Ryan Day is moving different, Ohio State looks as dangerous as ever, Matt Patricia's defense is hilariously good and Eleven Dubgate XIII was a huge success.
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*RYAN DAY IS MOVING DIFFERENT. Before Ohio State faced Minnesota on Saturday, Ryan Day stood on the 10-yard line and watched the unthinkable — winless UCLA knocking off Penn State, 43-37. The head coach walked into the locker room and, I assume, gave a similar message to the one he shared with the media after the game.
“If you want to be great, you have to be great all the time. Otherwise, you’re not great. You’re just somebody that shows up every week, and you don’t know what you’re getting,” Day said after Ohio State’s win. “That was the message to our team: It’s about our identity. If your identity is that you want to be great, that you want to be consistent, whatever those things are — we have a list of what we want to be — you have to do that every week, otherwise that’s not who you are, it’s just what you want to be. We talk to our guys a lot about that, but there has to be buy-in.
“We’ve got to go to Illinois next week, and it’s gonna be a bear. You saw what happened in college football today. You’ve got to bring it every week. The team that’s desperate and the team that’s hungry is gonna win the game. And it’s our job to make sure it doesn’t take a loss to make sure we are hungry and desperate. But these guys are still kids, so you’ve got to keep hammering home.”
*RYAN DAY IS MOVING DIFFERENT, PART TWO. When asked what prompted him to reiterate multiple times this week that Ohio State needed to be the most desperate and hungry team in college football, Day said he’s “just always on alert” and wants to make sure no opponent catches his team “off guard.”
“When you keep winning, it’s easy to take the problems and the issues and just say it’s not a problem,” Day said. “I’ll just say it: Bo Jackson reaches the ball out on second down, that’s a problem. We should not be reaching the ball out. That’s going to be a fumble down the road. I’m just going to call it out for what it is. That’s an issue. And if the ball is fumbled, then we’re in a different situation right now. We have to recognize the things we need to get better at.
“The 3rd-and-2, Lincoln (Kienholz) should have been in the A gap, but he bounced it. That’s going to lose us a game if we don’t recognize how important those things are. I love those guys, but we’ve got to get them fixed. And really, that goes to the coaches. We’ve got to get that straightened out. We’ve got to practice it better. We’ve got to drill it better. We’ve got to hold them accountable.
“Those are the things that when you’re chasing greatness, you gotta be all over, you’ve got to take them serious. And it can’t be after a loss when all of a sudden, everybody starts sitting up straight in meetings, or you’re gonna get burnt. Like they say in the Navy SEALs, when you think you’ve got it, you’re about to get it. And we’re far from where we need to be.
So we have to stay hungry every day.”
