ATLANTA – Jack Sawyer remembers exactly where he was on the afternoon of Tuesday, December 3.
You will never forget it. Josh Fryar won’t either. Emeka Ebuka too. And Jeremiah Smith.
In fact, the entire Ohio State football team (more than 100 players) gathered in the team room that Tuesday for an emotionally charged, sometimes heated, three-hour meeting where grievances were aired, blame was accepted and tears were shed.
“I remember it was one of the hardest days of my football life,” said Fryar, a fifth-year senior offensive tackle. “You saw every raw emotion from every player.”
Almost everyone spoke, at least a couple from each position group. The only coach in the room, Ryan Day, also spoke.
Still reeling from a home loss as a 21-point underdog to rival Michigan just three days earlier, Day cried at times, described his mistakes and actually accepted some of the blame: “I made a mistake,” he told the players, Fryar said.
“The guys let off some steam,” Sawyer said. “As competitors, the guys were angry about a lot of different things. We talk about it like grown men. We knew we had to come together and pursue this. And here we are, a month and a half later, playing for a national championship.”
That’s what they are. The Buckeyes arrived in Atlanta on Friday and attended the game’s annual media day Saturday morning near Mercedes-Benz Stadium, all wearing their white CFP sweatshirts.
The Buckeyes’ march here, so predictable at the start of the season, seemed so implausible just six weeks ago. Despite having perhaps the richest payroll in college football ($20 million), Ohio State stumbled in a lot of games in the regular season: The defense was hurt at Oregon in October; a limping offense eked out a narrow victory over Nebraska; the team barely survived at Penn State; and then, in the sport’s upset of the year, the Wolverines won 13-10 in Columbus.
Since then, it’s been a magical journey, one that many expected in August from a loaded roster.
They defeated the third best team in the SEC, Tennessee. They beat Big Ten champion Oregon in a Rose Bowl rematch. And then they took care of Texas in the Longhorns’ backyard in the Cotton Bowl.
Now, despite two losses, they are here, the favorites to win the first-ever expanded 12-team College Football Playoff, something that would not have happened in the four-team structure.
Maybe it won’t happen without that meeting either.
“Everyone said what they think is right and wrong,” said Jeremiah Smith, the star freshman wide receiver. “It definitely got emotional. I can’t say what everyone said. But things were said that people took and… that’s the reason we’re playing the way we are now.”
What exactly was said?
No one will say specifically.
“I won’t go into details. It is a private matter between me and my team,” Ebuka said. “We were able to discuss everything that has accumulated in our hearts.”
Like what exactly?
“Everyone was angry,” defensive lineman Tyleik Williams said. “Every (position) group stepped up and talked about how they were going to do better.”
Was this a dispute between attack and defense? Maybe.
“There was frustration on both sides of the ball,” Fryar said. “There was crying of frustration. Anger. Everything you can name. You want to see those raw emotions from people. Show that they care. “That’s what our team is all about.”
No one was more emotional than Day, the 45-year-old coach who, despite losing just 10 games in six seasons, is at the center of local and national criticism in Ohio, to the point that he pulled his own children out of school after one. of the last four losses to Michigan. That’s according to a post by Sawyer in the Players’ Tribune.
It wasn’t just his classmates who threatened Day’s children. They were his parents and “also the real teachers,” Sawyer said.
“His family has received death threats,” Ebuka said. “He has received death threats.”
In that Dec. 3 meeting, Day not only took the blame for his play-calling, strategy and preparation against Michigan. He leveled with the players. Overall, it just hasn’t been good enough, he told them.
“He would just look at us and say, ‘I made a mistake,’” Fryar said.
“You don’t see very often that a head coach can take the blame or that a head coach really listens to his players and what they have to say,” safety Lathan Ransom said. “That’s what he did.”
Day avoids revealing too much about the meeting inside the Woody Hayes Athletic Center, often called the “Woody.” It was intense and long. His players expressed their frustrations, among themselves and also with him.
Someday, at some point, he will share those stories, talk about them publicly, if Monday goes well.
The “only way” to tell these stories, Day said, is if Ohio State completes this success story and beats Notre Dame to win it all.
“There are great stories to tell about what happened behind closed doors and some of the things that were said and the personal challenges we had for each other,” he said, “but the only way to tell them is if you put up a banner “. Staying at the Woody.