Ohio State’s tough situation with Kerry Coombs, a great Buckeye but uncertain coordinator: Doug Lesmerises

Kerry Coombs led the OSU defense into the postseason last year, but Saturday there were problems in a loss to Oregon.
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COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Kerry Coombs is a great recruiter, enthusiast and position coach, a tremendous husband, father and grandfather. This matters because he has been a great Buckeye, a fundamental part of the Urban Meyer era of success with his recruiting and teaching of future NFL cornerbacks, and his infectious energy that lifted everyone around him.

You know Coombs and like him, and so do I, and so does Ryan Day, and that makes it more difficult when the defense Coombs leads plays poorly and the Buckeyes lose as two-touchdown favorites as they did Saturday, 35-28 to Oregon.

It is one thing to give up 52 points and 621 total offensive yards in the national title game to Alabama and a quarterback in Mac Jones that Bill Belichick is ready to turn into the next Tom Brady. It is another to give up 35 points and 505 offensive yards in Week 2 of the regular season to Anthony Brown, a quarterback who threw for 172 yards against Fresno State last week.

This fit, with Coombs in Year 2 as a first-time coordinator in a defense that Day wants to run, looks wrong, and now the Buckeyes have to figure out what to do about it. Hard decisions can be as complicated as they are necessary.

Assistant coaches are middle managers at a place like Ohio State, a point I’ve made repeatedly and a point with which many disagree. Ultimately, players and head coaches make the Buckeyes win, and assistants are replaceable because there is always someone qualified and eager to do a good job as a career stepping stone.

Good assistants are necessary, and assistants that miss stick out. But good assistants should not be hard to find. Assistants flock to a place like Ohio State, if you pick the right ones. That means the leash is short.

But here’s how we reached this point.

Day spent the 2016 season as an assistant with the San Francisco 49ers, dissecting football with a fellow assistant who would become one of his best friends in coaching. Jeff Hafley and Day shared personality traits and football opinions, and they vowed to work together again, one likely to hire the other as a coordinator when he became a head coach. That happened at Ohio State in 2019, when Day took over the Buckeyes and brought in Hafley to run the defense, aided by veteran Greg Mattison. The look would be a single-high-safety defense with a mix of man (Cover 1) and zone (Cover 3) coverages. That’s the defense that Day as an offensive mind had the most trouble with. And you can imagine the conversations Hafley and Day had about scheming it up.

With a generational pass rusher in Chase Young and 10 other future draft picks on the 2019 defense, things rolled that year. Then Hafley surprised Day by leaving after one season to become the head coach at Boston College. Day needed to hire someone else to run the defense they’d designed. But before he made that hire, Day made it clear the defensive plan wasn’t changing.

“That’s what I want to do moving forward,” he said in December of 2019.

Enter Coombs after a two-year hiatus in the NFL. He had worked with Day when both were Meyer assistants in 2017, but then Coombs jumped up. Why’d he leave? Well, he departed two weeks after Meyer hired a new coach named Alex Grinch, who is nearly two decades younger than Coombs, as co-defensive coordinator, while Coombs remained a position coach. I’ve always considered that more than coincidence.

Coombs returned two years later with a title and pay bump and a new level of responsibility, back at the school he loved but working for a new boss. Coombs spoke of the knowledge he’d gained in the NFL, of the variety of defenses he’d been exposed to, of his willingness to do something other than the two-safety, press-man defense the Buckeyes had mostly run during his first go-round in scarlet and gray from 2012-17.

And now here we are, with a defense that isn’t good enough.

“There’s enough blame to go around here,” Day said after the first regular-season loss of his career, citing failings on offense and defense. But Day runs the offense and isn’t going anywhere. So the defense is where something may have to give.

Let’s lay out a few conflicting realities.

* Day said he wants to run this style of defense, so part of the scheme rests with him. Playing only one deep safety theoretically should help a defense stop the run, but the Buckeyes broke down fundamentally and gave up back-breaking runs Saturday, including a 77-yard touchdown early in the third quarter.

More teams play three true safeties than one true safety right now, and the Buckeyes remain unusual in their look.

“I think that the defensive structure that has been in place has been a successful one,” Coombs said, “and one that a lot of folks are really comfortable with. I think we have to execute, we have to prepare, we have to do a good job of having our kids in the right places to make the right plays. ... I will own all of it.”

