Ohio State: College football's idiot-proof program
The Buckeyes' 2024 national championship is the latest data point that no program in the volatile world of college football has ever won as consistently as they do
Within minutes of Jayden Fielding’s 33-yard field goal splitting the uprights Monday night and effectively securing Ohio State’s ninth national championship in program history, the narrative that had been simmering for the past several weeks began to be etched into stone.
The Buckeyes weren’t just champions, but uniquely resilient ones that overcame an uncommon level of adversity to reach the pinnacle of their sport.
It was rhapsodized in print by no shortage of outlets. Players spoke about it in postgame press conferences and in the celebratory locker room. On ESPN’s postgame show, Kirk Herbstreit praised the team for “what they went through” before having to collect himself emotionally.
Obviously, there’s a lot of truth to it. These storylines didn’t materialize out of nowhere.
Ohio State faced the very real adversity of losing two football games, which would have eliminated it from title contention in virtually any other year in the sport’s history before the implementation of the 12-team College Football Playoff. The second of those losses came to archrival Michigan, which opened them up to unrelenting abuse from fans for blowing the one game they truly can’t blow. After that stunning 13-10 setback, coach Ryan Day’s family received threats that required around-the-clock police protection.
Before the Buckeyes could revel in joy, they had to endure pain.
When it came to overcoming odds, though, Ohio State wasn’t exactly the hero of a Horatio Alger tale. The Buckeyes were No. 2 in the Associated Press preseason poll and never fell below No. 4 until the Michigan loss. They have a roster reportedly worth around $20 million, one that includes a horde of former five-star recruits, all-Americans and key transfers from woebegone programs like Alabama and Ole Miss.
Above all else, they have what might be the ultimate advantage – they represent the closest thing college football has to an unsinkable program.
Any way in which you try to approach the debate over the greatest program in college football, Ohio State is among the small handful of competitors for the throne. Following Monday night’s triumph, the Buckeyes are tied for fourth with USC among FBS programs in national titles. They’re second in all-time wins, behind only Michigan. They’re tied for second for most Heisman Trophy winners, trailing USC by just one.
But what truly separates Ohio State from even the most decorated members of college football’s upper crust – the biggest, most powerful entities the sport has to offer – is its consistency. Simply put, the Buckeyes are rarely bad and even when they are, it’s incredibly short-lived.
Even among college football royalty, seemingly every program has a memorably miserable era to its name.
Alabama floundered for many of the 11 years between Gene Stallings’ resignation and Nick Saban’s hiring, with a series of Mikes – DuBose, Price and Shula – combining to go 50-46 (in Price’s very meager defense, he was bounced before he ever coached a game in Tuscaloosa). Oklahoma had a rough four-year stretch in the mid-late 1990s under Howard Schnellenberger and John Blake. “Texas is back!” only became a meme because Texas was very much not back for an uncomfortably long period of time. USC was a mess for several years before Pete Carroll was hired and has largely been one in the 15 years since he left. Michigan, the sport’s winningest program, has had to work through prolonged lulls at various points in its history.
No matter how well-positioned a program is for success, these ruts can happen for myriad reasons. Sometimes, it’s an ill-advised hire or a string of them. In other instances, it’s NCAA sanctions and the crippling effects those can have. Going back further, some schools prioritized keeping Black people off of their campuses and football rosters over winning games.
These aren’t unforgivable black marks against these schools (except that last one, of course). When you play football for more than a hundred years, you’re bound to slip up every now and then.
Unless you’re Ohio State.
Since 1899, which covers a period of 126 seasons, the Buckeyes have finished the regular season with a losing record only eight times. The programs with the next-fewest losing seasons during that stretch, Alabama and Oklahoma, have had 11 apiece. Other notable names have far worse track records. USC has 14 such seasons. Texas has 16. Michigan has 17. Penn State has 18. Georgia has 23. LSU, Tennessee and Florida, all with at least two national titles to their names, each have 24.
Ohio State hasn’t had a sub-.500 regular season since 1988. Among college football’s winningest programs, nobody comes all that close to that streak, with only Georgia (1996), Oklahoma (1997), LSU (1998) and Clemson (1998) having avoided at least one losing campaign this century.
The eyebrow-raising numbers don’t end there.
According to Sports Reference’s helpful database, the Buckeyes have the best win percentage (.756) of programs that have been at the FBS level for at least 30 years. Alabama, at .750, is the closest to them.
Every single full-time head coach Ohio State has employed since 1899 has finished their tenure with a winning record (the full-time stipulation here is necessary as Luke Fickell went 6-7 in 2011 as an interim coach). The worst win percentage of the bunch belongs to Paul Bixler, who went 4-3-2 in 1946, which would ultimately be his only season on the job.
Furthermore, every Buckeyes coach since 1950 has won at least 70% of his games. The only two coaches during that span fired primarily for on-field performance, Earle Bruce and John Cooper, won 75.5% and 71.5% of their games.
In Bruce’s case, athletic leadership didn’t even want to fire him, with athletic director Rick Bay resigning the same day Bruce was fired in 1987, after which he declared that the coach had “done a whale of a job.”
