ATLANTA — Ohio State coach Ryan Day stood off to the side of the stage as he and his players waited for the national championship trophy ceremony to begin.
Noticing the Buckeyes fans in the stands were growing quiet, Day waved his arms toward the crowd, encouraging them to make some noise. They responded with a roar, and he thrust his fist toward the roof.
Yeah, they love him now.
Ohio State broke in another new playoff system for college football by winning it all, rising from the wreckage of a devastating rivalry game loss and running through a gantlet of blue bloods to a national title.
Will Howard completed his first 13 passes on the way to 231 yards through the air, Quinshon Judkins scored three touchdowns, and the Buckeyes capped coach Ryan Day’s seven-week redemption tour with a 34-23 victory against Notre Dame in the College Football Playoff championship game on Monday night.
The longest college football season ever, starting in August and ending on Inauguration Day, turned into an Ohio State coronation.
“I remember going into that Tennessee (first-round) game, you know, a lot of doubters, maybe rightfully so,” said Buckeyes defensive end Jack Sawyer, victory cigar in hand. “But we persevered and trusted in God’s plan, and we were able to come out of it as national champs.”
The Buckeyes scored touchdowns on their first four possessions against a normally stingy Fighting Irish defense and came away with points on their first five, going up 31-7 halfway through the third quarter. Notre Dame came alive after that, with three straight long drives that resulted in two touchdowns and a missed field goal.
With 4:10 left in the fourth quarter, the Irish had cut Ohio State’s lead to 31-23.
The Buckeyes needed one more drive as the huge video board in Mercedes-Benz Stadium flashed an image of former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz watching from a suite. That drew loud boos from the Ohio State fans, who remembered how Holtz had questioned their team’s toughness before a regular-season meeting in 2023.
Howard ran for one first down, but facing third-and-11 at their own 34, the Buckeyes unleashed their ultimate weapon with an audacious play call. Howard found fabulous freshman Jeremiah Smith streaking down the right sideline and hit him perfectly in stride for a 57-yard gain to put the Buckeyes at the Notre Dame 10 with two minutes left.
It was as if Day and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly were directly responding to the critics who worried about Day coaching tight in the biggest spots and not maximizing his talented roster.
“I just thought to myself, only one national championship, you only get one opportunity a year to do this, let’s just lay it on the line and put it out there and be aggressive,” Day said.
With 26 seconds left, Jayden Fielding, who missed two field goals in the crushing loss to Michigan back in November, made a 33-yarder to clinch it and bounded all the way down to the other end of the field to celebrate.
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By rolling through four rounds of the first 12-team Playoff, Ohio State (14-2) won its seventh national title in the poll era (starting in 1936) and first since 2014, when Urban Meyer’s Buckeyes ran through the first four-team version of the CFP.
When Meyer stepped aside after the 2018 season, he handed the powerhouse program to Day. In six seasons since, the Buckeyes have hardly missed a beat — except in the game that means the most to their fans.
Practically a pariah among Buckeyes fans after losing to their archrival for a fourth straight time to end the regular season, Day now has as many national titles with Ohio State as Jim Tressel and Meyer. The 45-year-old Day is now 70-10 as Buckeyes coach.
“He’s the tip of the spear,” left tackle Donovan Jackson said of Day. “He wants to win more than anyone in that locker room. So seeing Coach Day hoist up that trophy, man, seeing all the flak he’s got, all the — excuse my language — s— he’s gotten, is just amazing as a player to see our coach in the position that we know he should be.”
“To see him have the success, makes me so happy,” Sawyer said of Day. “I saw the smile his wife had on her face and stuff that she had to go through. Being in Columbus after losing that game four years in a row, it’s terrible, and to come out tonight and win this game for them, it’s awesome.”
That game came on the last Saturday of November, when the Buckeyes left their home field angry, frustrated and dejected after Michigan dunked on them again and planted a flag on their 50-yard line.
Ohio State has been playing football for more than 125 years. The Buckeyes’ official record includes 335 losses. That 13-10 loss to “The Team Up North” as a 20-point favorite, capped by a postgame brawl, would make the short list of the worst in the history of the program.
“Life brings you tough things sometimes, but it’s how you react to them that’s your legacy,” Tressel said. “And the legacy of this team is that they looked a dark moment in the eye and came out champions.”
A group of talented Buckeyes — including defensive ends Jack Sawyer and JT Tuimoloau, receiver Emeka Egbuka and running back TreVeyon Henderson — had put off cashing NFL checks in favor of name, image and likeness checks this year for a chance to avenge their three previous disappointments against the Wolverines. The mission: Win The Game, the Big Ten and the natty.
They failed on the first two, ratcheting up the pressure on Day so much that his boss, athletic director Ross Bjork, felt compelled to try to calm Columbus the day after the Michigan loss by backing the coach and reminding Buckeye Nation that there was still a path to the third.
“Look, our program is never going to be defined by another program. Never,” Bjork said, a new national championship cap on his head and gold streamers and postgame confetti beneath his feet. “That doesn’t mean anything about de-emphasizing (the rivalry). We will never be defined by somebody else. We take the lead. That’s what we did in this run. So we’re not going to let others define who we are, what we stand for.”
In the previous playoff format, Ohio State’s season would have been effectively over after the Michigan game. The 12-team playoff meant it was far from it.
“It wasn’t like at the end of the year we were broken. It wasn’t that way,” Day said. “We had an awful day, and we just said we could never do that again.”
