Ohio State should give Mike Vrabel the world, resume dominance and never look back

This probably won’t come until a year from now, after Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan throttles Ryan Day’s Ohio State for a third straight season and the fury of a fan base becomes the charge of an athletic director.

But it will come, if Ohio State AD Gene Smith has an any sense for where things are headed in Columbus and what’s been happening in Nashville.

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Mike Vrabel’s Ohio State. Get used to the idea.

It’s more than an Ohio State fan fantasy — by the way, OSU loyalists, if at least half of your message board threads right now don’t have “Vrabel” in them, what are you even doing? — and it should not inspire scoffs of dismissal from Tennessee Titans fans. It should inspire reviews of the liquidity of the financial assets of Titans controlling owner Amy Adams Strunk. Keep that checkbook handy.

I don’t know for sure that Vrabel would take the job at his alma mater if offered. I know Ohio State should offer it, and anything Vrabel wants to take it.

And I wouldn’t totally rule out all of these things happening in a matter of weeks as opposed to months.

That’s not a prediction of a firing. Day’s 45-5 record in four-plus seasons, two Big Ten championships, two College Football Playoff appearances and advancement to the 2020 title game should earn him another season, right? Did I just write that out loud? Yeah, no. He’s not getting fired. Not this year.

But let’s cut to a Columbus Dispatch story by Bill Rabinowitz, a veteran and well-sourced Ohio State beat writer, from Jan. 13 about possible NFL interest in Day after last season. To quote Rabinowitz: “Don’t be shocked if Day seriously considers an offer if he gets one.”

Two factors were cited in the piece. One, obviously, was Day’s sub-market contract — and yes, he got the bump from $7.6 million a year to $9.5 a year, with an extension to 2028, a few months later. The other was the “fishbowl” aspect of Columbus, in particular after a “cataclysmic” event known as a loss to Michigan. Day, 43, and his young family experienced that after last season’s 42-27 Michigan upset in Ann Arbor, the Wolverines’ first win over the Buckeyes in a decade.

Saturday’s 45-23 dismantling of Day’s Buckeye’s by Harbaugh’s Wolverines made it two straight Michigan wins in the rivalry for the first time since 1999-2000. Also, it marked two straight double-digit Michigan wins in the rivalry for the first time since the Wolverines got three straight of those from 1946-48. With Ohio State quarterback C.J. Stroud moving on to the NFL and Michigan quarterback J.J. McCarthy back for his junior season in 2023, I’ll wager a third straight is on the way.

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I bet Day thinks of last year’s fishbowl as something more like a luxury swimming pool at this point.

It’s fair to wonder how appealing Day would be to NFL owners right now, but I think he’d fit in perfectly with the offensive whiz kids club. Remember, Vrabel wanted to hire him to be the Titans offensive coordinator when Vrabel got the job in January 2018. Day had only been with Urban Meyer for a season at OSU as co-OC after two seasons with Chip Kelly in the NFL, but Vrabel’s intelligence gathering in Columbus told him positive things. Day stayed at OSU and supplanted Meyer a year later.

Day is a good coach. But there are other good coaches who could win 45 out of 50 games at Ohio State, in this era of absolute talent-gathering dominance for the Buckeyes. What Ohio State needs is a great coach, like the flawed Meyer and beloved Jim Tressel, a coach who would not shrink in the moment the way Day did Saturday against Michigan.

Vrabel would stuff Harbaugh in a trash can, or split his head open trying. He’s the guy. The question is whether he’d sign up for that fishbowl — even though it’s his home fishbowl. His kids are grown, it’s worth mentioning.

A couple years ago, I got the strong sense this day would come at some point, while working on a story for The Athletic on Meyer’s improbably undefeated 2012 Ohio State team and how it launched Vrabel’s coaching career. Actually, go back about a year earlier, back when Vrabel still had post-presser conversations with writers on his availability days. The subject turned to recruiting in college football, and I asked Vrabel if that was one of the main reasons he left Ohio State after the 2013 season to become Bill O’Brien’s linebackers coach with the Houston Texans.

The answer I got back, in a nutshell, was that Vrabel actually loved recruiting. He loved building new relationships. He loved talking football with coaches and parents and kids. If you think about it, if he didn’t love all this stuff so much, he wouldn’t be coaching at all because he made more than $20 million as an NFL player. That’s why Meyer was initially leery about hiring Vrabel in the first place.

