Ohio State football coach Ryan Day is not alone in never being allowed to have a bad game. Neither can his quarterback. It is a lot to ask of Kyle McCord to perform at an exceedingly high level every time out. But such is life at THE.
“You’re not allowed to have a bad day at Ohio State. Any of us. That’s just the way it goes,” Day said Tuesday. “So I say all the time, on your bad days you have to be at least average, at the very least, if not better than that. On your average days you have to be really good. And on your good days you have to be great.”
McCord was seldom great Saturday against Wisconsin. A few times he was really good. But most of the time? It’s debatable whether he was even average. Hey, it happens. Justin Fields once threw three interceptions in a game. C.J. Stroud threw two.
Against the Badgers, McCord threw two picks, lost a fumble and twice was flagged for intentional grounding. The shaky performance stole much of the good will the third-year QB had built among OSU fans after he led the Buckeyes on their winning drive against Notre Dame five weeks ago. He gets three weeks to rebuild it before Michigan.
In one way, McCord’s up-and-down play this season was expected. First-year starters typically follow a trajectory of two-steps forward, one step back. At Ohio State, however, patience is not a virtue. If the quarterback isn’t moving three steps ahead then he is falling behind.
If that feels unfair, well, welcome to college football’s version of the PGA Tour, where to play quarterback for the Buckeyes is to be expected to channel your inner Tiger Woods. Even when Tiger’s game was off, he managed his way around the golf course well enough to make a tour-record 142 consecutive cuts. Woods often was incredibly good during that streak – winning 37 times – and never bad enough to be home watching on the weekend.
Such elite consistency in managing your game is something to aspire to, which is why Day encourages his quarterbacks to play golf between seasons.
“Playing quarterback is similar to playing golf,” he said. “Each individual play, each individual shot, is affected by the last play or last shot, because of where you are situationally, but has nothing to do with anything (in the present). The only thing that matters is that singular play. If you go in the water on the 18th hole you can ruin the whole four days of golf in the PGA. Same thing playing quarterback.”
McCord plays golf, so he understands that dwelling on the missed 3-foot putt makes missing the next 3-footer more likely. Easier said than done, but absolutely necessary if a quarterback is going to keep his head in the game instead of having the game in his head.
“It’s a mental thing,” Day said, returning to the golf analogy. “I tell those guys all the time they should play golf, because sometimes you have to manage the round. Some days, maybe your swing isn’t where it needs to be, you have to figure how to manage that round, have to keep the ball in the fairway. Maybe put your driver in the bag. When it’s feeling good, pull it out and hit it right down the middle. There’s a lot of parallels there, and you see a lot of quarterbacks play golf.”
McCord managed his mistakes relatively well Saturday, especially during the second half. He bounced back from the fumble and interceptions to help derail a Badgers’ upset bid. Not that it was perfect. The two intentional grounding penalties each moved Ohio State out of field goal range, but for the most part Day liked McCord’s resiliency. The quarterback remained aggressive and pushed through a lower leg injury to finish the game.
“There’s a lot of variables, and if you’re sitting there letting that play hurt you on the next one then now you’re really hurting the team,” Day said. “So if looking at the positives there, in the second half Kyle was able to move on and really even have a voice there on the last drive, ‘If we turn this into a two-score game we put these guys away.’ Some guys struggle with that. They can’t quite get over what just happened, and all the sudden one bad play makes a bad day, and now you’re in trouble.”
But just as golf requires more than mental acuity to be successful – swing mechanics matter – so quarterbacks need to mesh their physical tools with their decision making. For McCord, that means stepping up more often in the pocket and using his feet to buy time as the play develops. As for mental improvement, Day said his QB needs to have a plan for when a play breaks down.
“We talk about it all the time, why are we calling the play, what’s the design of the play?” Day said. “When it plays out like that, trust your feet, trust your eyes. When it doesn’t play out like that, where is your outlet? Where’s the ball going? What’s your plan? Then when it really breaks down, what’s your plan there?”
Sounds simple enough, but so does golf. That little dimpled ball sits there just waiting to be hit. Can’t be that hard, can it? Guess again. Playing quarterback is like trying to make the tricky sidehill putt as a 270-pound edge rusher comes at you with malicious intent. Even then, you’re not allowed to miss. At Ohio State, unlike on the golf course, the quarterback cannot have a bad day where he just doesn’t feel it. Like his coach, McCord gets no mulligans.
roller@dispatch.com
Get more Ohio State football news by listening to our podcasts
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio State quarterbacks, like coaches, never allowed to have bad days