Ryan Day has the most enviable position in college football if you really think about it. While Kirby Smart has established a championship culture with the Georgia Bulldogs, he's at the mercy of his region producing the best talent year in and year out. UGA isn't a national enterprise like OSU is, and has nowhere near the amount of money to spend on NIL.
Day is, in many ways, the closest active head coach to Nick Saban. Smart has not had either of his coordinators hired away since the 2022 season. While Mike Bobo and Glenn Schumann were there for the second of a back-to-back two-year championship stretch in Athens, no one has wanted to poach them away for a significant opening. Meanwhile, Brian Hartline, Jim Knowles, and Chip Kelly have been hired away in the past two years alone.
CBS Sports' Austin Nivison listed the Buckeyes first in projecting the next great college football dynasty and compared Day's ability to have coaches hired away and successfully replace them to Saban's with the Alabama Crimson Tide. Nivison also described how bright the future looks because of recent recruiting wins for the likes of 5-star EDGE DJ Jacobs and Tavien St. Clair, the latter of which came in the 2025 cycle.
"We could not let this exercise be published for college football fan consumption without an explicit acknowledgment of Ohio State's sustained greatness in the sport. The Buckeyes have been poised to dominate through multiple decades and multiple head coaches, fielding a contender nearly every season of the 21st Century. So why wouldn't the Ohio State football machine be able to keep this thing rolling for another five years? Ryan Day has made the Ohio State staff a glamour position in football, ensuring that the success in talent acquisition is matched by elite coaching, so even as coaches are hired away (similar to Nick Saban's Alabama program) we should not expect a drop-off," Nivison wrote.
"Day spent time this offseason talking about dinosaurs and an "adapt or die" mentality, which has set in motion his ability to continue some elite trends even in a new era. Five-star wide receiver Jamier Brown and five-star edge DJ Jacobs offer examples from the Class of 2027 of how Ohio State continues to win battles for top pass-catchers and pass-rushers, and whenever Julian Sayin wraps up his college career, there will be an opportunity for redshirt freshman Tavien St. Clair to fulfill the five-star promise he brought coming out of high school in Bellefontaine, Ohio."
Ryan Day just needs more rings to complete the Nick Saban prophecy
In some ways, it's a fool's errand to even compare the landscape Day is excelling in, and the one Saban ran away from, to the beforetimes of pre-NIL. Still, the Saban comparison is the white whale of coaching compliments. So though Day wants to blaze his own trail, being compared to a seven-time national champion, and specifically, a six-championship run in Tuscaloosa, isn't a bad place to be.
Of course, those six championships are the more important slice of the pie for Buckeye fans than being able to keep hiring great assistant coaches and land recruits. If Ohio State is spending more than everyone else and not winning, you're more likely to be compared to one-hit wonders like Steve Spurrier, who has a statue in the "Swamp," but only reached the mountaintop with the Florida Gators once.
Day is already in rarified air with Paul Brown, Jim Tressel, and Urban Meyer. One more title, and he's on his way to Woody Hayes. And Saban. He has plenty of ground to make up, though. As things stand, he's had a lot of great teams fall disappointingly short when the lights were shining brightest, with only one finishing the job.
Frankly, that's not even Saban-lite just yet.
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