THE SITUATIONAL: Film Study from Hell
Ohio State lost to Michigan again, and yet the final score was not the worst part.
The afternoon laid bare how divorced from rivalry history Ohio State’s approach to Michigan is under the current leadership. That means without an intervention, it’s likely this will keep happening.
This is Ramzy, and unfortunately I’m old enough to be a little too familiar with what I saw on Saturday. Football Scheme Senior Scientist Kyle Jones is here to challenge/support my thematic football and human capital management rivalry philosophies with his advanced analytics and sophisticated football acumen.
So this week we are publishing together. We’re in my dojo today. Kyle is hosting tomorrow.
PART I: INDICTMENT
RAMZY: If you’re hired to lead Ohio State’s football program, a full indoctrination into the Michigan rivalry is required onboarding – especially for an interloper from, say, Tennessee or New Hampshire.
Reader, if you think that’s dramatic or cringey you must be from somewhere else. You do not get it. And that’s fine, you’re allowed to be an infidel in Ohio State’s toxic football religiousphere. Ohio State’s head coach is not. That’s a showstopper.
I believed Ryan Day first working under Urban Meyer and then losing in Ann Arbor last season brought him up to code on The Game. He experienced what winning meant and how losing felt. The last time I was this wrong, well at least that take aged in a way that is now funny.
The Game is never won on paper or laminated play call sheets, because it is always played inside a living organism, either in Columbus or Ann Arbor. The Buckeyes and Wolverines fight to feed it in their favor amidst tension and anxiety so thick it physically hurts to watch them play.
When Ohio State feeds the organism successfully in Ann Arbor, O-H-I-O cheers bounce around the building, and the fans in blue are treated to the worst stadium experience of their lives. When Michigan has done this successfully in Columbus – and unfortunately I grew up in a time when this happened far too often – you get Saturday.
And then Ohio State fatalists get cartoonish in grief. That’s what we are, that’s what this rivalry does to us and it’s what every Ohio State head coach signs up for when he accepts the job. That’s part of the reason they all age faster than US Presidents.
On Saturday, the current Ohio State head coach had both feet firmly planted on the Michigan sideline, aggressively feeding the organism on the visitors’ behalf. It was the most John Cooperesque coaching performance since Cooper himself walked the sideline 22 years ago.
RYAN DAY HAS HEARD EVERYTHING ABOUT THE MICHIGAN GAME. IT’S NOW OBVIOUS HE DID NOT LISTEN.
Day forfeited the advantages of flawless weather, superior star talent, individual mismatches and home-field advantage to Jim Harbaugh by treating Michigan as just another game. His strategy was the same diverse and largely successful playbook experience we’ve seen all the way through 11 wins we now barely remember or care about anymore.
Restraint and caution, a couple of new wrinkles and a grab bag of getting-everyone-involved plays featuring guys who will never win major awards – a perfect recipe for beating Rutgers on Homecoming. The organism predictably turned on him as Michigan caved Ohio Stadium in on itself after halftime.
The strategy included some of the most conspicuous fatal errors documented in the 100+ year-old Ohio State head coaching catalog. Nightmare cautionary tales we’ve told in Ohio for decades, which somehow escaped the current head coach.
Day has heard every story about The Game by now. It now appears he didn’t listen.
Losing to Michigan like that is how Ohio State fans go full-cartoon and start talking about replacing a guy winning games at a 90% clip. But that’s not just because he lost. It’s because we’ve seen this type of loss so many times before, and we know what happens to coaches who lose to Michigan like this. They keep losing to them.
And they end up on the wrong side of the rivalry. Here’s how the right side sounds:
Jim Harbaugh was asked if he had any issues with players planting the flag at midfield after the game.
“I want to get that flag,” he says. “I want to get that flag and put it in our museum.”
— Austin Meek (@byAustinMeek) November 27, 2022
He’s on top of the world now. Harbaugh had been in hell and on his way out of town.
