Weak men create hard times
In many ways, Ryan Day is the least of Ohio State's problems.
The current trouble for Ohio State’s football program can be traced to university trustees failing to fire Urban Meyer like a dog in 2018.
Until then, Ohio State had always valued the university’s brand over anyone—even legendary coaches like Woody Hayes and Jim Tressel.
But that changed with Meyer, whom the university’s independent investigation found deleted records after failing to report domestic abuse allegations against former wide receivers coach Zach Smith.
Past coaches had been fired for much less. This time, however, university trustees only suspended Meyer for three games.
Former trustee Jeffrey Wadsworth, a retired engineer and executive, was the only dissenting voice, at least in the only way that mattered since he publicly resigned from his post in disgust over the decision.
“You read the report,” Mr. Wadsworth told The New York Times.
“There are seven or eight things about emails, memory loss, hearing things five times, and to me, that raised an issue of standards, values — not how many games someone should be suspended for. … I read all these articles, and I’m embarrassed.”
The decision set the stage for a three-game trial for then-offensive coordinator Ryan Day as an interim head coach. A trial, it must be said, that Day passed with flying colors.
Day’s 3-0 record in that span, including a much-ballyhooed win over Texas Christian, assuaged the fanbase’s fears that would have come with a three-time national champion like Meyer passing the program’s reins to an unproven commodity like Day without the usual nationwide search.
Moving on from Meyer was the right move, even if the university allowed that old pervert to have his swan song in the Rose Bowl where he allowed a backdoor cover for the ages against the otherwise overmatched Washington Huskies. (No, I’m not still bitter over that bad beat. Why do you ask?)
But six seasons later, we have all the results we need about Day as a head coach, which is hilarious considering Ohio State could at least theoretically still win a national title in January.
Day, by all accounts, has been an upgrade on Meyer in terms of human decency.
I don’t wish ill on the man despite having his personal address memorized. He entombed Clemson’s Dabo Swinney somewhere at the bottom of the Indian Ocean alongside Osama bin Laden, and that’s no small thing.
Day, however, is a multimillionaire thanks to a job where, by his own admission, he has failed to meet baseline expectations in the past four seasons. It’s unacceptable, and he knows it.
As for the possibility of still winning the national title, well, I’m in no hurry to find out how tawdry that trophy feels when Michigan’s army of shrill World War II historians can crow about how we may have won the so-called natty, but we didn’t win The Game.
And that all assumes we won’t lose in an embarrassing yet somehow still predictable manner to any of the playoff’s other 11 teams with equal talent, which has always been when Day somehow finds his pink penis lodged three-inches deep in the nearest electrical socket.
So yes, it’s as the jihadist wing has been saying over the years—this fella is a bum incapable of meeting the local team’s notoriously high standards on the gridiron.
He knew the deal when he signed the contract, and he’ll be able to rest on the mountains of money that Ohio State would still have to pay him to board that sealed train to the scenic Ural Mountains of Siberia.
But putting Day out to pasture is the smallest and easiest part of the equation.
In politics, the situation can always get worse. It’s true in football, too. Even for a certified blueblood like Ohio State.
Not that fans should accept the current product. They shouldn’t, even though there is no Urban Meyer-level, home-run candidate waiting in the wings.
But it’s hard to imagine that, out of all the football coaches in America, not one can meet or exceed Day's 10-2 standard.
On the face of things, we shouldn’t be scared of that search. Ohio State pays a bevy of ostensibly intelligent people to identify and recruit that coach, should the scenario arise.
But it’s precisely the people leading that hypothetical search that will lay bare the institutional rot that has infected Ohio State—starting at the top, with its failure to disassociate from billionaire Les Wexner, the longtime confidant and benefactor of Jeffrey Epstein, the most infamous dead pedophile in world history.
Yet, the trustees’ willingness to protect Ohio’s richest man isn’t surprising.
Wexner and his wife, Abigail, are longtime Republicans who contributed millions of dollars to the gubernatorial campaigns of Ohio governors John Kasich and Mike DeWine and their related Super PACs.
