Ohio State’s unhealthy Michigan obsession lands them atop Misery Index

“We felt what it’s like to not win this game, and it’s bad,” Day said. ‘It’s one of the worst things that’s happened to me in my life, quite honestly. Other than losing my father and a few other things, it’s quite honestly for my family the worst thing that’s happened. So we can never have that happen.”

Well, it happened. Again. And the Buckeyes’ 13-10 loss as a 19.5-point favorite — the fourth straight time Day has lost to Michigan — is a result that will probably have big implications on his future and the direction of Ohio State football. 

It’s not that Michigan doesn’t care about The Game, but there’s a different and much healthier relationship with that rivalry in Ann Arbor. Simply put, Michigan can have a good season even if it doesn’t beat Ohio State. But the opposite is not true for Buckeyes fans. It’s all-or-nothing in Columbus, which is way too much pressure to put on one game but is also the reality that the Ohio State coach has to live with. 

It’s clearly affected Day, to the point where the entire organization locks up when it sees Michigan across the field. When you hear Day compare losing to Michigan to the death of his father, you almost feel sorry for him. That’s no way to live, man. It’s just a football game. 

Now, what Day and his family have experienced the last few years is real. If you talk to folks around the Ohio State program, you’ll hear about threats and random people approaching his wife in public just to say impolite things. 

That’s not good either. It’s the symptom of a sick society that takes football way too seriously. 

It seems, though, that Day’s reaction to the environment he lives in is to double, triple and quadruple down on showing Ohio State’s fan base how much he cares about beating Michigan. It’s all the ‘That Team Up North’ stuff. It’s the countdown clocks in the Woody Hayes center reminding everyone how many days until they play Michigan again. It’s Day raising the stakes to impossible levels when he calls losing to Michigan one of the worst things that has ever happened to him. 

Day doesn’t have to say that stuff. He chooses to because he thinks it connects him — a guy who grew up in New Hampshire and didn’t step foot in Columbus until 2017 — to a fan base that has always looked at him a bit skeptically. 

But at the end of the day, none of that stuff matters. It’s just fluff. The substance is what happens on the field, and for four straight years Ohio State has not performed anywhere close to its capabilities on the day it spends the previous 364 preparing for. 

Which brings us to what happened in the aftermath of Saturday’s loss, when a melee broke out over Michigan players trying to plant a flag at the 50-yard line of Ohio Stadium. 

“I don’t know all the details of it, but I know that these guys are looking to put a flag on the field and our guys weren’t going to let that happen,” Day said. “I’ll find out exactly what happened but this is our field. And certainly we’re embarrassed at the fact we lost the game, but there are some prideful guys on the field that weren’t going to let that happen.”

Sorry Ryan, but no. That’s fake pride. That’s the kind of pride you buy at the Dollar Store and hang on your Christmas tree for a few weeks before you put it back in the attic. It’s an ornament. It means nothing. 

But it speaks to everything wrong with Day’s version of Ohio State. When it comes to Michigan, it’s little more than 365 days of performative nonsense leading up to the moment every year that they’ve blown up so big in their mind that they can’t play with the confidence and reckless abandon necessary to win a game like that. 

Day has won 87 percent of his games, but it’s telling that his best coaching job came in an epic College Football Playoff semifinal loss to Georgia, 42-41, in 2022. That game happened a month after Ohio State got torn apart by Michigan, 45-23, and backed into the CFP after Southern Cal lost the Pac-12 title game. Nobody thought Ohio State had a chance against Georgia, but the Buckeyes played so brilliantly they came within a hair of likely winning a national championship. That can’t be a coincidence. 

As long as Day’s the coach at Ohio State — which may not be much longer — it’s hard to have any confidence in the Buckeyes’ ability to win when the pressure is as high as it seems to be every year against Michigan. It was once unfathomable that Ohio State seniors could leave college without ever beating the Wolverines, but now it’s reality for some of them. So after four straight losses, the Buckeyes are No. 1 in the 2024 season’s final Misery Index, a weekly measurement of which fan bases are feeling the most angst.

Four more in misery 

Miami: There’s a decent chance Miami suffered the most costly loss of the weekend, barfing up a 21-0 lead at Syracuse before falling 42-38. The question is whether they’ll fall all the way out of the CFP.

