Ohio State’s Cotton Bowl performance was embarrassing, and if Ryan Day doesn’t make major changes, he has to go.

Despite painful losses in the last two games, the 2024 Ohio State football team was still largely a recognizable version of what Buckeye teams are supposed to look like, but the similarities are increasingly fading. With each year under Ryan Day’s direction, it feels like the program is running out a Xeroxed copy of a Xeroxed copy of a Xeroxed copy of the type of team that we all know Ohio State is capable of; you can tell what it’s supposed to be, but it’s getting harder and harder to make out the specifics.

With each passing season, it feels like the Buckeyes are getting further away from the crystal-clear vision of a program that prides itself on creativity, development, and aggression. With each new disappointing campaign, things are getting progressively cloudy around the edges so that it won’t be long before the product on the field no longer even resembles the best Buckeye teams of the recent past.

Day has one more shot to fix the shortcomings of his program, or his time in Columbus will be up. He’s not going to be fired before the 2024 season; Athletic Director Gene Smith is retiring in June and he’s not going to replace the most important employee in the athletic department before the new AD takes over — especially when Smith and Day are such close friends.

So, with the possibility of Day being fired off the table, there absolutely needs to be substantive and substantial changes made to the program immediately; like before the end of January for some, and before the end of December for others.

If he chooses to sit pat and not undertake any significant restructuring heading into the 2024 season, then in my opinion, Day does not understand or deserve the job as Ohio State’s head football coach. In the last three to four years, he has allowed an increasingly rapid erosion of many of the gains built up by Jim Tressell and Urban Meyer over the previous two decades, effectively returning the program to where it was under mid-tenure John Cooper.

Friday night’s performance by Day and his team (primarily the offense) was an embarrassment to the standard that the OSU program has set in the 21st Century, and while there are many programs that would be thrilled by an 11-2 season, Ohio State simply should not be one of them, especially when those losses come in the final two games of the season against teams that the Buckeyes should be able to beat.