Coach Ryan Day might have been understating things slightly when he said there’s a lot that comes with a loss at Ohio State.
Last Saturday’s historic fourth-quarter collapse by the Buckeyes in their 24-23 loss at Texas has brought angst and second-guessing usually reserved for losses to arch-rival Michigan.
Day spent Tuesday’s news conference going through the post-mortem after experiencing only his second setback in 27 games in September while trying to outline his hopes of preventing the loss from snowballing and impacting the rest of the season.
“It’s extremely frustrating, it’s maddening and we’re excited to get back on the field and get going because the last couple of days haven’t been fun around here,” Day said. “Had some really good conversations with the guys. I think they’re going to be in a good mindset moving forward. We understand we have a lot of football ahead of us. So this highlighted some things that we got to get fixed.”
It was the first time in program history the sixth-ranked Buckeyes have lost when leading by at least 17 points at halftime. Going back to 2004, top-ranked teams in the AP Top 25 were 197-0 when holding a 20-point lead at any point in the fourth quarter. Ohio State was up 23-3 going into the final 15 minutes before the Longhorns scored on their final three drives.
Day might have been too aggressive at times — including a failed fourth-down conversion when the Buckeyes could have kicked a field goal — which he owned up to.
“When it’s time to go win the game, we all have to be on the same page and we have to live with the result. Just like we throw the ball on third-and-4 to Jeremiah (Smith) on a fade to go win the game (in the fourth quarter). Yeah, I absolutely own that. We didn’t have enough answers in the fourth quarter to go win the game, but we will moving forward.”
One late-game situation Day acknowledged he might do differently next time is letting a team score in order to have enough time to possibly go on a game-winning drive.
Day called his final timeout with 53 seconds remaining when Texas’ Hollywood Smothers was stopped on first-and-goal at the 1. Smothers ended up scoring two plays later and with 25 seconds on the clock.
“If we win the game, then it would’ve been the right decision. And in the moment you’ve got to make a hard decision and I decided to try to hold the line,” he said. “Ultimately would have loved to see what it would’ve looked like if they would’ve scored. So we’ll have to think about it when it happens again.”
Julian Sayin passed for 278 yards, but completed only five of 16 passes in the second half. The junior has a 75.9% completion rate in his two seasons as Ohio State’s starter, but it is 62.5% in losses.
Before opening Big Ten play on Sept. 26 against Illinois, the Buckeyes (1-1) host Kent State on Saturday.
Ohio State is averaging 59 points and winning by an average margin of 51.7 points in its seven matchups against MAC teams since Day took over as head coach in 2019.
The bigger concern is making sure the Buckeyes correct mistakes by the time they have crucial road tests next month against No. 18 Iowa, No. 4 Indiana and No. 12 Southern California.
“It’s see what we did wrong, try to improve those and make sure this doesn’t happen again,” Sayin said. “I think we have a good group of guys on our team. I think we can use this as fuel. I love the group of guys on the team and have a lot of confidence in them.”
Reporting by the Associated Press.
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