Ryan Day explains what made Bill O’Brien the right hire at Ohio State

Ryan Day surprised many when he moved to hire long time NFL and college coach Bill O’Brien as the new Ohio State offensive coordinator. But the man in charge in Columbus had carefully weighed out what he was doing.

Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Day addressed the big staff shake up and how he arrived at his choice to not only change offensive coordinators, but his final pick to fill the role. It’s all part of a broader assessment of the program.

“I think at the end of the season, you look hard at what kind of changes need to be made,” Day said. “And as we know at Ohio State, we’re chasing that one or two percent. We’re chasing that last couple drives of a game, or whatever that is. I felt like in that particular situation, for me to really be able to hand over a lot of the duties that I was doing — I really was looking for somebody who had great background in the NFL, the SEC, he’s a former head coach, he had been a head coach in the league. And the experience of developing quarterbacks was there. So I just, and then the fit, culturally, was the right fit.”

O’Brien’s track record is lengthy, with stops in both college and NFL coaching ranks. His first seven jobs in coaching were at the college level before he joined the New England Patriots staff in 2007.

From there, O’Brien did a solid stint in New England, coaching from 2007-11 and rising to eventually be the offensive coordinator in 2011. O’Brien was then hired to take over at Penn State in the fallout of the Jerry Sandusky scandal, where he coached for two seasons in 2012 and 2013. O’Brien was successful enough at Penn State to garner NFL head coaching interest, and he took over as the Houston Texans head coach ahead of the 2014 season.

O’Brien was mostly successful on the field with the Texans, winning the AFC South four times in seven seasons. But his shortcomings as a general manager, among other organizational dysfunction in Houston, led to his ouster in 2020.

But O’Brien landed on his feet, filling the open offensive coordinator position at Alabama following the departure of Steve Sarkisian. Following a pair of strong showings coaching the Crimson Tide offense — including coaching Heisman-winning quarterback Bryce Young in 2021 — in 2021 and 2022, O’Brien returned to the NFL ranks, serving as the Patriots offensive coordinator for a second stint for the 2023 season.

And through all this experience and time on task, O’Brien has grown into a coach that Day thought would be just the right complement for Ohio State as the Buckeyes retool and enter 2024 as one of the top teams in the country.

“There were certain things that — I wasn’t just going to make this decision and say ‘Well we’re just going to go in this direction and I’ll throw somebody into that role.’ It has to be the right person,” Day said. “And I felt like, after a spending a bunch of time on it, Bill was that right guy for that right spot at that time. And so if something were to change, then we’d have to adjust from there. But that was something I spent a lot of time on to make sure it was right.”