The Ohio State Buckeyes won the 2024-2025 National Championship in football with four straight wins in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff over Tennessee, Oregon, Texas and Notre Dame.
The run has Ohio State media calling it the most impressive four-game stretch of all-time and has helped the Buckeyes to become the odds-on favorite to win the 2025-2026 national title in some circles.
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On Thursday, Buckeyes coach Ryan Day sat down for an interview with college football host Josh Pate during which he gave credit to his players and coaching staff for their hard work, touched on a wide variety of topics and ultimately fired back at critics who assert that the Buckeyes won on the strength of their offseason NIL spending spree.
Ryan Day speaks at the Ohio State Spring Game on April 12. © Kyle Robertson/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
“There was this perception out there that, oh, any team that wins now, well they’re just winning because they went out and paid guys a lot of money,” Pate said to Day as he lauded the Buckeyes’ for gelling together as a team during their historic run.
“Yeah, I think that’s where…It’s just easy for people to say, well, you know, Ohio State had NIL for this amount of money or whatever that is…It’s just so cheap and so easy for someone to say,” Day says around the 34 minute mark of the video below.
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“If you actually do the research, all it does is really tell you the value of an Ohio State football player.
“When you look at a brand that has just south of 12 million fans in the city of Columbus with two million people and the power of Ohio State, yeah our guys are going to make a lot of money in NIL.
“We did add six or seven guys, but not 15, not 20, where we went out there and just went and got the best players in college football that wasn’t the case, and that’s not what won us a championship, I think it’s easy for people just to kind of say that because it’s easy and it’s cheap,” Day added.
Day mentioned Buckeyes holdovers Denzel Burke, Donovan Jackson, Emeka Egbuka, Jack Sawyer and others as players who formed the foundation of Ohio State’s title team along with Will Howard and Quinshon Judkins as key contributors who were added in the portal.
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“I’m pretty defensive of that because these guys who came through here and have scars, you don’t always remember the wins until you win championships.
“That really didn’t affect us in the end because we knew that wasn’t the case, it wasn’t like we just had the best players money could buy, if anyone actually did their research.”
Related: Jeremiah Smith Teases Big Ohio State Announcement With Curt Message