The Hurricanes are 10-2, but their only notable wins came against 8-4 Louisville and 7-5 Florida. Without a top-25 win and knocked out of the ACC championship game, Miami’s hopes now totally hinge on the selection committee ignoring the weakness of their résumé and rewarding a good record.

Make no mistake, Miami has been a high-wire act all season and needed a lot of luck to squeak out games against the likes of Virginia Tech and Cal. If the Hurricanes get left out, the only complaints should be directed toward head coach Mario Cristobal, who manages to do less with more as consistently as any coach in America.

Given the weakness of the ACC and the huge talent advantage Miami had over every team it played this year, 10-2 was practically the floor for what this season could have been. And if the Hurricanes don’t make the CFP with a loaded roster, an experienced and brilliant quarterback in Cam Ward and such a weak ACC to feast on, it’s one of the worst coaching jobs of the decade. 

Kentucky: A year ago, the Wildcats nearly lost coach Mark Stoops to Texas A&M. But just when it seemed like a deal was in place, A&M’s booster class revolted and directed the Aggies’ coaching search toward Mike Elko. So Stoops went back to Kentucky as one of the 10 highest-paid coaches in America, making more than $9 million per year even though he’d never sniffed a conference championship or College Football Playoff berth.

But now Kentucky fans, too, are no longer enamored with Stoops’ formula of playing good defense and doing a lot of punting while squeezing out just enough constipated offense to go 7-6. Though it was enough to get Kentucky out of the SEC basement for awhile, the margins were always thin. And this year, they completely collapsed.

Kentucky finished 4-8, won just one SEC game (against Ole Miss, of all teams) and averaged 18 points for the season against FBS opponents. The offense wasn’t just bad, it was disastrous, including in Saturday’s 41-14 loss to Louisville. Stoops now will promise big changes, but the idea that another school like A&M will swoop in and force change at Kentucky is now a fantasy. They’re stuck with each other. 

Wisconsin: Remember a couple of years ago when everyone thought Wisconsin got the coaching steal of the century in Luke Fickell? After taking Cincinnati to the CFP out of the American Athletic Conference, Fickell was supposed to go to a Midwestern blueblood like Notre Dame or Ohio State. But the timing wasn’t right, so he took Wisconsin instead.

As Fickell wraps up his second season, though, he’s much closer to the hot seat than being talked about for those kinds of jobs again. Wisconsin’s 24-7 loss to Minnesota cemented a 5-7 record and the Badgers’ first losing season since 1995. And the vibes are even worse than that after finishing the year with five straight losses, scoring a total of 68 points in those games and firing offensive coordinator Phil Longo in the process.

After the final loss, Fickell told the media that ‘those who stay will be a champion,” which sounded like a pitch against a mass exodus to the transfer portal. We’ll see how he handles it, but Wisconsin fans have every right to worry about the risk of a full-on collapse at one of the most consistent winning programs of the last couple of decades. 

Florida State: It’s finally over. Mercifully, the 2-10 year from hell is in the record books and Mike Norvell can focus on what it’s going to take for the Seminoles to get back to something resembling competence. The first step came shortly before a 31-11 loss to Florida, when Gus Malzahn stepped down at UCF to reportedly become the Seminoles’ offensive coordinator.

Norvell and Malzahn go way back, first working together in 2007 when Norvell was a graduate assistant on the offensive staff at Tulsa. It’s a bit reminiscent of last year, when Chip Kelly left UCLA to become the offensive coordinator at Ohio State under Day, who played quarterback for him at New Hampshire.

Though Malzahn is still a big name in the sport, it’s not an exciting hire. Though his reputation as an offensive genius formed as the spread offense took over college football, it’s been awhile since his offenses were anything special. The truth is, it’s going to take a lot more than an offensive coordinator to fix what ails Florida State.

As former Norvell assistants like Dan Lanning and Kenny Dillingham see their stars rising, the 43-year-old Norvell is at a bit of a career crossroads. Is he the guy who had Florida State rolling at 13-0 last year before getting snubbed by the CFP? Or is he a weak recruiter and poor leader who let it all collapse this year when the transfer portal didn’t replenish FSU’s talent? Florida State fans will spend the next nine months riddled with anxiety over those questions, because 2025 is going to be the tell for where this program goes next. 

Miserable, but not miserable enough

Texas A&M: After a 13-year pause in the Aggies’ rivalry with Texas, they had it all teed up for a clash with massive implications. Despite already having three losses, Texas A&M could have gotten to the SEC title game with a win and potentially made the playoff.

