Ryan Day is 81-10 as the head coach of Ohio State, including 11-0 this year as the Buckeyes try to repeat as national champions. It’s a breathtaking run of success.

Yet Day is famously 0-4 against Michigan over the past four years, including a shocking home defeat to a middling Wolverines team a year ago. Another loss Saturday in Ann Arbor, especially as an ESPN BET 11.5-point favorite, would invite continued scorn and frustration.

It is why you’d think Day is the coach under the most pressure to win a specific game this weekend.

Then along comes Lane Kiffin saying, hold my Hotty Toddy.

Kiffin has yet to publicly declare where he will work next season — let alone the rest of this season. It might be LSU. It might be Florida. Or it might be Ole Miss, where he has the 10-1 Rebels ranked sixth heading into Friday’s Egg Bowl at Mississippi State.

“An announcement on Coach Kiffin’s future is expected the Saturday following the game,” Ole Miss athletic director Keith Carter wrote in a statement.

It’s a game Kiffin had better win.

Forget the rest of this chaotic story. The long, slow drag-out of an announcement. The fact that Kiffin had family members reportedly tour other schools and towns … while still working in Oxford. The daily cryptic book excerpts Kiffin sends out on social media, leaving fans to try to decipher their meanings.

Or even the fact the decision is merely “expected” on Saturday.

Maybe. Or maybe not. Who really knows? It’s Lane. Maybe he’ll pick a hat, like recruits do, or have Jesse Palmer come to town for a “Bachelor”-style rose ceremony.

If nothing else, Kiffin, a personality like no other, has set up Friday’s game in Starkville, Mississippi, as a game like no other — one of the most “must-win” contests a coach has ever faced.

Ole Miss is having its greatest season in more than 60 years. The College Football Playoff is waiting. A home playoff game, which might be the biggest sporting event in state history, is at hand. The Rebels are absolute national semifinal contenders, if not capable of winning the whole thing. Kiffin himself has never had a season this successful.

Yet if Ole Miss gets upset Friday by its archrival, it could all collapse. If so, the blame will be singular.

Day can lose and, despite the embarrassment, move on to bigger challenges.

Kiffin might never live down creating a circus of speculation and distraction as he considers quitting on a playoff team.

His defenders can blame the clunky calendar, but life is about timing. Sometimes it doesn’t work in your favor. Leaving a team with big possibilities (it is extremely unlikely Ole Miss would allow him to coach in the playoff) for the perceived greener grass of another program would be an extraordinary decision. Is he a coach or a job hunter?

Emotions will be bitter enough if Kiffin leaves after securing a victory that puts Ole Miss in the playoff. If the Rebels lose, though? They aren’t assured anything, falling into a crowded group of 10-2 contenders seeking an at-large bid. They could get left out.

Making matters worse, it’s quite possible Kiffin bails the next day. That would give the College Football Playoff committee the option of downgrading the Rebels because they lost their head coach the way it downgraded Florida State two years ago because it lost its starting quarterback to injury.

Just like that, the dream season would have a nightmare conclusion … just as the perpetrator skips town. How will that go over?

Ole Miss is an 8.5-point favorite. It should defeat a Mississippi State team that has shown admirable growth this year but is still rebuilding. This is the Egg Bowl, though. Anything can — and has — happened. Upsets. Comebacks. A guy costing his team by mimicking a urinating dog during a touchdown celebration.

This thing is almost always wild.

“Coach Kiffin and I have had many pointed and positive conversations regarding his future at Ole Miss,” Carter wrote in his statement. “While we discuss next steps, we know we cannot lose sight of what is most important — our sixth-ranked team that is poised to finish the regular season in historic fashion.

“Despite outside noise,” Carter wrote, “Coach Kiffin is focused on preparing our team for the Egg Bowl.”

He better be. And then Ole Miss better win it.

This is going to be a big budget – not to mention a complex budget.

It could, depending on how it lands, determine the fate of this government. And it’s hard to think of many other budgets that have been preceded by quite so much speculation, briefing, and rumour.

All of which is to say, you could be forgiven for feeling rather overwhelmed.

But in practice, what’s happening this week can really be boiled down to three things.

1. Not enough growth

The first is that the economy is not growing as fast as many people had hoped. Or, to put it another way, Britain’s productivity growth is much weaker than it once used to be.

The upshot of that is that there’s less money flowing into the exchequer in the form of tax revenues.

2. Not enough cuts

The second factor is that last year and this, the chancellor promised to make certain cuts to welfare – cuts that would have saved the government billions of pounds of spending a year.

But it has failed to implement those cuts. Put those extra billions together with the shortfall from that weaker productivity, and it’s pretty clear there is a looming hole in the public finances.

3. Not enough levers

The third thing to bear in mind is that Rachel Reeves has pledged to tie her hands in the way she responds to this fiscal hole.

She has fiscal rules that mean she can’t ignore it. She has a manifesto pledge which means she is somewhat limited in the levers she can pull to fill it.

Put it all together, and it adds up to a momentous headache for the chancellor. She needs to raise quite a lot of money and all the “easy” ways of doing it (like raising income tax rates or VAT) seem to be off the table.

So… what will she do?

Quite how she responds remains to be seen – as does the precise size of the fiscal hole. But if the rumours in Westminster are to be believed, she will fall back upon two tricks most of her predecessors have tried at various points.

