​What would you say if you asked a casual observer or a seasoned college football follower to name the best head coaches in the sport? Typically, the responses would point to a familiar trio: Kirby Smart of Georgia, Curt Cignetti of Indiana (though Indiana’s smaller recruiting pool and alumni base can temper his reach), and Ryan Day of Ohio State, often cited as the top three in some order. Earlier this week ESPN released its ranking of the top college football coaches, and those three were indeed prominent in the conversation—Cignetti, Smart, and Day, in that sequence. Yet the panel doing the voting surfaced some intriguing nuances. One notable input came from Bill Connelly, ESPN’s analytics expert, who placed Day at No. 8 in the country. Eight! It would be interesting to see which five coaches he has ahead of Day (assuming Cignetti and Smart would still be in the mix) and to examine the rationale behind that placement.
That said, Connelly did offer some transparency about his reasoning, particularly in explaining why he ranked the country’s winningest active coach by winning percentage so low in 2024–25. It appears that he boiled the assessment down to a single game. “Honestly, it’s just really hard to evaluate the performance of a successful Ohio State head coach, as it has been the most consistently outstanding program in the nation for decades,” Connelly wrote. “I may have dropped Day too far after last season, but I just didn’t think he stuck the landing at all in 2025. When it was time to help that offense shift into gear late and ramp up the tempo and the risk profile against elite opponents, Day just couldn’t do it. I’m not an Ohio State fan, but I was yelling at the TV during the Miami CFP game because the Buckeyes simply refused to accelerate the pace in the second half when they were down by multiple scores. They weren’t up for the task late in the season, and it cost them. Eighth is probably too low, but I suppose it could be viewed as a challenge for 2026.”
Regardless of how readers interpreted Connelly’s stance, the dialogue offered some useful takeaways. Day was one of only two coaches to lead his team to an undefeated regular season, the other being Cignetti. The two losses Ohio State endured came in close fashion against Indiana, who would go on to win the national title, and against a Miami squad that surged at the right moment to reach the title game, losing narrowly to the Hoosiers. Before that blemish, Ohio State had delivered a remarkably strong regular season: after a seven-point win at home over Texas, the Buckeyes followed with eleven consecutive victories by margins well beyond a touchdown.
Day has shown a knack for hiring strong assistants and for adjusting strategy to keep the program at the forefront. He has overseen an offense and a program that has remained aggressive, adaptable, and high-pressured, and he has guided Ohio State to a CFP appearance in five of his seven seasons in Columbus, indicating a sustained track record of excellence. That consistency has contributed to his reputation as one of the sport’s premier coaches, even as analytics-driven critiques—such as Connelly’s—continue to offer a counterpoint and spark thoughtful debate about how to weigh a program’s historical dominance against a single-season performance.
In any case, Day’s performance remains a central pillar of the Buckeyes’ ongoing narrative: a program capable of exceptional regular seasons, high-level recruiting, and strategic evolution, with the occasional late-season stumble that invites scrutiny from analysts and fans alike. The conversation about where Day ranks on a given list will likely persist as long as Ohio State maintains its status as a national powerhouse and as evaluators continue to balance traditional indicators of success with the insights that analytics provide.