Ohio State head coach Ryan Day was a guest on The Tonight Show starring Jimmy Fallon on Monday, exactly one week after Day and the Buckeyes raised the national championship trophy. In fact, Day brought the hardware with him on his trip to New York City, which led to a fun exchange to begin his segment.
“Thanks for bringing the trophy with you and congratulations,” Fallon said.
“It’s not exactly light – it’s about 50 pounds,” Day said.
“Yeah, it’s very, very heavy,” Fallon said. “Jeez, I can’t lift it. I’m not joking; I can’t lift it.”
“You gotta get in the weight room,” Day joked.
Fallon then showed the audience a picture from the postgame celebration on the field at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which elicited several cheers from OSU fans in attendance.
“(Sunday) we had a huge celebration in the stadium and we had over 45,000 fans there and that’s when it really sunk in,” Day said. “Just because of the hard work and the journey that we had to go on to get there. This is the first time we’ve had the 12-team format of the playoff, so we played 16 games and there were ups and downs along the way. But our guys showed resilience.
“So, to hoist that trophy with everybody there, it means a lot.”
[Follow this link to watch all of Day’s segment, which lasts 5:42.]
Fallon of course asked Day about the viral postgame video of a golf cart crashing into the wall with him, Will Howard and Cody Simon aboard – and showed a clip of it.
“You’re stressed during the game and you finally take a deep breath and relax,” Day said. “So, we get on the golf cart to go to the press conference and we are just gunning it through the field. I mean, going around and dodging people and I’m grabbing on like this. (Grabs both sides of the chair.) And then we took the corner and hit the wall. And if you look back, Will Howard is back there laughing his tail off and so is Cody Simon. And I’m looking like, you’ve got to be kidding me right now.
“It’s amazing how you come right back down to earth 20 minutes after the game.”
“It’s like the scene in Austin Powers,” Fallon said.
“That’s what I said,” Day said. “I said, ‘We’re in an Austin Powers movie right now.'”
Later during the segment, Day explained how the Buckeyes were able to achieve their biggest goal despite the disappointing loss to Michigan on Nov. 30.
“I think that’s the story of this team,” Day said. “And I think there’s so many people who can learn from this team. We’ve got an unbelievable group of guys. Guys who decided to come back and forego the NFL. And there was a point at the end of the year when nobody thought we were going to do this. But there was a group of guys who did and decided they were going to.”
