Ohio State Football: Brian Hartline will call plays in the Spring

Signing Day has pretty much arrived and gone with no fan fair for the Ohio State football team. Everyone that they wanted to get happened before today. Ryan Day did speak to reporters for the first time since the crushing loss against Georgia and revealed something very interesting.

In that press conference, he revealed that Brian Hartline, the new offensive coordinator, will be calling plays this Spring. After he does that, they will make a full determination on whether or not Hartline will become the full-time play-caller based on those results.

It was reported previously that Day was considering giving up those duties and he confirmed that today. Hartline has never called plays before or coordinated an offense. He will do both for the first time once Spring practice rolls around in a few weeks.

I’m really interested to see how this works. There’s no doubt that Hartline is the best wide receivers coach in the country and perhaps the best recruiter in the country as well. Now it’s time to see if he can scheme up some plays to make this offense even more deadly.

Specifically, I want to see if he can get the Buckeyes to run the ball better. That’s something the Ohio State football team struggled mightily with down the stretch of the season. We won’t get to see the bulk of the work Hartline is doing until the Spring Game though.

If I had to guess, I would say that Day is going to retain those playcalling duties this season and then give them up to Hartline next year. He mentioned he is considering giving up those duties to free up more time to do coaching in other areas of the team, so we’ll see.

No matter what the result is, this is an interesting development that we will be following very closely.