Instead, Texas overcame an incredibly juiced-up crowd at Kyle Field and controlled the game from start to finish in a 17-7 victory. The sad part for Aggies fans is that they had a really nice 8-4 season and showed a lot more toughness and substance than any team Jimbo Fisher put on the field over the previous six seasons.

But when you lose it all at the hands of your most-hated rival, especially under these circumstances, that’s all anyone will remember. For a dozen years, Texas A&M held its SEC membership over the Longhorns’ heads. Now, they’re conference mates again — and Texas is clearly the better program already. 

Clemson: After losing the state championship to South Carolina, Dabo Swinney told the media, “We had a good year. We could have had a great year.” Translated from Dabo-speak to regular English, that means Clemson had a bad year. It’s undeniable.

Despite going 9-3, Clemson feasted on a bunch of ACC dreck, didn’t beat a top-25 team and didn’t measure up in its big SEC tests against Georgia and the Gamecocks. For Clemson’s standards, that’s a bad year and one that will bring even more questions from the fan base about whether Swinney’s best days are behind him.

However, when Miami lost to Syracuse, it vaulted the Tigers into the ACC championship game against SMU, where Swinney will attempt to win his ninth conference title. That would turn a bad year into a pretty good one, especially since a win would likely come with a playoff berth. Can you imagine Clemson getting in through the back door while South Carolina barely misses it just a week after winning at Clemson, 17-14? For now, though, Clemson fans have a lot to worry about in their back yard.

After dominating South Carolina between 2014-21, the Gamecocks have suddenly won two of the last three under Shane Beamer and look like a more exciting and fun program to be part of. 

California: The beginning of this season introduced college football’s online community to the so-called “Calgorithm,” an army of social media mavens who flooded the zone with irreverent memes and AI images that poked fun at the school’s reputation for being a bastion of hippie/granola liberals who don’t care too much about football.

It was fun to watch them troll the likes of Auburn and Florida State, who played Cal early in the season when it seemed like there was real on- and off-field momentum behind the Calgorithm. But that storyline came to a screeching halt in the second half of the year. The Bears’ 38-6 loss to SMU finished off a 6-6 season in which they had some truly crushing losses, including by one point to Miami and NC State and by two to Pittsburgh. They also accounted for Florida State’s only FBS win of the season.

So while the Bears are going bowling — no small accomplishment given the program’s difficult history and a lot of cross-country travel — their first year in the ACC could have been considerably better. 

Maryland: Mike Locksley was not happy with Penn State coach James Franklin at the end of a 44-7 loss because the Nittany Lions scored on a 15-yard touchdown pass as time expired to run up the score. “It’s bull(expletive), is what it was,” Locksley told the media when asked about a lengthy exchange between the two of them after the game.

Asked for his side of the story, Franklin said his third-stringers deserved the chance to make some plays, especially because Maryland still had its best players on the field and was also trying to score late. The bottom line to all this, though, is that Maryland is 4-8 in Locksley’s sixth season and won just a single Big Ten game against USC. So whether his frustration is with Franklin’s sense of sportsmanship or the general predicament of Maryland football’s slide from mediocrity to irrelevance doesn’t really matter. When you’re complaining about whether a final score is 38-7 or 44-7, you look extremely small and weak as a coach. If it’s that important, how about just getting a stop? 

Georgia Tech: The brutality of the Yellow Jackets’ 44-42 eight-overtime loss to Georgia is multi-dimensional. It’s the fact that Georgia Tech let go of a 17-0 halftime lead. It’s that the game was on the verge of being over until quarterback Haynes King took a tough hit and fumbled with 2:05 to go, allowing Georgia to tie it up a few plays later. It’s a series of questionable calls and non-calls down the stretch that all seemed to go against the Yellow Jackets. And, of course, it’s the history of two programs that have been rivals forever but are no longer on a level playing field, with Georgia often dominating in recent vintage.

When you have such a clear opportunity to take down the Bulldogs, you have to take it. Georgia Tech looked like the better team for nearly all of that game in Athens and could have severely wounded Georgia’s chances of making the playoff.

Instead, Tech has to settle for a nice 7-5 season and a national pat on the head praising them for how hard they played. In a rivalry like this, that kind of condescension is sometimes worse than the loss itself. 

(This story was updated to add a video.)