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Ryan Day pushes back on claims NIL delivered Ohio State a national championship
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Ryan Day pushed back against narratives that Ohio State bought its national championship in a sit-down interview with CBS Sports’ Josh Pate on Thursday.
Michigan alum and College GameDay host Desmond Howard said during the College Football Playoff last season that Ohio State making the national title game wasn’t a shock because the Buckeyes spent $20 million through NIL efforts on their roster. When Kirk Herbstreit tried to cut in and argue the point, Howard doubled down and said, “It’s true. It’s facts.”
But the Ohio State defense to claims that last year’s national title was delivered via NIL has consistently been the same. The Buckeyes didn’t assemble a team prior to the year. Rather, they paid to keep a squad together.
“The truth of the matter is that the majority of those guys were all guys that decided to come back or were already on the team that we recruited and developed,” Day told Pate on Thursday.” We did add 6 or 7 guys, but not 15, not 20 where we just went out there and just got the best players in college football. That wasn’t the case. That’s not what won us a championship.”
Ohio State had a 7-man transfer class last offseason. Those transfers were incredibly impactful — and they weren’t cheap — but a number of the major contributors were Buckeyes through and through.
Look no further than the NFL Draft. From 2016-23, Ohio State had at least 6 players selected in every draft cycle. In the 2024 NFL Draft, the Buckeyes had just 4 selections — the fewest since 2013. That wasn’t an indictment on the talent in Columbus, it was a sign of how many chose to stay. And, following a title, Ohio State tied a program record for draft picks in a single cycle during the 2025 NFL Draft.
Of the 14 players who were drafted, 11 of them spent their entire careers at Ohio State.
“I think that’s where it’s just easy for people to say, you know, Ohio State just had NIL for this amount of money or whatever, and it’s just so cheap and so easy for someone to say,” Day told Pate. “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 and the city of Columbus with 2 million people and the power of Ohio State, yeah, our guys are going to make a lot of money in NIL.”
Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
