COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ryan Day’s been open about his own history with mental health issues, stemming from his own father’s death by suicide in 1988 leading to a foundation he and his wife Christina set up to promote awareness for pediatric and adolescent mental health.

But Tuesday wasn’t about Day.

Instead, it was about Harry Miller, the former Ohio State offensive lineman, the former high school valedictorian, a person who seemingly had everything in the world, and his decision to step into Day’s office to tell him what’s really going on.

“This is about Harry,” Day said. “This is about his journey.”

In a statement released on Twitter announcing his medical retirement from football, Miller said that before last season, he stepped into Day’s office, the coach who recruited him, and told him he had the intention to kill himself.

“I tried my luck at football once again, with scars on my wrists and throat. Maybe the scars were hard to see with my wrists taped up. Maybe it was hard to see the scars through the bright colors of the television. Maybe the scars were hard to hear through all the talk shows and the interviews,” Miller wrote in his statement. “They are hard to see, and they are easy to hide, but they sure do hurt. There was a dead man on the television set, and nobody knew it.”

It was emotional, Day said, something that keeps coaches up at night.

But he said it’s a great example of the difference between coaching in college and coaching in the NFL: getting the opportunity to dive into the lives of the players he recruits and coaches and try and help.

Similar to when a player tears his ACL or sprains his ankle and they need physical therapy, Day said the program has structures in place when players may need some help working out things mentally.

“He did the work,” Day said of Miller. “We just put the structure together and we’re glad he’s in a better place now than he was certainly at this point a year ago.”

It’s now an issue Miller champions alongside Day.

“You look around and say, ‘Something’s going on right now, and something needs to happen.’ The dilemma is that nobody has to say something, but that is precisely why somebody has to say something,” Miller said on the Today Show Monday, recalling he told his mother at 8 years old that he wanted to kill himself, having lived with anxiety and depression since he was a child.

“I had no intention of this happening the way it did. People have called me brave, but to me, it felt like not dying. It felt like me being honest. Maybe bravery is just being honest when it would be easier not to.”

But it’s also an issue Miller made clear that’s not exclusive to him, talking about the messages he received after games calling for him to transfer while other players on the roster, he said, received death threats.

While saying death threats are unacceptable and something he and the coaching staff address extremely seriously, the exposure associated with being a part of a program like Ohio State is “part of the job,” Day said.

And that doesn’t make it easy.

“It’s one thing for someone in their 40s to be able to compartmentalize things like that, but it’s a lot harder for the younger generation who’s really found their identity through social media, through their phones to go on there and see some of those things,” the Ohio State head coach said. “It’s one thing to say, ‘Hey, it’s only 10 people.’ I say it all the time, ‘When you look at a stadium of 107,000 people, if you have 10 people, it’s a little, tiny section in that stadium right there. Everybody else is great, but all you see are those 10 people and those comments. They stick with you.

“The easy thing to do is to look at it and say, ‘Boy they get a free scholarship, they get all of this attention, they get all this.’ And that’s great, it’s true. But there’s also the other part of it that is easier for some to handle and a little bit more difficult for others.”

For Day and the rest of the program, the help revolves around one Theodore Roosevelt quote hung prominently in Ohio State’s team meeting room.

It’s “the man who is actually in the arena:” It’s where the credit goes, where the opinions matter most in the highs of triumph and the lows of defeat instead of with “those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

And it’s something Day said Miller still wants to be a part of, finding a way to make an impact in the Ohio State football program. But it was a hard decision for him to make, to step away from the game he’s loved for so long.

“This was a huge decision for him,” Day said. “It took a whole year to get to this point for him. You can tell how emotional he was about it because football’s been a huge part of his life. So to step away was a big deal and now he’s kind of repurposing himself. And that’s not easy to do. I’m proud of what he’s done and he’s got a lot to offer.”

Miller realizes now how much his words matter, how much of a voice he actually has.

And it’s one that he plans to use.

“When you are preparing not to say words anymore, you realize how important your words are. Even now, they feel so clumsy speaking about it now,” Miller said. “I would just say hope is pretending to believe in something until one day you don’t have to pretend anymore. Right now, you have all the logic, all the rational in the world to give up on it. I would just ask: pretend for a little bit and then one day you won’t have to pretend anymore and you will be happy.”

For Miller, through all the work put into his mental health over the past year, it started with a conversation in Day’s office.

The head coach still isn’t sure why the former Ohio State offensive lineman picked him, whether it was him recruiting Miller and feeling safe enough to tell him what was really going on, or because of his public concern for mental health and his own history in the area.

But to Day, that doesn’t matter.

Even though the healing process continues for the former lineman, he’s just glad Miller did.

“I am proud that he was comfortable enough to walk into my office and have a conversation,” Day said.