Ryan Day 'Fired Up' About Ohio State Defense Under Matt Patricia

There’s not much Ohio State defensive coordinator Matt Patricia can do in his first year to improve on the Buckeyes’ No. 1 defense from 2024.

But that doesn’t mean head coach Ryan Day doesn’t want him to try.

Ohio State is replacing four starters on the defensive line, a starting middle linebacker, and three members of the secondary. The returning players all became accustomed to former coordinator Jim Knowles’ scheme — and many thrived in it.

As the lone new face on the defensive staff, Patricia has been asked to learn the defense they’ve run the past three years, but also add his own flourishes and philosophies where he sees fit. There is no shortage of talent on this year’s Ohio State defense, especially if Patricia and his staff are looking to accentuate strengths and minimize weaknesses.

“He’s willing to work with the guys that are on staff, but also he’s got a great background of when you think about the Patriots and what he did there,” said Ohio State head coach Ryan Day. “It wasn’t always just the same defense. He took guys who had certain skill sets and put them on the field and put them in a great situation to be successful, and that’s really what we want, but also continuing to run the Ohio State defense.”

Patricia’s history and success in the NFL was certainly a positive for Day, but the key to any hire is making sure it’s the right fit and he is able to get the most out of the players.

“It was a pretty extensive process going through different coordinators, making calls and making sure it was the right fit and not just necessarily being worried about what the quote-unquote perception of a hire is,” Day said. “We’ve got to find the right fit for us, and again, the feedback we’ve gotten so far from our players and recruits has been excellent about how Matt’s connected with our players, and I think it’s a great opportunity for him.”

In hiring Matt Patricia, Ryan Day made sure that he found somebody that can keep the Buckeyes on their current path while also adding to it. Even under Jim Knowles, the defense grew and evolved over the course of his three years at Ohio State.

Despite the personnel losses, Day sees no reason to scrap a defensive scheme that worked.

“I’m very excited about our defense and what we’re doing,” he said. “We wanted to keep continuity there, and that was one of the reasons it took us a long time with a very thorough process in hiring Matt. When you look at Tim [Walton] and Larry [Johnson] and James [Laurinaitis] and Matt Guerrieri, these guys had a huge part of what we did last year on defense. And so we want to keep that continuity. We want to run the Ohio State defense, and Matt was willing to embrace that.”

That being said, Ryan Day didn’t hire Matt Patricia to be Jim Knowles.

Which is another reason Day is excited about the possibilities of this 2025 Ohio State defense.

“Matt has his own background and things that he likes, and I think one of the things he does a great job of is putting guys in situations to be successful. So he’ll have his little different changes, but we want to keep, really, the structure of what we’ve done in the past and keep that going. So I’m fired up.”