Ohio State head coach Ryan Day didn’t hold back during his recent chat on the Pat McAfee Show, using the platform to fire up his squad and shut down any offseason hype whatsoever. The head honcho dropped a reality check on his players, basically telling them that paper roster talent means nothing if they do not grind every day. Day is using the heartbreak of last season as a wake-up call to make sure his locker room stays hungry from the get-go!

“You know, week two at Texas, it’s a monster game for us,” Ryan Day said when asked about their brutal schedule. “It’s not the end of the season, but we know how important that is and where that’s going to project out down the road. So we have to have a great preseason camp. We got to be good early, but then we have to continue to develop as the season goes on, and continue to evolve as the season goes on.”

The head honcho doubled down: “What we look like in week two cannot be how we look like at the end of the year, and then we have to handle after Thanksgiving better going into the playoffs. There’s no question. You know, look at it just how we did. You know, what the Big 10 championship, everything that led up to that game, and then and then the layoff, and we just didn’t play well against Miami, especially in the first half.”

The warning stems directly from the team’s past struggles with long layoffs and late-season momentum. After grinding through the season and dropping that close Big Ten Championship to Indiana, the Buckeyes had a 25-day break before the playoff quarterfinals. The Buckeyes came out looking flat, unprepared, and frankly, complacent.

Ohio State went completely scoreless in the first half of a game for the first time since 2016, digging themselves into a 14-0 hole that they could never quite climb out of. Despite having so much talent, they simply couldn’t get into any sort of rhythm one bit all night.

Ryan Day’s aware that a repeat of that stagnation will ruin their season. Complacency is a total luxury Ohio State does not have because their schedule is absolutely diabolical.

According to pretty much every media outlet, the Buckeyes are at the top of the food-chain when it comes to the most difficult schedule in the country.

The Buckeyes are staring down a gauntlet where they could realistically play 11 teams ranked in the Top 25 or Top 15. Day acknowledged that hitting the ground running is absolutely critical because there are no easy weeks to coast through.

To make things wilder, a monster test lands right on their doorstep almost immediately. In just Week 2 of the season, Ohio State has to line up against the powerhouse No. 2 ranked Texas Longhorns. Day explicitly noted how important this matchup is for where the team projects down the road, warning that what they look like in Week 2 absolutely cannot be what they look like at the end of the year if they want to handle business after Thanksgiving.

One more thing apart from surviving the week 2 Texas scare show, Day’s quite hell-bent on fixing the most alarming offensive problem Ohio State has seen in years. Last season, the Buckeyes’ Yards After Catch per reception (YAC/REC) plummeted to a shocking 5.1 yards. Not going to lie, quite a red flag for a program known for big plays.

To put that 5.1 number into perspective, it is a total anomaly for a Ryan Day offense, which comfortably averaged above 6.0 YAC per reception for five straight seasons. Dropping that low meant the signature “home-run” threat was completely gone.

Good thing is, he brought Arthur Smith and Cortez Hankton to help with that. Regardless, end of the day, it’s upto the players, and they cannot get complacent for even one second from the get-go.