Ohio State’s Season Should Be Appreciated, Not Condemned, After Loss to Georgia

Is an 11–2 season really a failure, even in college football’s title-or-bust world?

Last summer Ryan Day offered up the words that are so easily used against him now: “Maybe at some places, 11–2 with a Rose Bowl victory is a good year. It isn’t at Ohio State.” He just went 11–2 again—this time with no Big Ten title, another rivalry loss to Michigan and a College Football Playoff loss. It was his second straight championship-free year. This will prompt some discussion of soul-searching in Columbus, and maybe somebody will mention the fact that Day’s record at Ohio State is 45–6.

I’m just a writer, but I always thought winning 88% of your games was pretty good.

Day gets paid nearly $10 million per year to coach a strange form of professional football wherein the employees are unsalaried because they are required to attend college, so I don’t expect anybody to feel bad for him. But I do feel bad for fans who watch their team win 45 out of 51 games and then grumble that the coach should be fired. Where is the joy in that? If your team winning 90% of its games leaves you unhappy and unfulfilled, you have stopped watching sports for entertainment and started to see them as a servant who is late to bring you your tea.

Day has made the College Football Playoff in three of his four years as Ohio State coach :: John David Mercer/USA TODAY Sports

Ohio State just lost a truly epic game to No. 1 Georgia. It was heartbreaking, just as it would have been heartbreaking for Georgia if the Buckeyes had won. But for three hours, OSU gave its fans the kind of great, tension-filled show that is supposed to draw us to sports in the first place. Doesn’t that count for something? Can’t we just say “Wow, what a game,” without using the scoreboard to indict the loser?

I don’t know how many Ohio State fans are actually thinking about whether Day should be fired. I suspect it’s not as many as Twitter sometimes indicates, but it’s also more than just a few trolls. I think it’s fair to say that a) Ohio State’s administration has not given three seconds of consideration to firing Day, and b) Day’s future is a topic of conversation among the fan base. Day will visit Michigan next year with a two-game losing streak in the rivalry and a new quarterback. The Wolverines should be a top-10 team again. Ohio State has a long history of firing coaches for losing too much to Michigan.

But maybe it should matter that these were the best back-to-back Michigan teams in at least 30 years. Urban Meyer never faced a Michigan team as good as these two. During those years when Jim Harbaugh couldn’t beat Ohio State or win the Big Ten, I wrote that Harbaugh’s main problem was catching the Buckeyes during one of the all-time great programs’ peaks. Ohio State was a top-five team every year, which is unusual even for Ohio State. It’s hard to beat top-five teams. This isn’t a complicated argument.

Ohio State is now dealing with a Michigan peak. Of course the Buckeyes still expect to win that game, and they should. But the rest of us, especially in the media, should be level-headed enough to acknowledge that beating a great Michigan team is a lot harder than beating the mediocre-to-very good ones Meyer faced.

This year, Day had a top-five team that lost two games, both to other top-five teams. Disappointing? Sure. But that’s not the same as failing.

A few years ago, after North Carolina beat Duke in their annual end-of-regular-season game, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski said: “Carolina is better than we are. That doesn’t mean we can’t win.” It was a completely rational comment that Day could never get away with making, because every college football season ticket these days comes with a pitchfork.

Day understands the landscape. For a social media video last year, the Big Ten asked coaches to say one nice thing about their rival. Day said he couldn’t think of anything good about Michigan. It was, of course, the non-answer that he presumed his base wanted to hear. College football is so overheated that a coach is afraid to say his rival’s university and football program have a single redeeming quality.

The College Football Playoff has convinced a disturbing number of fan bases that there is only one prize worth winning. Otherwise, the season was a failure. It’s a grossly skewed way to live. What other sport is like this? When was the last time you heard speculation about a college basketball coach’s job after their team made the Final Four?

The expansion of the Playoff will only make this worse. Winning rivalry games won’t be such a big deal, because college football is deemphasizing what used to be the best regular season in sports. Making the Playoff won’t seem all that special to certain fan bases because 11 other teams will do it every year. The bowl games are already irrelevant—players skip them all the time, which is their right—and while the bowl system has long greased pockets that were unworthy of greasing, they were also a boon to the sport. They were a small carrot for teams that had no real chance at a big one.

When the Playoff expands to 12 teams, it will still be extremely selective (the NFL, with just 32 teams, puts 14 in its playoff) but will also diminish the achievement of making it. Meanwhile, half of the Football Bowl Subdivision won’t be playing for anything meaningful all year. Those teams can’t win their conference, won’t make the Playoff and are now participating in a sport that is tossing out all its consolation prizes, because all that matters is the national championship.

The expanded Playoff is another in a long line of imperfect but exciting ways to crown a champion. Wild stuff will happen. Sometimes the fifth-best team will win. Absolutely loaded programs will get stunned in consecutive seasons. It’s part of the deal. Every game does not have to be a referendum on a coach or a program. This past weekend, the two losing teams—Ohio State and Michigan—have all sorts of reasons to believe they should have won their games, but they didn’t. That’s sports. You can lose without failing.

This is all supposed to be fun. Winning 45 out of 51 games is supposed to be fun. Making it into the Playoff is supposed to be fun. Losing on a last-second missed field goal is never fun, but as disappointing as it was, I hope Ohio State fans appreciate the ride their team just gave them. I don’t care what Day said last summer or what anyone posts on a message board this week: Going 11–2 with a thrilling Playoff loss to the defending national champions is absolutely a good year. Even at Ohio State.