It would have been somewhat understandable had Ohio State lost to USC on Saturday because of subpar play from a true freshman quarterback making his first career start on the road.
Instead, the Buckeyes got at worst average play from Luke Fahey. The California native completed 21-of-38 passes for 260 yards and a touchdown. He also ran the ball for 21 yards, sack-adjusted.
Fahey didn’t light the world on fire, but he didn’t go out there and lose them the game. That honor belongs to the Ohio State coaching
staff.
It all starts with Ryan Day, who, despite several personnel and coordinator changes, has allowed the same problems to fester within his program year after year.
The Buckeyes have had as much offensive skill talent as anyone in the country, and yet the red zone offense has been consistently abysmal under Day almost every season he’s been at the helm. Ohio State, rather than utilizing the best wide receiver prospect the sport has ever seen, would rather shoot itself in the foot time and time again.
Against USC, the Buckeyes scored only one touchdown in four trips to the red zone. That included one series which saw them set up with first-and-inches at the goal line, where they then proceeded to run — out of the shotgun — for no gain, lose yardage on a false start, and throw two incomplete passes before ultimately kicking a field goal.
Day, who specifically gave up play-calling so that he could focus on other overarching areas during game days, like clock management, has also been completely terrible at actually managing said clock when the situation demands it.
Trailing by two scores with around eight minutes remaining, Ohio State continued to huddle up and run the ball as the clock ticked away. The Buckeyes would eventually score on the drive on a touchdown pass from Fahey to Jeremiah Smith, but the drive ate up nearly SIX minutes of the game clock.
Then, to make matters worse, rather than kicking the extra point and pinning USC deep on the ensuing kickoff, needing one stop to get the ball back trailing by eight, they elected to go for two. The two-point conversion failed, effectively ending the game rather than giving his team a shot for a stop-and-score late with two timeouts and the two-minute warning.
If Day isn’t calling the plays, isn’t managing the clock, and struggles to make decisions of when and when not to go for it, what exactly is he still doing?
What he definitely isn’t doing is getting the most out of Ohio State’s quarterbacks, which is what he was brought to Columbus to do in the first place. Which brings us to perhaps Day’s biggest offense, no pun intended: his terrible coaching hires.
Day made the right call when he shifted to more of a CEO role as Ohio State’s head coach to step away as the de facto position coach and hire a real quarterback coach. The only problem: they didn’t actually hire a real quarterbacks coach.
Billy Fessler is the Buckeyes’ passing game coordinator and quarterbacks coach. The 31-year-old’s first real gig was the quarterbacks coach job for two years at Akron, where the Zips ranked 18th nationally in passing yards in 2022 before plummeting to 99th in 2023 under his tutelage. He made a quick stop at UCLA before ending up at Ohio State in the same role.
Nothing about that resume reads like you have earned a spot coaching quarterbacks at one of the biggest programs in the country, and the position has suffered without any real guidance from an actual experienced leader.
Julian Sayin seemed to regress this past offseason, and when he went down with injury, Fessler and the coaches were somehow unable to get the former five-star prospect behind him on the depth chart ready to go. That’s no disrespect to Fahey, who again played well enough, but Tavien St. Clair being an afterthought at this point in his Ohio State career is either terrible prospect evaluation, coaching malpractice, or both.
Then there’s the offensive line, which played one of its worst games of the season against USC. Fahey was only sacked twice, but the constant pressure in his face did not make life easier for a first-time starter, and the unit also managed to commit a whopping SIX penalties.
Again, the unit is led by an under-qualified assistant in Tyler Bowen, who before this was coaching tight ends at Virginia Tech.
The Georgia native hasn’t actually coached offensive line since 2017, when he did for one season at Maryland. Bowen’s only other experience with the position group came at Fordham, an FCS program, in 2015 and 2016. In Bowen’s previous role as the Hokies’ OC from 2022-24, Virginia Tech’s offense ranked 120th, 57th and 68th, respectively.
What part of that resume leads you to believe that he is fit to lead perhaps the most important position group at a place like Ohio State?
Speaking of tight ends, maybe the single worst assistant coach of the Ryan Day era — at least on offense — has got to be tight ends coach Keenan Bailey.
Bailey was an intern at Ohio State in 2016, working up to quality control coach in 2019 before eventually taking over the tight end position in 2023. Since then, Bailey was further promoted to co-offensive coordinator in 2025, where he was part of the braintrust that helped score 10 points against Indiana and 14 points against Miami at the end of last season once Brian Hartline was out the door.
The tight end position is now maybe in the worst shape it has ever been thanks to his tutelage. Even with that being the case, it is the position Ohio State looks to feature the most both in run blocking and in the red zone — surely a coincidence that the team has struggled so much in short yardage in those areas!
While those three are the clearest examples of guys who never should’ve been hired in the first place, the Buckeyes also have a handful of other coaches who deserve criticism for their performance this season.
Robby Discher was hired to take over special teams, and they are just as bad as ever — another staple of Day’s tenure in Columbus. Carlos Locklyn’s running back room hasn’t exactly shown out, and he has failed to land a single running back in the 2026 recruiting class. Larry Johnson’s defensive line has managed six total sacks through eight games.
Having three outwardly bad coaches and three more underperforming assistants isn’t exactly a winning formula. This Buckeyes team is obviously not as talented as last year’s or the year before, but there is absolutely no reason that they should look as wildly unprepared and undisciplined as they did against USC.
It was jarring to watch how Ohio State played on Saturday, especially since they had two full weeks to prepare for this game. Players looked out of sync and out of position; the play calls on both sides of the ball made very little sense for the majority of the game; and the coaches were unable to dig their way out of it once things started to snowball.
That’s what happens when a head coach surrounds himself with inexperience and incompetence.
Ohio State’s players certainly didn’t put their best foot forward against the Trojans, but they were set up to fail by a staff that simply is not up to par with what a program of this caliber demands.