Ohio State’s head coach absolutely cannot be among the millions of people who do not understand The Game, or worse – pretend they get it. Day parroted everything someone with his job title is supposed to say for a full year, and then on Saturday went full-Coop with strategy and in-game behavior.
Losses to Michigan are not all Cooperish. Jim Tressel didn’t go full-Coop in 2003. Luke Fickell did nearly everything right and still lost in 2011. Even Coop’s 1988 loss was decidedly un-Coop-like! (we just didn’t know that yet).
Last year there were some factors which gave Day the benefit of the doubt, and he made swift, loud changes to address what happened in Ann Arbor. He approached the challenge like a project manager. It’s now evident he still doesn’t understand the assignment.
The good news is that is still totally fixable. It’s just too late to fix it for last Saturday.
Nov 23, 1991: Desmond Howard returns a punt against Ohio State at Michigan Stadium. The Buckeyes had not allowed more than 19 points all season, as Michigan won 31-3. Mandatory Credit: USA TODAY Sports
PART II: UNLEARNED CAUTIONARY TALES
STILL RAMZY, HAVING TROUBLE SHUTTING UP: Saturday was a 1996 and 2000 mashup.
Two games I’m sure Day has never seen. I know DC Jim Knowles hasn’t, and that’s because he proudly admitted he hadn’t even watched the 2021 game. If you’re going to be successful in this rivalry, you have to immerse yourself in it, because while the players and coaches come and go, the venues, ghosts and energy never change.
You have to watch the tape with the volume all the way up so you can hear the stadium living or dying in real time. You have to feel when death warms over or hits peak in-game euphoria. You have to become obsessed with this dynamic. It’s not just the emotionless X&O stuff and scouting film.
Coaches work at Ohio State for a limited amount of time. If they’re not absorbing the full experience and taking it as seriously as cartoonish Ohio State fans do, they’re just punching a clock. And unfortunately, the locals don’t take kindly to paycheck players.
It’s a huge hassle, sure. They can coach at Wake Forest if they don’t want to deal with it.
What we’ve witnessed since 2019 is a breathtaking surrendering of RIVALRY COMMAND, held in Ohio State’s favor for two decades.
OSU (and Michigan) coaches not only need to know how to win that game, but understand how it has been lost. Ohio State ate some very familiar-tasting shit on Saturday in large part because the guys in charge somehow missed that their game strategy and philosophical approach to the rivalry were long-established failures.
They repeated doomed history that was readily accessible to them. Day was in high school when the head coach of the 1996 team puckered away the entire afternoon as a 17-point favorite by playing scared. He was in college when a couple of misplaced wrinkles made it interesting and the Buckeyes came out hot, but then failed to put Michigan in a tough spot and his team’s fragile psyche ceded the afternoon to the visitors over the 2nd half.
Ohio State head coaches have to scrutinize all of the shit their predecessors left behind so they can avoid stepping in the same piles. Day brought a John Cooper mindset into the Michigan game on Saturday while facing a coach who has been emotionally vested in the rivalry since he was 10 years old.
Harbaugh was crying about the Ohio State game before Day first located Ohio on a map at school. That’s not Day’s fault. He has to understand this is an embedded disadvantage he must overcome, and his rival is not just some weirdo who still drinks milk and spills word salad sound bites.
The Game will be an emotional mismatch as long as Day and Harbaugh are the two coaches, just like Bo vs. Coop, Mo vs. Coop and Lloyd vs. Coop all were. Tressel vs. Lloyd showed when both coaches understand the rivalry, Ohio State has the advantage – especially when one coach is taking just a little too long to retire, and recruiting classes suffer.
Tressel vs. Rodriguez was a disaster for Michigan, and Meyer vs. Hoke would have only gotten more lopsided if Michigan had allowed it to fester. Day vs. Harbaugh with Meyer’s fading fingerprints is not boding well for the Buckeyes.
Harbaugh is now 2-6 in this rivalry, but he hasn’t Coop’d a single loss. Michigan was both outmanned and facing Ohio State coaches and players who…
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