* Regardless of the look, Coombs had never called a defense above the high school level before his first season in Columbus last year. It’s possible that he has been elevated above his coaching strengths. The Buckeyes don’t use as many presnap adjustments or varied looks as many teams. Coombs’ feel for calling the game doesn’t seem to be all the way there, but how long can the Buckeyes wait for that to come around?

* The defensive talent is clearly an issue, and Coombs has to deal with that. Part of the talent dip is because he left and the Buckeyes didn’t recruit as well without him, and now he’s suffering the consequences.

In the 2017 and 2018 classes, the last two Coombs recruited to, the Buckeyes landed 13 defensive players ranked among the top-100 players in the country.

In the 2019 and 2020 classes, the classes recruited while Coombs was gone, the Buckeyes landed two defensive players among the top-100 players. That’s not all Coombs of course, but he came back to less talent on the defense. (The 2021 class, with Coombs involved, had six top-100 players on defense.)

Thirteen compared to two is a lot.

* Ohio State has Paul Rhoads, a 10-year college defensive coordinator at Pitt, Auburn, Arkansas and Arizona, on staff as a lowly paid $48,000 analyst. That means Rhoads can watch film and help game plan, but he can’t recruit or coach at practice. It’s common for major programs to hire overqualified former coaches for jobs like that, and they take the gigs to stay in the coaching mix and set up their next jobs. But the point is that there is an experienced coordinator who knows the roster already in the building.

Coombs did face reporters in a postgame news conference Saturday, which doesn’t always happen with assistants after a loss. He took nine questions, virtually all centered on why the defense was so bad and whether he’s the right man to lead the defense.

“I’m responsible,” Coombs said. “That’s my job. So we have to play better. When we say we have to play better, I’m not blaming the players. The standard of our defense is one of excellence. And I have to do a better job.”

When I asked Day specifically about where he was with Coombs, he put it back on himself.

“Everybody on our staff works really, really hard, and we all make decisions together as a group, and ultimately it comes back on me, I’m the head coach,” Day said. “We’ll go back and watch the film, and then we’ll figure out where it goes next week. But again, ultimately, it comes back on me, because I’m the head coach.”

Day, Coombs and the rest of us saw the same thing, which was Oregon hitting Ohio State with the same thing -- beating the Buckeyes on the edge to the short side of the field. There was a particular technique the defense didn’t execute correctly several times in terms of defenders passing off duties. But Coombs admitted Oregon out-schemed them that way.

“I think the amount of plays that were run into the boundary side was something that they probably had not shown a good deal of,” Coombs said. “And I think that’s where we had difficulty. But again, that (means) make adjustments on the side and then we’ll go from there.”

That didn’t happen in a way that prevented the Ducks from working it time and again.

Both Day and Coombs pledged vague changes, knowing this can’t be repeated. But what can really be done? The Buckeyes are rotating players constantly on defense, probably too much. They could calm that down. Or they could give even more snaps to younger, possibly more talented, players. But there were some mistakes of inexperience Saturday.

Could Day change the defensive scheme and play two deep safeties as the base? Could Coombs take more risks with different looks to give QBs more to think about? Could Day think about promoting Rhoads while moving another assistant down, to give Coombs more help? Could the Buckeyes just hope for improvement with time and anticipate offseason changes?

Assistants like former linebackers coach Bill Davis and former quarterbacks coach Tim Beck have fallen short at Ohio State and been the subjects of my critiques. Both were gone after two seasons. Greg Schiano was fine his first two seasons and a real problem as the defensive coordinator in 2018, and he was gone.

But this may be more like Ed Warinner, who was a very good offensive line coach for the Buckeyes from 2012-14, and then overmatched as the co-offensive coordinator in 2015 and 2016. He got two years of coordinating before he was pushed aside. Coombs has earned more leeway than any of them. He has given more to Ohio State football.

I think there’s little doubt that if this doesn’t substantially improve this season, someone else will run the defense in 2022. But you wonder what might change now. Coombs is arguably one of the 10 best position coaches in OSU history. But now he’s coordinating. And this is far from one of Ohio State’s best defenses.

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