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Make no mistake, losing to Michigan came with a cost: The 12-team bracket ensured that this season’s national champion would be the first in the history of the sport to win at least three postseason games. A second-regular season loss by the Buckeyes, to Oregon in mid-October, meant they needed to win four, navigating a road paved with traditional powerhouses.
“This is much more like the NFL,” Day said.
Ohio State made it look easy in a cathartic blowout against Tennessee and its 30,000 orange-clad fans at Ohio Stadium and while avenging their loss to the Big Ten champion Ducks at the Rose Bowl.
Texas provided a stiffer test in a semifinal played in the Longhorns’ home state, but Sawyer — a Buckeyes product from birth — put the Longhorns away with a late scoop-and-score.
The Buckeyes finished the job against Notre Dame, the most storied program in college football history, with eight national titles, more than 900 victories and enough lore to fill a library.
“We just needed a foot in the door,” Jackson said. “I mean, with the horses that we had, with the guys that we had, with the hard work we had, we were able to make a run for it. Seeing the confetti fall made it all worth it.”
The first all-Midwestern college football title game was played in the stadium that annually hosts the SEC Championship Game. The northerners brought their weather to Atlanta, with temperatures in the 20s outside Mercedes-Benz Stadium around kickoff, making Ohio State and Notre Dame ski caps with pom poms on top a popular accessory around downtown Atlanta. To be fair, it barely broke single digits in Columbus, Ohio, and South Bend, Ind., on Monday.
The frigid temps had fans seeking shelter in the stadium early. More than two hours before kickoff, the concourses were packed, with Buckeyes calling out “O-H, I-O” and fans exchanging fist bumps and posing for photos with marching band members in full uniform.
The climate-controlled confines were a fast track for Ohio State’s star-studded offense, although it took a while for it to get on the field.
Marcus Freeman’s Fighting Irish, 8.5-point underdogs, started with a statement: an 18-play, 75-yard touchdown drive that took nearly 10 minutes off the clock. Notre Dame converted two third downs and two short fourth downs, and Riley Leonard’s ninth carry of the drive was a walk-in 1-yard TD to make it 7-0.
The Fighting Irish’s first national championship since 1988 seemed like a real possibility. For the 39-year-old Freeman, it would have been the first for a Black coach at the highest level of college football. But Ohio State responded with a 75-yard touchdown drive, capped by a Howard-to-Smith 8-yard touchdown to tie it at 7.
The Irish offense couldn’t find a counter in the rest of the first half.
“I think more than anything, it was two series after the first one we didn’t execute and we had some self-inflicted wounds that we had to clean up,” Freeman said. “Second half we drove the ball. I thought we did a good job with some tough situations. But we can’t run Riley every single play. That’s not what the formula for success is.”
Ohio State made it two-for-two on touchdown drives on its second possession, going 76 yards with Judkins, the Ole Miss transfer running back, stiff-arming a tackler to the ground on the way to a 9-yard touchdown run. Then three-for-three, with Howard dicing up the best pass defense in the country, especially on third down. The Kansas State transfer found Judkins alone in the middle of the end zone for a 6-yard score with 27 seconds left in the first half to make it 21-7 at the break.
It was a spectacular display by Howard and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly, spreading the ball around to the Buckeyes’ array of weapons. Notre Dame’s pass defense came into the game No. 1 in the country in completion percentage allowed at 50.7 percent. Only Georgia in the quarterfinals broke 60 percent in any game against the Irish’s No-Fly Zone secondary.
Howard was 14 for 15 in the first half for 144 yards and two touchdowns to six different receivers.
Notre Dame, so effective in the so-called middle eight (the last four minutes of the first half and the first four of the second), got outscored 14-0 by Ohio State.
Judkins broke free on the second play of the second half for a 70-yard run that put the Buckeyes on the doorstep again. Three plays later, it was a hat trick for Judkins as Ohio State’s offensive line, which lost its two best blockers to season-ending injuries, collapsed the Notre Dame front for a 1-yard score.
Howard celebrated with a fist pump. Notre Dame fans were left slackjawed and silent. With 12:46 left in the third quarter, Ohio State led 28-7, conjuring up memories of the 2012 BCS Championship Game when Alabama beat the Irish 42-14.
Not so fast. These Irish are built differently.
“The outlook of Notre Dame football is extremely high,” Freeman said. “As long as the people in that locker room that come back understand what it takes, the work these guys have put in, there’s a lot of success in our future.”
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Leonard finished with 255 yards passing, including two touchdowns to Jaden Greathouse, and the second and the accompanying two-point conversion made it a one-score game with 4:15 left in the fourth.
The Buckeyes would not be denied, with Smith delivering the knockout.
“I knew that we got a freak of nature on the edge,” said Jackson. “I knew that if we gave Will enough time to get it to him, (Smith’s) gonna get open.”
Smith finished with five catches for 88 yards.
“Them guys came back for a reason, so I had no choice but to give it my all each and every day in practice,” he said. “I just know them guys wanted to win a national championship, and I had to give it my all for that.”
The super team era in college football might be fading away, with the transfer portal and the introduction of aboveboard payments to players creating smaller margins between the top teams.
The Buckeyes at their best, loaded with experienced veterans and bolstered by a few star transfers such as Howard, Judkins and safety Caleb Downs, proved to be a super team, overcoming the pressure of a championship-or-bust season and delivering their embattled coach a national title that will go down as redemptive, relieving and historic.
“Ohio State may not be for everybody, but it’s for these guys,” Day said, “and I’m really proud of them.”
(Photo: Rich von Biberstein / Icon Sportswire / Getty Images)