Kasich and DeWine, in turn, appointed 15 of the 20 trustees currently serving nine-year terms at Ohio State. (The Board selects three non-Ohioans to serve as charter trustees for three years while two students serve two-year terms.)
That trusted Republican majority, in turn, has stayed silent in the face of the State Legislature’s increasingly hostile rhetoric toward higher education that compounds problems with inadequate state funding.
In response, the trustees have shifted the university model from a once-proud land-grant into a real estate hedge fund constantly searching for increasingly lucrative out-of-state and foreign enrollment.
I could spin an entire article on how the nepotism racket works on the trustee circuit, but for the sake of brevity, here’s one example in Trustee Elizabeth P. Kessler.
Kessler, as the “Partner-in-Charge” at Jones Day, has the kind of résumé you would expect for a Republican appointed to her position by a Republican.
For example, her official biography brags about keeping the grubby little fingers of lead poisoning victims out of the coffers of Sherwin Williams, an Ohio-owned multinational conglomerate.
But her 293-word biography leaves out some key details, as originally revealed by the brilliant Hilltop Husband in an article for The Rooster about how City and County Democrats keep appointing Republicans to the Regional Airport Authority Board, on which Kessler also sits:
Kessler’s father is none other than John W. Kessler, co-founder of The New Albany company. The other founder being Les Wexner, steadfast friend and benefactor of noted dead sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Elizabeth is a shining example for young people of what you can accomplish if you work hard and are born to Les Wexner’s business partner and the daughter of a former PUCO counsel/chairman of GTE.
Ah! Well. Suddenly, the university’s steadfast refusal to disassociate from the Wexner name makes much more sense.
And through that lens, so does the abrupt departure of former Ohio State president Kristina Johnson in May 2023.
Johnson, after several bust-ups with Republican trustees and Wexner himself, left the university halfway through her first contract and forfeited a tenured position within the College of Engineering's Department of Computer Science and Engineering.
According to Sheridan Hendrix of The Columbus Dispatch, Johnson left with one year of her base salary ($920,000) and a one-time lump sum of $278,100. The university and Johnson also agreed not to disparage each other in public, though that certainly didn’t stop the university from trying to assassinate her character via anonymous sources in The Dispatch.
As it turns out, public embarrassment didn’t enamor top presidential replacement targets of Ohio State. After a handful of candidates said no, Ohio State decided to hire Ted “Slapshot” Carter, then the president of the University of Nebraska.
Carter came from Nebraska after firing several faculty members and leaving the university with a $60 million debt. He’s also the first president in Ohio State’s prestigious history without a doctorate.
But Carter showed one big reason why he got hired during his first week on the job.
Carter publicly kissed Wexner’s ring the same week as unsealed court documents revealed one of Epstein’s numerous victims said under oath that Wexner raped her multiple times.
“We’ll see what else comes out,” Carter told reporters in January. “But I am confident that our relationship – Mr. Wexner has been such a great, great philanthropic partner – will continue.”
You would only need to see “what else comes out” if you were strategically ignoring what is already in the public realm about the longtime relationship between Epstein and Wexner. But that’s apparently no problem for Carter as long as Wexner keeps writing checks to his alma mater.
Yet, we can give Carter this much: He was at least smart enough to see the kind of leverage he had when he took the job, knowing the last thing Ohio State wanted was another litigious exit from a president unable or unwilling to finish their first term.
He immediately exerted that leverage in the replacement search for storied athletic director Gene Smith.
Patrick Chun, a former disciple of Smith and current athletic director at the University of Washington, was seen as the apparent continuity hire for an athletic program that had enjoyed national success under Smith.
Carter veered from that simple recipe and hired Ross Bjork, then of Texas A&M. Bjork was certainly no stranger to the money aspect of new-age college athletics. But curiously, Bjork’s most prominent accomplishment in College Station was having to fire football coach Jimbo Fisher after Bjork laughably gave him a fully guaranteed contract extension of $94.95 million. Whoopsy doodle!
