Places like Ohio State and Notre Dame rarely hire head football coaches from within. Conservatively, those are two of the 10 best jobs in the sport, and as such they customarily draw some of the most established head coaches in the country as applicants. Between 1946 and 2018, Ohio State had one internal promotion and Notre Dame had two.
Yet when the Buckeyes and Fighting Irish play Saturday in South Bend, the men leading both teams out of the tunnel got those plum positions after serving as coordinators at the schools. They replaced hugely successful former bosses and were tasked with maintaining the machines—if not improving them. Their first college head-coaching jobs came at garden sports in their 30s. (Born on third base, a certain coach in Ann Arbor might say.) They also had mountains of pressure dropped on their relatively young shoulders the minute they took over.
Ryan Day, in his fifth season at Ohio State, has done everything but the two things the fan base ultimately demands from its head coach: dominate Michigan and win a national championship. Urban Meyer, Jim Tressel and Woody Hayes did both. Earle Bruce and John Cooper, who coached the 266 games between Hayes and Tressel, did neither and were tolerated more than revered before ultimately being dismissed. Day replaced Meyer, who merely had a 7–0 record against the Wolverines and won the Big Ten’s only national title of the past two decades (in 2014).
