It’s time for Ohio State to get some actual adults in the room on offense

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Ohio State failed to achieve two of its three ultimate goals this season, defeating Michigan but losing the Big Ten Championship Game to Indiana and falling in the first round of the College Football Playoff to Miami.

In both of the Buckeyes’ losses to the Hoosiers and Hurricanes, a large portion of the blame fell squarely on the shoulders of an offense that looked unprepared and out of sync.

After watching Curt Cignetti’s team completely dismantle a good Oregon squad in the Peach Bowl, it made it even more impressive how well Ohio State played against Indiana defensively. The Buckeyes held the Hoosiers to 13 points in Indianapolis — their lowest scoring output of the season.

It was all for naught, however, as the Ohio State offense could only muster 10 points, and a missed 27-yard field goal (I’ve already belabored the special teams aspect) was the icing on the cake for a rough showing by Julian Sayin and company.

The Buckeyes had a chance to bounce back in a big way against Miami. Ryan Day had nearly three weeks to prepare his team to right the ship, and with the play sheet back in his hands we expected to see a similar version of the Ohio State offense that we saw during the College Football Playoff run last year.

Instead, we got more of the same from the Indiana game. A slow, methodical approach that felt robotic and rigid, lacking creativity and explosiveness outside of Jeremiah Smith’s own personal contributions. It was a style that allowed zero room for error once the Buckeyes were in a 14-0 hole.

Ohio State battled back to make it 17-14 early in the fourth quarter, but were unable to ‘turn up the gas’ when they needed it most, and eventually lost 24-14.

The story of both games was largely the same: the defense did its job, and the offense let it down.

Now, heading into a 2026 season with a much tougher schedule and a ton of question marks on that defensive unit that carried the team into the postseason, Ohio State must quickly realize that it’s offensive staff was simply not good enough in 2025, and that needs to change.

That starts at offensive coordinator.

The Buckeyes spent the first four seasons of Day’s tenure with Kevin Wilson as the offensive coordinator. An Urban Meyer holdover and formerly the co-OC alongside Day, Wilson was largely a figurehead as it was still the head coach calling his own plays.

Brian Hartline was promoted to offensive coordinator in 2023, in addition to his duties as wide receivers coach. A decision that was made purely to keep Hartline around for a few more years, the star recruiter was given a trial run during the offseason as a play-caller, but by the time the season actually came around it was once again Day in charge.

Then came the 2024 campaign, when Ohio State brought in former UCLA head coach Chip Kelly to be its offensive coordinator after Bill O’Brien spent about two weeks in the role before taking the job at Boston College. As Day’s coaching mentor, Kelly was able to flawlessly blend the Ryan Day offense with his own ideas, especially in the run game.

When Kelly was hired as head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders following the Buckeyes winning the National Championship, Ohio State once again promoted Hartline to OC, this time with the intention of him actually calling the plays. There are conflicting reports over just how much influence Hartline had as a play-caller, but either way Day wound up in charge once again after Hartline took the job at USF.

If you are following along, since Ryan Day took over the program in 2019, he has hired exactly one true play-calling offensive coordinator, and that was Chip Kelly last year. The result? A national title victory.

The last full-time play-calling head coach to win a national title was Jimbo Fisher in 2013, and that was a wildly different version of college football. There is far too much for a head coach to worry about before, during and after games for their head to be buried in the play sheet.

You need to have a real, experienced offensive coordinator to keep the machine running.

This Ohio State offense on paper should have been electric. The Buckeyes had two future top-10 NFL Draft picks at wide receiver in Jeremiah Smith and Carnell Tate, a former five-star quarterback in Julian Sayin, a do-it-all tight end in Max Klare and a budding star freshman running back in Bo Jackson.

All that should be more than enough to rack up points against nearly any opponent.

Instead, poor coaching and a misguided approach to tempo (which, again, is poor coaching) led that group to score just 10 points against Indiana and only 14 points against Miami.

The No. 1 goal for Ryan Day this offseason should be to hire an offensive coordinator — one with actual, proven play-calling experience and the ability to blend some ideas of their own with the base of Day’s Ohio State offense. This is one of the premier programs in the country, and it should not be hard to lure some of the game’s best offensive minds to Columbus.

That being said, while offensive coordinator is far and away the most important addition to this staff, Day also needs to take a holistic look at the entirety of his offensive staff.

Ohio State is not a ‘learn on the fly’ type of job; This should not be a place where coaches are getting their first true experience. The Buckeyes are at the very highest level of the sport, and in turn should have only the highest level of coaches at nearly every possible spot.

When you look at the makeup of this group on offense in 2025, that was not nearly the case:

• Brian Hartline was the nation’s best recruiter of wide receiver talent, but had no experience as an offensive coordinator prior to the failed experiment in 2023.
• Tyler Bowen seems to be a decent recruiter, but he was a tight ends coach at Virginia Tech prior to Ohio State and had not coached offensive line since 2017 (at Maryland).
• Keenan Bailey has been an intern and a quality control coach at Ohio State since 2016, and was promoted to tight ends coach in 2023 before taking on co-OC duties in 2025 with zero other coaching experience.
• Billy Fessler was a graduate assistant at Ohio State in 2021 and spent two seasons as the QB coach at Akron before returning to Columbus as an analyst and taking on the QB coach role prior to this season.
• Carlos Locklyn is really the only guy on this list with prior high-level experience, coaching running backs at Western Kentucky (2021) and Oregon (2022-23) before landing at Ohio State.

Does that sound like a group of the most brilliant minds you could find to coach at a place like Ohio State? I’m sure they’re all great guys, but at the end of the day the Buckeyes should probably be expecting a bit more from the braintrust that is expected to lead some of the nation’s premier talents.

There are no new ideas coming from this collection of coaches. When Ryan Day needed help putting together an offensive game plan for the postseason, there was so little experience around him to draw from. When the chips were down, none of these guys were ready to meet the moment.

Ohio State put together an inexperienced and unqualified offensive coaching staff in 2025, and it paid the price. It handed the keys to a Ferrari to a 17 year old kid with his learner’s permit, and they drove it 30 miles per hour until it ran out of gas on the freeway between Indianapolis and Arlington.

An all-time Buckeyes defense was let down by its offense, and virtually all of it was the result of poor coaching. Changes need to be made to avoid a similar fate in 2026.

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