“I think it was building and in my view, his detractors were just waiting for an excuse,” Bay said after his resignation and Bruce’s ouster, according to an account from the time from the Dayton Daily News. “And 9-3 wasn’t a big enough excuse. It wasn’t quite justifiable. But when we got to four losses, including one to Wisconsin, a poor showing against Michigan State, three [losses] in a row, his detractors had their excuse.”
(Some additional context: after going 11-1 in his first season after taking over for Woody Hayes, Bruce went exactly 9-3 in six consecutive seasons. That streak ended in 1986 with a 10-3 season before a 6-4-1 finish in 1987 led to his demise.)
In Cooper’s case, Ohio State had become infamously hapless against Michigan, losing 10 of 12 games to the Wolverines during Cooper’s tenure, but there was also dysfunction in the locker room and in the classroom. In the leadup to the Outback Bowl in Jan. 2001, which would be Cooper’s last game at the helm, a starting wideout was kicked off the team due to his Blutarsky-esque 0.00 grade-point average, the team most valuable player and leading rusher was held out of the starting lineup for missing the first practice in Tampa, and one offensive lineman sued another for $50,000 over an on-field fight the previous spring.
“Looking at the situation objectively, I know the University made the best move considering what had been the direction of the program,” Herbstreit, who was Cooper’s first recruit at Ohio State, wrote for ESPN in 2001 immediately following his former coach’s firing. “I'm sure it was a difficult decision, but they handled it appropriately by making it as quickly as possible following the bowl game. The program had lost their focus on the goals which had enabled them to be a championship caliber team throughout the mid-90s. They had become more of a selfish, individual team and had lost discipline, character and integrity.”
When a program’s examples of coaching failures are men who won more than two-thirds of their games at the school, it’s fair to say things have been pretty good.
How have they managed to do it? In a ruthlessly competitive sport in which programs do whatever they can to field a winning team, how has Ohio State done this better than everyone else?
At least for this century, there’s something to be said for organizational stability, with Gene Smith, one of the most respected athletic administrators in college sports, serving as the Buckeyes’ athletic director from 2005-24.
There’s a recruiting angle to this, too.
Though population shifts over the past 50 years have negatively impacted Ohio and caused the already high number of top-tier prospects coming out of the likes of Florida and Texas to mushroom, the state the Buckeyes call home still gives them an important advantage. Over the past 10 years, only six states have had more players in the top 247 of 247Sports’ prospect rankings than Ohio (247 is such an arbitrary number, but I respect the commitment to the website’s branding). While Ohio doesn’t come anywhere close to Texas, Florida, California or even Georgia, it has scarcity working in its favor. While Texas, Florida and California are overrun with power-conference programs, Ohio State was the only school in college football’s big leagues for much of that stretch. Even with Cincinnati now in the Big 12, the schools aren’t anything close to peers.
That standing has come with a clear benefit for the Buckeyes. Of the 83 top-247 recruits who came out of Ohio from 2015-24, 41 went to Ohio State. The hit rate among top-100 recruits was even better, with 21 of 31 ending up in Columbus.
Even beyond their home state’s border, the Buckeyes have excelled in recruiting, regularly restocking their rosters with some of the country’s best players. Since 2011, they’ve had a recruiting class ranked lower than No. 7 nationally only once. Given their emergence as a name, image and likeness juggernaut, that’s unlikely to change.
There’s always significant interest in the program, which can lead to things like Day’s family needing security, but also maintain a constant pressure to win that keeps university leadership on its toes. The Buckeyes have finished among the top five programs in attendance every season since at least 1949, according to university records.
Like any top program, Ohio State spends a lot, but the financial commitment to the program has never dipped all that much. It was fourth among FBS programs in football expenses in 2022, the most recent year available in the U.S. Department of Education’s records. Five years ago, it was fourth, as well. Going back to 2003, the first year these figures were available, it was first. Even in 2011, when it was mired in scandal, it was second in football expenditures.
Though that’s not an exhaustive list, all those different pieces add up. Some programs have one or two of these things. Even fewer have most of them. The Buckeyes may very well be the only program with all of them – organizational alignment, fertile local recruiting, unwavering interest and all the necessary funds to make the metaphorical engine hum.
Which brings us back to the present.
In the distant past of one month ago, before he was a championship-winning leader of men, Day was facing persistent and public questions about his job security after the most recent Michigan loss. Had his team managed to blow a first-round home playoff game against Tennessee, the cries for Day to be fired would have only intensified.
While some like Herbstreit were aghast that a coach with such a sterling win-loss record (he was 63-10 heading into the playoff) could ever be on the hot seat, one of the most common and persuasive arguments I’d hear from the so-called “lunatic fringe” was that prior to arriving at Ohio State as co-offensive coordinator in 2017, Day was a career assistant who was most recently a quarterbacks coach for losing NFL teams whose staffs got fired. The job, as they reasoned, made him someone who was able to amass that kind of a resume, not because he’s some kind of coaching prodigy. A lot of people could have done this, they’d say.
If he hadn’t already in his first five seasons with the Buckeyes, Day proved his mettle during his team’s playoff run and removed many of the remaining doubts about whether he could lead Ohio State to what many of its fans consider to be its destiny as a title-winning program.
Along the way, though, he may have proved some of his detractors right. Maybe anyone, even someone who was helping pilot one of the NFL’s worst offenses only eight years earlier, can win big with the Buckeyes.
(Photos: Getty Images, Columbus Dispatch, Associated Press)