“Every single team we play, including this team — Illinois is a very good team — can knock you off if you’re not on your game. [Illinois] has to be the best game we’ve played all season.” – Ryan Day (Press Pros Feature Photos)
By Marcus Hartman for Press Pros Magazine
With a road game against a ranked opponent on tap, Ryan Day had an obvious theme for his weekly press conference.
The Ohio State head coach used the word “efficient” or “efficiency” nine times through the course of the roughly 30-minute chat with reporters Tuesday.
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How do the Buckeyes deal with the ever-evolving pace of play in college football (now much slower than when he first took the helm)?
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“I think the key is efficiency,” Day said after his team ran only 58 plays against Minnesota on Saturday. “And whatever allows us the opportunity to be the most efficient.”
(A two-fer’ right out of the gate.)
What about getting touches for star receiver Jeremiah Smith?
“We have to make sure that we’re figuring out as many ways we can to get him the ball, knowing that that’s not the No. 1 most important thing: The most important thing is to move the ball and score points and be efficient,” Day said.
OK, that makes sense.
Forcing the ball into coverage is the cardinal sin of quarterbacking, and locking in on one target can be problematic even for experienced signal callers in the NFL, let alone a redshirt freshman such as Ohio State’s Julian Sayin.
How about getting off to a fast start Saturday?
The Buckeyes have only one first-quarter touchdown this season (excluding the three they scored in game two against Grambling State of the FCS) so that is an obvious area they can improve.
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“I think just giving them a clean plan and really emphasizing efficiency and finishing the drives,” Day said. “I think that’s important, and that’s what we’re going to do. Because to your point, I think a couple of the games we started OK, but we haven’t been great. I think we can start better, and when you’re on the road in an environment like this, you definitely want a fast start.”
Then there’s the matter of Brain Hartline’s first five games as the primarily play-caller for the offense.
How is that going?
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“Yeah, he’s doing great. It’s never easy when you’re doing something for the first time, and I think he has been really efficient,” Day said.
Toward the end of the session came a question about throwing the deep ball. That’s typically a boom-or-bust type deal, isn’t it?
Maybe not so much.
“Well, it starts with your feet, but a big part of it is the receivers. Those are long routes down the field, and you can only have so many of those within a week,” Day said.
This turned out to be a sneak attack from the “e” word. Going long in games might be a gambit, but practicing with practicality is key to setting it up. Receivers can’t be asked to run too many length-of-the-field sprints during the week lest they have nothing left for game day.
“Otherwise, you just blow your doors off your wideouts,” Day said. “So it has to be efficient. There’s a system about how we do it.”
While Day’s consistency was impressive, this was no bit.
Day wasn’t doing another Jim Tressel impersonation or channeling former Bengals coach Marvin Lewis by keeping the media at arm’s length.
He’s just that locked in, that focused on having his team ready to take another step forward on the path toward defending its national championship.
Oh, Day would never say that in so many words. In fact, he’d be more likely to say the opposite — and he pretty much did that on Tuesday, too.
“Every time I hear somebody say, ‘You guys are doing great,’ or anything like that, I just feel like we’re getting set up. That’s just the way that I look at it as a coach,” Day said.
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As such, he’s told them to block out the noise, but that advice comes with a twist.
“Usually they’re talking about adversity,” Day said. “I’m using it right now with our guys because all of a sudden, everyone thinks you’re the No. 1 team in the country, and you’ve done all these things.
“We haven’t done anything yet. We haven’t accomplished a thing, and so the only thing that’s going to matter is who gets better week in and week out.”
He went on for another 394 words on that answer — not very efficient, ironically — but you probably don’t need to read them all to get the gist.
Aside from making sure his team is blocking, tackling, throwing, catching and kicking at its best, Day is worried about complacency hitting his team while there’s still corn in the fields between here and Champaign.
“Every single team we play, including this team — Illinois is a very good team — can knock you off if you’re not on your game,” Day said. “And this has to be the best game we’ve played all season. And that’s the other part. It can’t just be like what we did last week. The team we were last week is not going to be good enough. We’ve got to be better in a lot of areas.”
Of course, motivation should not be too hard this week even with the Buckeyes coming off a 42-3 drubbing of Minnesota.
The Fighting Illini are ranked No. 17, and they know a thing about beating the defending champions on their turf.
Illinois took down Michigan early last season, a feat they might end up regretting by the end of the afternoon this Saturday.
Is there a more efficient way to get Ohio State’s attention?
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