KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — As the final seconds of Ohio State’s loss to Michigan ticked away in its regular-season finale, the fans in the Buckeyes student section voiced their displeasure.
“F— Ryan Day! F— Ryan Day!” they chanted.
Minutes later, Josh Heupel walked off a field almost 400 miles away in Nashville as “Rocky Top” blared through the stadium of the Volunteers’ in-state rival. He hugged national champion baseball coach Tony Vitello. Athletic director Danny White was smiling and waiting for him on the way to the locker room.
The orange-clad fans who flooded Vanderbilt’s stadium celebrated a breakthrough moment for the program.
Ohio State and Tennessee have identical records. They’re separated by just one spot in the final College Football Playoff rankings.
But as they meet in the first-ever first round of the CFP in Columbus, the stakes couldn’t be more different for the coaches on the opposing sidelines.
Much of that is because of what they inherited and what they’ve done since.
Heupel inherited a once-proud program that had won 10 games once since 2004 and had cycled through five other coaches from 2008 until hiring Heupel in 2021.
He took over after Jeremy Pruitt was fired on Jan. 18. 2021, very late in the coaching cycle, after an internal investigation that lasted longer than a month found cause to fire Pruitt when it discovered multiple NCAA recruiting violations. As a result, more than 30 players fled the program and transferred, including former blue-chip recruits Henry To’oTo’o, Wanya Morris, Eric Gray and Quavaris Crouch.
The roster was decimated.
The program was coming off a 3-7 year in a season shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic. In the 118 previous seasons of Tennessee football, the Vols had finished four games below .500 just once: in 1906, the final year under J.D. Depree. From 1980 to 2007, the program had suffered through just two losing seasons. From 2008 until Heupel’s hiring, the Vols endured eight losing seasons.
The situation was dire.
In Year 2 under Heupel, the Vols reached No. 1 in the CFP poll and only a shocking loss at South Carolina separated the program from its first Playoff berth.
“Nobody was expecting that year in 2022, at least outside the building,” junior running back Dylan Sampson said. “Now, that’s the expectation.”
Two years later, the Vols are in the Playoff, albeit one that expanded to 12 teams. And Heupel, after exceeding expectations with a 7-5 season in 2021, has won 30 games and counting in the three years since.
“We’ve continued to take steps,” Heupel said. “This is the next step we had to take as a program.”
At Ohio State, expectation has defined Day’s tenure as Buckeyes head coach. He took over a program in 2019 that won the Big Ten in Urban Meyer’s final season and won it again in his first two seasons.
Since then, he’s stumbled into a Michigan problem. In 2021, he lost to the Wolverines to end Ohio State’s eight-game winning streak in the rivalry, just the second time OSU had lost to Michigan since 2003.
Two more losses in 2022 and 2023 served as roadblocks to Big Ten titles, but the Buckeyes backed into the Playoff in 2022 and came within a 50-yard field goal from beating eventual national champion Georgia in the semifinals.
That close call did nothing to erase the impact of the losing skid against Michigan. Failure in The Game, the New Hampshire native Day has learned, is simply not tolerated.
“It’s one of the worst things that’s happened to me in my life. … Other than losing my father and a few other things, like, it’s quite honestly, for my family, the worst thing that’s happened,” Day said of losing to Michigan before this season’s loss.
It’s a remarkable statement that seems unbelievable on its face, but the weight of those losses seemed evident in the Buckeyes’ shocking 13-10 defeat in November.
The saving grace of the loss last season was Michigan was preparing to lose coach Jim Harbaugh and more than a dozen players to the NFL after winning the national title. OSU’s rival would take a step back in what looked like a peak year for the Buckeyes, who sounded ready to unleash three years of frustration.
Except the 7-5 Wolverines, whose season was marked by ugly offensive play, uglier losses and a frustrating quarterback carousel with no answers, extended their winning streak in the rivalry to four anyway.
And thus, Day’s serenade on his way off his home field. And that was before a brawl on the field led to players on both teams being pepper sprayed by police after a skirmish over Michigan’s efforts to plant a flag at midfield of Ohio Stadium.
The Playoff offers the potential for something close to redemption. A loss will introduce more questions about whether he’s the right man to lead Ohio State.
This season’s failure so far has come with a roster that cost boosters $20 million, highlighted by high-profile additions of safety Caleb Downs from Alabama and running back Quinshon Judkins from Ole Miss that had some wondering if the Buckeyes roster was one of the best in recent memory.
Whether true or not, it hasn’t lived up to expectations. Now the Buckeyes are a 7.5-point favorite for their first game since the Michigan debacle.
Day is 66-10 overall and 46-5 in Big Ten play with two conference titles to his name. Heupel is 37-14 and 20-12 in SEC play and has yet to play for a title.
One of them could be coaching his last game on Saturday.
Expectation will do that.
Heupel can coach unburdened, armed with the knowledge his approval rating has never been higher, and he’s one loss to South Carolina two seasons ago from having it be impossibly high.
Day, despite his bosses’ assurances, will ignite more cries for his firing with a loss. Ross Bjork, who replaced the retired Gene Smith as athletic director earlier this year, said this month he’s “absolutely” sure Day will be back in 2025. It would cost a little over $36 million to fire Day after the season, and earlier this month, Day said the issue “never came up” in discussions with recruits.
After the loss to Michigan, Bjork backed Day in an interview with the Columbus Dispatch and said the program’s focus was on the Playoff.
“The reason we had to say something after (Michigan) is, we’re still breathing, we’re still alive,” Bjork said. “The book is not closed.”
Exactly. Things change.
In many ways, Heupel can probably relate.
He took over at UCF in 2018 after Scott Frost parlayed a 13-0 season into the head coaching job at Nebraska, his alma mater. Heupel, who had been the offensive coordinator at Missouri, was a surprising selection.
He won 12 games in Year 1. Then 10. Then six. The volume of grumbling in Orlando wasn’t at the level it currently resides in Columbus, but it was loud.
Less than a month after White was hired as athletic director at Tennessee, he turned to Heupel in a hire that shocked both Tennessee and UCF fans alike. Heupel had started looking like a poor caretaker of a program that claimed a 2017 national championship. But thus far at Tennessee, it looks like being a rebuilder of a program becomes him.
He’s thrived. The change of scenery, despite the lackluster welcome when Heupel was hired, has been a dream for both sides.
Day’s time at Ohio State has quickly devolved into a nightmare.
Saturday, they’ll meet in the first 12-team College Football Playoff.
The stakes — and pressure — are much higher on the coach in charge of the favorite.
(Top photo of Josh Heupel: Steve Roberts / Imagn Images)
