The surgeon’s head snapped up. The drill stopped spinning.
“Really?” he asked. “What’s he like? Is he ready for this?”
Swigert laughed. The former wide receiver is one of the many people who know Day well enough to assure Buckeye fans that the new head coach at Ohio State is a hire they will come to appreciate. Day sprung from relative anonymity to landing one of the most coveted jobs in football in just a few short years. After a three-game audition last September, he was officially named as Urban Meyer’s replacement at the end of the 2018 season.
A few months shy of his 40th birthday, Day was a head coach for the first time. He takes over a program that has won three of the past five Big Ten championships and finished ranked in the top five nationally in four of those years. He is stepping into the shoes of one of modern football’s most accomplished winners. He inherits a well-oiled machine with the unenviable task of making it his own without messing it up. His margin of error? Non-existent.
“You beat the rival,” Meyer told him. “Every other game you have to win as well. Every player has to get drafted in the first two rounds. No off-the-field issues, and never lose to that rival.” Then the old coach wished him luck and flashed the smile of a downhill-bound trekker at a trailhead greeting.
Former players such as Swigert, mentors such as Meyer, Chip Kelly and Steve Addazio, and Day’s closest friends have all given him the same message Swigert gave the surgeon: He is ready. Winning and leading have defined Day for as long as any of them can remember. Cut him open, it’s in his bones.
