Award watch list season is finally here in the month of July and Ohio State head coach Ryan Day is one of the first Buckeyes to make the cut as he was one of 17 coaches named to the preseason watch list for the Dodd Trophy, presented to the national coach of the year in football.

The award has been handed out on an annual basis since its inception in 1976 and only one Ohio State coach has ever been honored as Jim Tressel won the award in 2002.

The namesake of this award is Bobby Dodd, the former longtime head coach at Georgia Tech. According to the mission statement behind the award, it stresses the importance of scholarship, leadership and integrity, “three pillars of the legendary coach Bobby Dodd’s coaching philosophy”.

Day is joined by Tom Allen (Indiana), Paul Chryst (Wisconsin), James Franklin (Penn State) and Kirk Ferentz (Iowa) as Big Ten coaches to make the list from the Big Ten along with former Ohio State (interim) coach Luke Fickell, who is currently the head coach at in-state Cincinnati.

The 2020 award went to a fellow Big Ten coach as Pat Fitzgerald of Northwestern won the prestigious coach of the year award, the first Big Ten coach to win it since Ferentz won the award in 2015.

Coach of the Year awards have been difficult to come by for Ohio State head football coaches and Ryan Day breaking through and winning a Coach of the Year award just in the Big Ten in 2019 was large news, but even that was not a unanimous decision as conference media awarded Day while the conference coaches gave the nod to Minnesota’s PJ Fleck.

Prior to that, the last time an Ohio State coach won the conference coach of the year award dated all the way back to 1979 when Earle Bruce won the award.