meyer’s best man at his wedding, was a disastrous hire, and the start of a trend of several terrible assistant coaching hires by Meyer.
Then came Alex Grinch and Taver Johnson. Grinch, who joined Greg Schiano in Columbus as co-defensive coordinator and safeties coach, as well as Johnson, who took over coaching cornerbacks and special teams, helped pave the way for an Ohio State defense that ranked 52nd in the country allowing more than 25 points per game.
Meyer’s continually eroding staff decisions began to lead to some shocking Ohio State losses. The Buckeyes got blown out by Iowa in 2017, and blown out again by Purdue in 2018.
While there were some addition off-field factors that ultimately led to the end of the Meyer era at Ohio State, his poor hires across the coaching staff had led to a diminishing product on the field. It was time for the Buckeyes to move on, and in stepped quarterbacks guru Ryan Day to take the reins.
Like Meyer, Day did eventually lead Ohio State to a national title. However, also like Meyer, his issues are now largely the result of some terrible coaching hires around him.
A ton of Ohio State’s success on its 2024 national title run can be attributed to offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, who finally brought back a little bit of creativity to a Buckeyes’ offense that had gone stale. The biggest strides were seen in the running back, with TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins both putting up huge numbers in Kelly’s system.
When Kelly took the Las Vegas Raiders’ offensive coordinator job in 2025, Ohio State turned the role over to wide receivers coach Brian Hartline. Far and away the nation’s best recruiter, Hartline’s ability to draw up an offense left a lot to be desired, and it was clear the Buckeyes took a large step back on that side of the ball as a result.
Ohio State scored 10 points against Indiana and 14 points against Miami in its back-to-back losses to end the season. On a unit that featured both Jeremiah Smith and Carnell Tate, in addition to a breakout freshman running back in Bo Jackson and a five-star quarterback in Julian Sayin, that was obviously a massive letdown.
Elsewhere, the hires of Keenan Bailey, Tyler Bowen, Billy Fessler, Tim Walton and Carlos Locklyn have continued to worsen their respective position groups.
I’ve already written about the likes of Bailey, Bowen and Kessler, all three of which are woefully under-qualified to coach their units at Ohio State and have caused drastic declines at the tight end, offensive line and quarterback positions, respectively, but Locklyn and Walton shouldn’t get a pass either.
Locklyn looked to be a good hire at the time to lead the running backs room, and unlike the aforementioned unholy trio actually came to Columbus with at least a little bit of pedigree having coached at Oregon.
That said, the Buckeyes’ running backs room is in dire straights right now, with Bo Jackson taking a step back from his freshman season and nobody else at the position having established themselves this year. On top of that, the recruiting trail has been a disaster, with still zero running backs committed in the 2027 class.
Walton, who has been at Ohio State since 2022, has also seen his room begin to decline. The Buckeyes have done a decent job in recruiting talent at the cornerback position, but it seems like most guys that don’t show up as a mostly finished product never really improve.
Jay Timmons is the best player in the room, and he’s a freshman in his first season of collegiate football. Guys like Jermaine Mathews Jr. and Devin Sanchez haven’t shown much of any improvement year over year, with Sanchez failing to live up to his five-star pedigree to this point in his career.
As with Meyer, Day’s poor coaching staff hires have made the on-field product worse, and those same puzzling losses to lesser programs that we saw in the late-stage Meyer era are now beginning to crop up with Day, beginning with the 2024 loss to Michigan and most recently a 30-18 loss to a bad USC team this past weekend.
Ohio State is 6-4 over its last 10 games, a nearly unfathomable record over any stretch for the historically elite program. Day’s overall record remains impressive, but it would be hard for even the most avid of Day’s defenders to say that the recent product we’ve seen on the field is up to the standard.
By the head coach’s own established goals, Day is currently failing. Day said that Ohio State’s three main goals each season are to beat Michigan, to win the Big Ten title and to win the national title. To this point, they are just 5-for-21 on those goals during Day’s tenure, have zero B1G titles since 2020 and could still go 0-3 on those goals in 2026.
It feels like history is repeating itself at Ohio State, and we know how things ended with the previous regime. If Ryan Day isn’t able to recognize his mistakes and turn things around in a hurry, we could potentially be heading down a dangerously similar path.
