Ryan Day evaluates what he saw from Will Howard in big atmosphere vs. Oregon

Ohio State coach Ryan Day isn’t into moral victories, evidenced by his comments in the wake of a loss to Oregon. Quarterback Will Howard had a costly mistake when he slid on the game’s final play without enough time to call a timeout.

The game was over before the Buckeyes could try a field goal attempt.

“Well like I said, the No. 1 goal is to win. Talked about the defense and statistics and those things. Well, win. Same thing on offense. It’s about winning,” Day said. “I’d say the same thing, we didn’t win. It’s a loss. But once you take that part out of it and you look at the way he competed there was a lot of positives coming out that way. So we’ve got to grow on it so the next time we’re in that situation we do win.”

It’s easy enough to absolve Will Howard from most of the blame. It was in an extremely hostile road environment in a huge spot.

Still, it wasn’t like he was on an island by himself.

“I haven’t been in that type of situation before as a quarterback, but I’ve been in those types of situations,” Day said. “There’s a lot going on. There’s a lot going on. The good news is we do have the communication, so we’re able to give him some information in that moment.”

What was relayed down to the field to Will Howard was the sense of urgency. Ohio State needed a quick play to preserve at least some time to attempt the field goal.

Howard simply lost track of the clock at the final moment.

“Tried to get a quick pass to Brandon, someone flashed in his face, then he tried to dart out and with six seconds left you’ve got to get down pretty quick,” Day said. “So I think if we could all do it all over again he would have got down quicker. We probably would have called something maybe with a little bit more spacing to the field. You second-guess all these calls when it doesn’t work out.”

One thing Ohio State is working to ensure? That the same disaster doesn’t strike twice. The Buckeyes have repeatedly worked on late-game clock situations in practice.

The goal is to rep it enough times that it becomes second nature.

“So when we’re in that situation again, which we worked that same exact situation twice last week where there was the same time on the clock and we had one timeout from the minus-25 yard line and we had to kick a field goal,” Day said. “We continued to work that, not that we don’t do that anyways. But we’ll just continually go through those situations, so that when those situations come up we’re just ready to handle it better.”

Day issued the final word on the Will Howard mishap, looking to move on.

“But I would just say obviously in that moment when you have that, we did save the timeout so that if he was to get vertical and get down we could call the timeout quickly,” he said. “Tried to give him a quick pass and just layer it into the boundary.”

It didn’t work out. Now Will Howard and the Buckeyes do their best to move on.

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