The Ohio State football team enters the 2025 season with a massive target on its back. After winning the national championship in the first 12-team Playoff, teams are going to try to tear them down. They are the standard against which every team is trying to match.
Despite the fact that the Ohio State Buckeyes have to replace 15 starters from last season, Ryan Day and his staff believe that this team is good enough to go back-to-back. Having the best offensive and defensive players in the country certainly helps their confidence.
Day understands that every team is going to give the Buckeyes their best shot, so it's not going to be easy to win a national championship for the second year in a row. Day gave a quote during Big Ten Media Day that should fire up fans about their chances of doing just that
Ohio State football fans should be fired up after this quote from Ryan Day
Day made it very clear that Ohio State will be as aggressive as they were to end last season, if not more aggressive.
Ryan Day said Ohio State isn’t approaching this season like it’s the defending national champion but a team trying to go win a new national championship.
— Dan Hope (@Dan_Hope) July 22, 2025
“We’re not defending anything. They can’t take the trophy away. We’re attacking.”
This team attacked opponents in the last four games of the season in a way that they didn't in the second half of the regular season. They didn't let other teams dictate what was going to happen. Ohio State was able to show everyone that they clearly had the best team in the country.
Keeping that level of aggressiveness is key in Day's team repeating the success that they had during what was the best four-game run in Ohio State football history. He wants to make sure that he doesn't make the same mistakes that he made during the Michigan game.
In that game, he was not aggressive offensively. Once they became aggressive on that side of the ball in the CFP, they were flat-out unstoppable. They are approaching games with that same level of aggressiveness in order to bring that national championship trophy back to Columbus for the second year in a row.