Ryan Day is a coach who can see the best in an overwhelming pool of talent. He was recruiting guys whom he was confident could get him results. And one of them is Jeremiah Smith. Not many players have coaches travelling down to meet them. But Smith had Mario Cristobal, Mike Norvell, and Billy Napier making the trip to get him to flip. “I just go with my gut feeling, just go [with] who’s developing receivers into first-rounders. So that’s who I went with,” Smith told Rivals when he signed with Ohio State. And boy, did Ryan Day see his efforts getting paid off.

Day came very close to losing Smith to Cristobal, even after he had committed to Ohio State. This was the No. 1 prospect in all parameters of the 2024 class, and Cristobal was ready to go to war for him. The star WR told The Athletic that the decision to pick OSU came through in the “final two minutes.” Both Day and Smith had a swell time after that in 2024. Smith was a crucial piece of the machinery that got Day his National Championship win, with his 76 receptions for 1,315 yards and 15 touchdowns. Smith is the kind of player you’ll have to wait years to see again, and Day knows how big he scored when the WR signed the letter.

Noah Weiskopf of The Lantern asked Ryan Day if his “knees buckled down” when Smith signed, and if his freshman season was how he had imagined it to be. “That was probably the dream, for it to be the way it is. But he certainly fulfilled that. And we knew how special he was, and so that day was a rollercoaster of emotion. But even then and there, I knew,” Day recounted warmly. “We all knew what an impact he could have and how different he was. Just wired different,” he remarked about Smith.

Day recalled the WR’s first season play, where he dropped a screen pass that could’ve gone as a touchdown. “Nobody even blinked. Because we had just seen what he’d done in practice and we knew it was going to be that type of a year. And then, for him to finish it with that play in the national championship game, was fitting,” the HC said. And we all know how crucial Smith was in that last quarter. He caught that 56-yarder from Notre Dame’s Christian Gray, and the rest is history. That game wasn’t even the one with his best numbers. It came in the Rose Bowl, where he produced a career-high and set a program record of 187 yards and 7 receptions – the most receiving yards ever made by a freshman.

This year, he’s going to have a more pronounced role and responsibilities in the WR room. “I think him having a voice and when he speaks up, everyone’s going to listen. And that he’s starting to find that voice, I think, going into his second year,” Day noted. He’s made a generational impact among players, so much so that he’s the guy recruits come to watch at visits, the HC told WSYX. Experts are already hypothesizing an NFL career for him, where he is in high demand. Smith is Day’s most dangerous weapon, and all of CFB knows that. But the elite WR was just one part of a whole team that also put in their efforts to get that National Championship win. And the HC is urging the dedicated OSU fanbase not to set such towering demands as the baseline for success.

Ryan Day wants fans to tone their expectations down a notch

For the Buckeyes HC, winning that national championship is never the end goal. He told Josh Pate in a May 1 episode of his podcast, “[If] your goal is to just win a national championship, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. To me, my goal is to help these young men reach their dreams and goals. Winning championships just allows us to continue to do that “. For him, the focus is always the game and his players, and he can get them to do better.

The Buckeyes fans are not only one of the most passionate in CFB – they’re also the most demanding. The program’s legacy boasts of stints with Urban Meyer and Jim Tressel. It’s a team and culture that they want to be bolstered season after season. Keeping a national championship streak is an insurmountable amount of pressure for these young players. Day’s priority is his own people first, to get them to achieve their career goals.

“If you don’t win championships at Ohio State, they’re gonna find a new coach. That’s just the way of the world, right? But that’s not the goal. The goal is to help these guys reach their dreams and goals,” he told Pate. Ryan Day made that happen with Jeremiah Smith, producing one of the best players in CFB at the moment. With him at the helm, Day is focused on ensuring the program does better every season. The Championships will come along the way.