Ryan Day’s risky Jim Knowles replacement puts Ohio State’s title chances in doubt

Change is constant in college football, especially in our new NIL world. Ohio State knows this as well as anyone, having celebrated their run to a College Football Playoff national championship by losing both offensive coordinator Chip Kelly (back to the NFL with the Las Vegas Raiders) and defensive coordinator Jim Knowles (poached by Big Ten rival Penn State). Success means everyone trying to get what you have, and you only stay atop the mountain if you can adapt quickly.

Ryan Day has shown the ability to do that already during his time in Columbus. He brought in Knowles from Oklahoma State three years ago to overhaul a defense that had bottomed out, and he responded to last season's dispiriting Cotton Bowl performance by giving up playcalling duties and handing the reins of his offense to Kelly. Both of those decisions paid off big-time in 2024, even if the road along the way was a bit bumpy.

This time around, however, the results have been ... decidedly more mixed. Replacing Kelly internally with Brian Hartline and tight ends coach Keenan Bailey was understandable enough; Hartline has proven his worth to the Buckeyes many times over, and the risk inherent in his lack of experience as a coordinator was probably worth the reward of keeping him in Columbus. On the defensive side, however, we're finding it hard to come up with an argument for Day's strategy.

Matt Patricia hire goes against everything that brought Ohio State to a national title

According to ESPN's Pete Thamel, Ohio State has hired former Detroit Lions head coach and New England Patriots defensive coordinator Matt Patricia as its new DC, promoting secondary coach Tim Walton and safeties coach Matt Guerrieri along with him.

Walton and Guerrieri were among the best assistants on the Buckeyes staff, each of whom were probably receiving offers elsewhere and needed promotions and pay bumps to stick around. Patricia, however, is a total mystery: Not only has he not coached in college since serving as an offensive grad assistant with Syracuse back in the early 2000s, but he spent the 2024 season out of football entirely after the entire NFL decided they had no use for him.

And they had very good reason to reach that conclusion. Patricia's three years in Detroit could hardly have been worse, both in terms of his management of the locker room and the product on the field. As was whatever he was actually responsible for with the Patriots offense in 2021 and 2022, and his disastrous stint as interim DC for the Philadelphia Eagles during their late-season collapse in 2023. That's six seasons in a row of truly terrible results; the last time you could point to a positive item on Patricia's resume was his run as Patriots DC under Bill Belichick from 2012 through 2017, and recent football history is littered with former Belichick assistants who didn't look nearly as promising once they flew the nest.

There's no good football argument for this hire, and more broadly, it seems to fly in the face of everything that helped Day finally get Ohio State over the hump this past season. Knowles was an outside hire, someone with no connection to Day, Ohio or the Buckeyes program. Kelly and Day had a long-standing relationship, but bringing him in showed a willingness to get uncomfortable and embrace a more CEO-style approach to being a head coach. Rather than continue committing to what got him here, though, Day has instead fallen back on the sort of questionable decision-making that led to diminishing results toward the end of Urban Meyer's time in Columbus, relying on preexisting connections and internal promotions instead of finding the best fit for the job.

Maybe Patrica will work out fine; there's no shortage of talent for him to work with, after all. But it's hard to understand the process that led Day here, and he could be burning through all that post-natty good will very quickly.