COLUMBUS, Ohio – How different that postgame scene must have felt for Ryan Day, Ohio State’s embattled head coach, who stood in almost exactly the same spot as everything about his team three weeks ago on Nov. 30 His tenure appeared to be collapsing after its fourth straight loss to Michigan. Screaming players, their eyes red from local police pepper spray, raced past Day in search of medical attention. Belligerent fans, their patience exhausted by Day’s confusing schedule, hurled profane insults his way. Wounded seniors, their careers forever tarnished by the inability to defeat The Team Up North, brawled on the midfield logo as the Wolverines attempted to plant their flag. Chaos reigned as Day gained a foothold on the 24-yard line, his disbelief and disillusionment leading to temporary paralysis.

So much had changed when Day returned to this place late Saturday night, after a College Football Playoff game against Tennessee, whose fans had eagerly stormed Ohio Stadium and left well before the end of the fourth quarter. Perhaps emboldened by the sickening possibility of a $20 million roster dissolving with nothing but cash to show for it, Day and his coaching staff authored and engineered their best performance of the season: a 42-17 dismantling of the Volunteers at the same time Ohio expanded state’s season as the program gets back into the national championship conversation. Saturday night’s victory over a respected SEC opponent was so comprehensive that it left the Buckeyes as betting favorites against No. 1 Oregon in the quarterfinals, a Rose Bowl rematch of the instant classic those teams presented at Autzen Stadium in mid-October. That night, the Ducks prevailed by one point.

To earn this rematch and have a chance to advance to the national semifinals, Ohio State had so much to sort out before the postseason, so many issues both schematic and psychiatric that the coaches needed to examine. They needed to strengthen the interior of the offensive line, where injuries forced the Buckeyes to begin making personnel changes. They had to rediscover their aggressiveness in the passing game, where targets for wide receivers Jeremiah Smith and Emeka Egbuka had declined along with the number of downfield shots. They needed to revitalize the pass rush, where veteran edge rushers Jack Sawyer and JT Tuimoloau underperformed compared to their sky-high recruiting pedigrees. And Day himself had to bring Ohio Stadium back to life, where scores of fans cheered at the possibility of his firing after another loss to Michigan.

“It’s been a long lead-up for us,” Day said in his postgame press conference. “To say it doesn’t bother you – it does. We are very proud of who we are. These guys are very proud.”

“I think it says a lot about who our guys are that we were able to respond in such a great way.”

Long before anyone knew which version of Ohio State would show up Saturday night — or how many Ohio State fans would fill the stadium — Day positioned himself near the goal line during early warmups. He witnessed up close the high passes that quarterback Will Howard threw to every member of the Buckeyes’ incredibly talented receiving corps. Rep after rep, parable after parable, Day watched intently as Howard dropped passes into the metaphorical bucket. For close followers of the program, especially those who wanted to remove Day from his high-paying post, the irony of the situation was great: There stood Day, purveyor of a confusing, anti-air game plan that crippled his team against Michigan late last month, facing off the offensive style fans have wanted from him and offensive coordinator Chip Kelly all season.

Perhaps the reason Day was so fixated on Howard’s long passes was because he knew about the extremely aggressive game plan. About the 37-yard touchdown pass to Smith on the team’s first possession and the 40-yard connection to Egbuka on the second. Over the wheel route to hold off TreVeyon Henderson for 21 yards and Howard’s second touchdown pass to Smith for 22 yards, this time punishing the hubris of Tennessee defensive coordinator Tim Banks for refusing to star Giving corner Jermod McCoy some form of safety assistance. By the time Howard finished leading the Volunteers to 24 of 29 passes for 311 yards, his success was made possible by a far more determined offensive line, and the Buckeyes’ lead had grown to 32 points early in the fourth quarter.

“To win it all, you have to win the first one,” Kelly said. “That’s really the focus of the whole team. I think Ryan did a great job keeping everyone focused. There was really no conversation about what we were going to do on January 20th (when the national championship game was played) because January 20th meant nothing if we didn’t take care of December 21st. I think our guys were fully focused on playing this game.”

But so was Tennessee’s fan base. With Knoxville only 360 miles from Ohio Stadium, legions of Volunteer fans seized the opportunity for what many of them called a bucket list trip, traveling north on I-75 by caravan until they crossed Kentucky to invade the Buckeye State. Those who didn’t feel like driving opted to fly, filling the lobby of a hotel next to John Glenn Columbus International Airport with men in plaid overalls and women debating how many layers they would need to get into one to keep warm on a cold night in the Midwest. “Everyone,” one of the women joked around 3:15 p.m. “You’ll be out for the next eight hours.”

Thousands more Tennessee fans had already been braving the elements for some time, spilling into the side streets and bars adjacent to Ohio State’s campus well before kickoff on a 25-degree evening. Pregame interviews with volunteer fans on ESPN Radio, which showcase Southern sentiment, revealed that most of them had paid between $200 and $300 for tickets, a range they compared to away prices for conference games against Vanderbilt . A leaked pre-sale enabled countless away fans to purchase tickets in the days after this year’s playoff round was announced. Of the 102,819 fans in attendance Saturday night, between 25 and 35% wore orange.

“I think they thought they were going to take over this place,” Howard said.

That Tennessee theoretically had enough fans to do this underscores how precarious the early moments of Saturday’s game really were and how much potential there was for the mood at Ohio Stadium to sour and simmer toward outright chastisement if the Buckeyes were defeated early would have fallen behind. Instead, the Scarlet and Gray faithful were handed a stunning victory, with Ohio State taking a 21-yard lead at the end of the first quarter and outrebounding the Volunteers by 217 total yards – all while quarterback Nico Iamaleava had four sacks pressured, nine pass breakups and a 45.2% completion rate, by far his lowest of the season.

With more than 13 minutes left in the fourth quarter, drops and droplets of Tennessee fans trickled out the exits, their flickering hopes of a comeback dashed by an Iamaleava incompletion on fourth down. Ohio State’s victory was so assured that an assistant coach watching those games from the locker room snuck away for a bathroom break while snaps were still running and joined a few reporters in the restroom while chatter was still going on came from his headset.

“I told them in the locker room that what defines you in life is how you deal with adversity in life,” Day said, “as a person, as a man, as a father. So to see the way.” They reacted in that game (after the loss to Michigan), you could tell by the jump that they had a look in their eyes that they were going to win that game. I thought they played like that.

The look in Day’s eyes was equally meaningful as the band played “Carmen Ohio” to celebrate a monumental win and the extension of Ohio State’s season. He hugged his wife and children just a few meters from where the madness unfolded around him on November 30th. And that night he had earned the right to smile.

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball with a focus on the Big Ten for FOX Sports. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.

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