Ohio State head coach Ryan Day is beginning to be very vocal about pushing for a restart to the Big Ten football season sometime in October. He released a statement this week looking for answers for his players and pushing to get things going in the next month.
To say that it caused some commotion would be an understatement.
To follow that up, Day also made an appearance on ESPN’s College GameDay Saturday morning with Penn State head coach James Franklin, as well as Pac-12 coaches Kyle Wittingham (Utah) and David Shaw (Stanford) to discuss the state of return to play efforts in both conferences.
When Day was asked about how soon he felt things needed to restart in the Big Ten in order for Ohio State and others to be involved in College Football Playoff discussions, he again reiterated a mid-October date.
“Yeah, I don’t know if there’s an exact date,” Day said. “But I think we need to try and get going by mid-October to get into the conversations and the CFP. But again, it’s first things first. Let’s just make sure that we can figure out a way to do this safely and then we’ll tackle that next.”
"I think we need to try to get going by mid-October."@OhioStateFB coach Ryan Day hopes their season will start early enough to be considered for the College Football Playoff. pic.twitter.com/6Osk7S3dw4
— College GameDay (@CollegeGameDay) September 12, 2020
This isn’t anything new from Day, but it is now clear that there are at least some real conversations happening today and beyond that could get the Big Ten playing football again. Whether that is in October or not, we can at least agree on a couple of things.
First, safety should be — and is — being considered. Secondly, there’s some positive momentum here that looks like it could very well result in Big Ten and Ohio State football sometime this fall.
So yeah, things are very encouraging at the moment.