COLUMBUS, Ohio – For as many steps as the Ohio State offense took in a forward direction last season the same could be said about the defense taking steps backward. Yes, Ohio State still went 13-1, won the Big Ten Championship and went on to win the Rose Bowl in Urban Meyer’s final year as head coach, but there will always be a major case of the “what-ifs” regarding the defense and what that would have meant for the overall fortunes of the team.

What happened last year will have to remain in the past, but it still will be a study for Ryan Day and his new coaches in 2019 as they embark on their first year as the new Ohio State staff after the retirement of Meyer.

It was not a complete overhaul of the defensive coaching staff but only Larry Johnson remains from the 2018 staff as Day has tasked four new coaches with taking over the defense and building upon a defense that finished No. 72 in the nation in total defense last season and was among the worst in recent history in regard to giving up “chunk” plays.

These new coaches will be tasked with looking at the defense from the ground up and working on restoring the defense to where it had been the previous four years, a top-10 defense in three of those seasons and top-20 in the fourth, but don’t call it a ‘fix’ job.

“Ryan didn't talk about fixing anything,” co-defensive coordinator Jeff Hafley said earlier this month when asked about fixing the defense. “When Ryan called me and we started to speak, we just talked. We talked about the possibility of me coming back to college football, what he saw me doing. But we never talked about fixing anything.”

Day will no longer be able to solely focus on the offense as the new head coach and has spent a lot of time thinking about the disparity between where the offense and the defense were last season.