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Fast-forward to that story, which involved Vrabel’s best friend, Luke Fickell — previously a hot candidate to replace Day, but now Wisconsin’s new coach because bold moves work — talking Meyer into giving Vrabel a chance. Here’s what Meyer told me he learned quickly about Vrabel as a recruiter: “One of the elite guys.”

Kerry Coombs, who coached defensive backs on that Meyer staff and then with the Titans under Vrabel — and then was hired away by Day to be Ohio State’s defensive coordinator, and then was sacrificed after last season, and boy would it have been interesting to see his reaction Saturday — told the story of Vrabel flipping cornerback Gareon Conley from Michigan to Ohio State. It paired nicely with the story, told first in the Rabinowitz book “Buckeye Rebirth” on the 2012 season, about Vrabel paying an in-home visit to defensive lineman Noah Spence, getting scratched up wrestling Spence in his living room, but also getting the commitment.

“Mike’s a winner, so if Mike’s gonna recruit, he’s gonna win,” Coombs said then. “He’s not gonna cheat, but he is gonna do everything possible, pull out every resource, use every strategy available, in order to get a recruit.”

And he will relate to his players. If you’re a Titans fan who thinks Vrabel is a pro guy and that’s that, you’re fooling yourself. It’s obvious he loves coaching at the highest level and he must see a path toward Canton in this role — he wasn’t quite that level of a player — but we’re not just talking about college football. We’re talking about Ohio State. And we’re talking about a guy whose approach would work on any level.

“I mean, I try to coach them the same way,” Vrabel said for that story. “I try to teach, develop, try to inspire them to do their jobs better. My relationships were probably different as a college D-line coach than they are as an NFL head coach. But let’s be honest, man, the only thing that’s different with some of our guys and some of the players on Ohio State and Alabama is that we’re paying them. What’s really different about a 21-year-old player on Ohio State or Clemson and a 23-year-old like Rashaan (Evans) or Jayon (Brown)?”

Now, would the transfer portal and name, image and likeness and all that has come about to make college coaching more complicated scare Vrabel away? Maybe. Would $12 million a year simplify things? I know it would be a wise investment for Ohio State.

(Of course, and this goes for the forecast of Day’s inability to overcome Harbaugh in the future as well, I also knew Josh Heupel was an underwhelming hire for Tennessee. And that Harbaugh was never going to live up to the hype at Michigan. And that Tom Herman was a can’t miss. And will they have player and coach statues of Scott Frost after he brings Nebraska all the way back? And on and on and on. These coaching projections have their limitations. But I do feel good about this one.)

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Vrabel is 48-28 with the Titans, 2-3 in the postseason, including a run to the 2019-20 AFC title game, but that doesn’t fully convey how impressive he’s been in this job. Getting more than he should out of his talent isn’t just about relationships and motivation, it’s about scheming and finding edges in the film and the rulebook. Get him going on any aspect of the game and he’s got the math and probabilities on recall. His pursuit of winning is exhaustive.

Recruiting for Ohio State already has tremendous advantages. I’m trying to imagine Vrabel not winning over a parent in a battle with Alabama or Georgia, or a kid when he says: “I played for the best coach ever, caught touchdowns from the best QB ever in Super Bowl wins and coached one of the best running backs ever. So yeah, I know what it takes in the NFL.”

That would also mean departing from the dream of winning a Super Bowl as a coach. But the Titans have a worse roster this season than last season, Derrick Henry and Ryan Tannehill are getting older, and some years of mediocrity may be ahead until and unless they find a great quarterback. Ohio State may look more appealing by comparison if (when) this materializes.

This is the kind of speculation that is sure to annoy Vrabel. But maybe it will be a nice distraction from the A.J. Brown questions this week. For those who aren’t aware, the Titans play at the Eagles on Sunday, seven months after the draft-day trade that sent Brown to Philly. In the moments afterward, Vrabel looked like someone had just kicked him in the stomach, or made him listen to “The Victors,” high volume, Muzak version, for hours.

When it’s Mike Vrabel’s Ohio State — sorry, I mean, if it’s Mike Vrabel’s Ohio State — he will be the coach and the GM, holding picks at the top of the draft every year.

(Top photo: George Walker IV / USA Today)

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