In retrospect, it was probably a bad sign that A&M fans almost literally threw one of their famous casualty-producing bonfires to celebrate Bjork’s exit from university athletics.
At Ohio State, Bjork’s most notable achievement is cutting the men’s gymnastics scholarship team, which was a something that probably would have had to happen over the dead body of Gene Smith, were he still in charge.
But with the jury still effectively out on Bjork, Carter only needed a couple more months to embroil his newest employer in an embarrassing international scandal.
As originally reported by The Rooster, Carter once again ran roughshod over university guardrails and selected Chris Pan, a largely unknown alumnus, as speaker at the spring semester’s commencement.
Pan delivered what The Rooster described as “the worst commencement speech ever.”
While I believe Pan’s later assertions of his good intentions—he did indeed fulfill his promise to supply free motivational bracelets to graduates—his tangent into proselytizing Bitcoin, a fake internet currency preferred by pedophiles and cyber criminals, was downright bizarre.
But while the Bitcoin preaching was unbecoming of the stage even in the best interpretation, that turned nefarious when the university approved the Bitcoin part of the speech. Because, as The Rooster revealed, ol’ Slapshot has an unspecified vested interest in a Bitcoin mining company.
Seven months after that fiasco, Ohio State has yet to return a public records request from The Rooster seeking documents related to Carter’s unilateral decision. One might suspect that the apparent treasure trove doesn’t paint Carter and his university handlers in the best light.
In what has become a depressing ritual, the university’s chosen path seems to be burying embarrassing documents for as long as allowed under law.
But that’s a strategy that can’t be replicated with the football team, as we saw once again on Saturday afternoon in the decrepit Horsehoe.
When you combine all the problems—from the trustees in thrall to Epstein’s benefactor, to the corrupt president and incompetent athletic director—it’s easy to see why Day is the least of Ohio State’s problems.
Sure, Day would have been fired after any other previous season. But in this one, it’s still possible for Ohio State to win the national title.
Maybe Day will win a title and decide to ride off into the sunset toward a job with a more detached fanbase. After these past four Novembers, that wouldn’t be hard to find from his vantage point.
But if Day exits for whatever reason, why should any Buckeye fan have confidence that this current crop of sachems will be able to identify and recruit a suitable replacement? Especially if someone like former Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel says, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
The chances of replacing Day with someone better are only a few percentage points north of zero.
And given that the football team is a shiny object that distracts the masses from the decadent rot affecting the university, Bjork giving a vote of confidence to Day last night makes sense.
Bjork knows what the job market looks like. Why assume that risk when passing the buck is much easier?
After all, a sensible bureaucrat is risk averse since they know as well as anyone: It can always get worse.
THOSE WMDs. The mind-bending new science of measuring time… Surely, you’re a creep, Mr. Feynman… Inside Big Oil’s war on transparency… No, that isn’t duct tape on your plane’s wings… The 10-minute Mecca stampede that made history… My friend was a popular rising artist; how did he end up on the streets of Portland, addicted and dangerous?
Day will keep his job if he wins any playoff games at all, they are too weak to pull the trigger without another loss. But Vrabel should get the job. I’ve been at events with Urban and his wife and they are some of the worse excuses for humans I ever met at OSU, which is really saying something.
You also missed Carters complete mishandling of on campus Gaza protests, like allowing snipers perched against students with signs and kufiyas, and the constant catering to a tiny minority of Zionist students and their parents.
You’ve written an insightful, but disturbing piece. At least it disturbs me, a ‘71 alumna. I hate that OSU is apparently running away from its foundational mission as a land grant university. Here’s a little something that speaks to the wrong headedness at the school: our neighbors’ daughter scored a 36 on the ACT, was valedictorian, and comes out of a small town school district. You’d think OSU would throw open the doors and roll out the $ to admit her to this year’s freshman class. You would be wrong. OSU did offer around $7000 in scholarship money to her. Instead she is attending Yale at an out of pocket cost to her of around $7000. I think Ohio State should be ashamed of itself.