Ryan Day Admits He Regrets Not Letting Texas Score in Ohio State’s 24-23 Loss
Ryan Day gave everyone the answer they wanted on Monday. Read it again, though, because it is not the answer Ohio State fans should want.
Asked about his clock management in the final minutes of the Buckeyes’ 24-23 loss at Texas, Day said this: “It didn’t work, so the answer is yes. If we win the game, then it would’ve been the right decision. In the moment you’ve got to make a hard decision and I decided to try and hold the line. Would love to have seen what it would’ve looked like if they would’ve scored.”
Start with the first sentence. It didn’t work, so the answer is yes. That is a coach conceding a result, not a process. And the second sentence makes it explicit: if Ohio State wins that game, Day believes it was the correct call.
The math said let them score
Texas had the football at the 1-yard line with 1:30 on the clock. Ohio State had no timeouts left. There is only one question in that scenario, and it is not whether your defense can be heroic. It is how many seconds you want your offense to have when it gets the ball back.
Day chose to hold the line. Texas simply ran the clock down to 25 seconds and then walked in the go-ahead touchdown. The Buckeyes got the ball back with a quarter of a minute and no way to stop the clock.
Everyone watching knew this in real time. Fans knew it. Analysts said it on air while it was happening. The one person who did not act on it was the guy wearing the headset.
Here is the thing about “hold the line.” It only pays off if Texas fumbles or gets stuffed four straight times from the 1. Even a stop probably ends the game anyway with Ohio State pinned deep and out of time. The upside was a lottery ticket. The downside was exactly what happened.
Regretting the outcome is not the same as learning
Coaches make bad decisions. That is survivable. What is harder to fix is a coach who reviews a bad decision two days later, with all the time in the world and no crowd noise, and concludes that the only thing wrong with it was the final score.
“Would love to have seen what it would’ve looked like if they would’ve scored” is a curious line from someone who had a full day to run that exact scenario. He can see what it would have looked like. It would have looked like Ohio State getting the ball around the one-minute mark with a chance to drive for a field goal instead of 25 seconds and a prayer.
The context makes it worse. Ohio State led 20-3 at halftime and still lost by one. A team that controlled that game for two quarters had it taken away in the final 90 seconds, and the head coach is on record saying he would do the thinking part the same way again.
The fallout arrived Sunday. Texas jumped to No. 1 in the AP Top 25 with 56 of 68 first-place votes. Ohio State slid to No. 6, which put the Buckeyes outside the top five for the first time in two seasons.
None of that is fatal in September. Ohio State will get chances to climb back, and one-point road losses to the new No. 1 do not end seasons. But games in January are decided by margins this thin, and the man making those calls just told everyone he would do the same thing again as long as it works out.
That is not accountability. That is results-based reasoning with a microphone in front of it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.