INDIANAPOLIS — It’s been tough sledding lately in Columbus, Ohio. No matter how good the Buckeyes have been, there’s been a dark cloud over Ohio State, having lost to rival Michigan football the past three years.
Winning The Game had started to appear to be OSU’s birthright, given the results dating back to Jim Tressel’s tenure in Columbus. But after former Wolverines head coach Jim Harbaugh said at Big Ten media days in 2021 that Michigan would beat Ohio State, win the Big Ten, or die trying, things turned around in Ann Arbor in a hurry.
Now it’s the 2024 iteration of Big Ten media days and the Ohio State contingent has its crack at dispelling media narratives on day one. Senior OSU edge rusher Jack Sawyer spent some of his time on the dais backing his head coach, Ryan Day, after the past three years of losses.
“It’s a tough thing to look at,” Sawyer said. “If you ask Coach Day, Coach Day is a man enough to sit up here and tell you that’s part of the job he signed up to do.”
Sawyer went further, noting that the narratives have targeted his head coach.
Day went from being something of a wunderkind to being 1-3 in the rivalry. There were moments where either Day was overconfident (behind closed doors, he said in 2020 that the Buckeyes would hang 100 on the Wolverines) or one of his cohorts was (receivers coach Brian Hartline proclaimed that what OSU did in the dark would come to light in 2022 before Michigan won, 45-23). Sawyer says that it’s the players’ fault and that Day doesn’t deserve any of the criticism he’s getting from the media over the past three years.
“Me being a guy who would go to war for him any day, regardless of the topic, I think that he gets wrongly criticized over a bunch of stuff,” Sawyer said. “A bunch of junk comes up after — comes out after we lost to those guys about him not caring. Which is completely — couldn’t be more wrong. So I think he does get unfairly criticized at times but he knows what he’s signed up to do and we’ve all signed up to do those same things as well — we’ve fallen short as well. If anything, it doesn’t go back on him, it comes back on us as players and that’s why we decided to come back.”
This year, the Buckeyes hope that things will go back in their favor, having loaded up both via recruiting and the transfer portal. Meanwhile, Michigan football will be breaking in a first-year head coach in Sherrone Moore and will have a new starting quarterback.
The Game will take place at noon on November 30 in Columbus.