First, she will deploy “fiscal drag” to squeeze extra income tax and national insurance payments out of families for the coming five years.

What this means in practice is that even though the headline rate of income tax might not go up, the amount of income we end up being taxed on will grow ever higher in the coming years.

Second, the chancellor is expected to squeeze government spending in the distant years for which she doesn’t yet need to provide detailed plans.

Together, these measures may raise somewhere in the region of £10bn. But Reeves’s big problem is that in practice she needs to raise two or three times this amount. So, how will she do that?

Most likely is that she implements a grab-bag of other tax measures: more expensive council tax for high value properties; new CGT rules; new gambling taxes and more.

No return to austerity, but an Osborne-like predicament…

If this summons up a particular memory from history, it’s precisely the same problem George Osborne faced back in 2012. He wanted to raise quite a lot of money but due to agreements with his coalition partners, he was limited in how many big taxes he could raise.

The resulting budget was, at the time at least, the single most complex budget in history. Consider: in the years between 1970 and 2010 the average UK budget contained 14 tax measures. Osborne’s 2012 budget contained a whopping 61 of them.

And not long after he delivered it, the budget started to unravel. You probably recall the pasty tax, and maybe the granny tax and the charity tax. Essentially, he was forced into a series of embarrassing U-turns. If there was a lesson, it was that trying to wodge so many money-raising measures into a single fiscal event was an accident waiting to happen.

Except that… here’s the interesting thing. In the following years, the complexity of budgets didn’t fall – it rose. Osborne broke his own complexity record the next year with the 2013 budget (73 tax measures), and then again in 2016 (86 measures). By 2020 the budget contained a staggering 103 measures. And Reeves’s own first budget, last autumn, very nearly broke this record with 94 measures.

In short, budgets have become more and more complex, chock-full of even more (often microscopic) tax measures.

Read more from Sky News:
What tax measures are expected in budget?
The political jeopardy facing Rachel Reeves in budget

In part, this is a consequence of the fact that, long ago, chancellors seem to have agreed that it would be political suicide to raise the basic rate of income tax or VAT. The consequence is that they have been forced to resort to ever smaller and fiddlier measures to make their numbers add up.

The question is whether this pattern continues this week. Do we end up with yet another astoundingly complex budget? Will that slew of measures backfire as they did for Osborne in 2012? And, more to the point, will they actually benefit the UK economy?

This is going to be a big budget – not to mention a complex budget.

It could, depending on how it lands, determine the fate of this government. And it’s hard to think of many other budgets that have been preceded by quite so much speculation, briefing, and rumour.

All of which is to say, you could be forgiven for feeling rather overwhelmed.

But in practice, what’s happening this week can really be boiled down to three things.

1. Not enough growth

The first is that the economy is not growing as fast as many people had hoped. Or, to put it another way, Britain’s productivity growth is much weaker than it once used to be.

The upshot of that is that there’s less money flowing into the exchequer in the form of tax revenues.

2. Not enough cuts

The second factor is that last year and this, the chancellor promised to make certain cuts to welfare – cuts that would have saved the government billions of pounds of spending a year.

But it has failed to implement those cuts. Put those extra billions together with the shortfall from that weaker productivity, and it’s pretty clear there is a looming hole in the public finances.

3. Not enough levers

The third thing to bear in mind is that Rachel Reeves has pledged to tie her hands in the way she responds to this fiscal hole.

She has fiscal rules that mean she can’t ignore it. She has a manifesto pledge which means she is somewhat limited in the levers she can pull to fill it.

Put it all together, and it adds up to a momentous headache for the chancellor. She needs to raise quite a lot of money and all the “easy” ways of doing it (like raising income tax rates or VAT) seem to be off the table.

So… what will she do?

Quite how she responds remains to be seen – as does the precise size of the fiscal hole. But if the rumours in Westminster are to be believed, she will fall back upon two tricks most of her predecessors have tried at various points.

First, she will deploy “fiscal drag” to squeeze extra income tax and national insurance payments out of families for the coming five years.

What this means in practice is that even though the headline rate of income tax might not go up, the amount of income we end up being taxed on will grow ever higher in the coming years.

Second, the chancellor is expected to squeeze government spending in the distant years for which she doesn’t yet need to provide detailed plans.

Together, these measures may raise somewhere in the region of £10bn. But Reeves’s big problem is that in practice she needs to raise two or three times this amount. So, how will she do that?

Most likely is that she implements a grab-bag of other tax measures: more expensive council tax for high value properties; new CGT rules; new gambling taxes and more.

No return to austerity, but an Osborne-like predicament…

If this summons up a particular memory from history, it’s precisely the same problem George Osborne faced back in 2012. He wanted to raise quite a lot of money but due to agreements with his coalition partners, he was limited in how many big taxes he could raise.

The resulting budget was, at the time at least, the single most complex budget in history. Consider: in the years between 1970 and 2010 the average UK budget contained 14 tax measures. Osborne’s 2012 budget contained a whopping 61 of them.

And not long after he delivered it, the budget started to unravel. You probably recall the pasty tax, and maybe the granny tax and the charity tax. Essentially, he was forced into a series of embarrassing U-turns. If there was a lesson, it was that trying to wodge so many money-raising measures into a single fiscal event was an accident waiting to happen.

Except that… here’s the interesting thing. In the following years, the complexity of budgets didn’t fall – it rose. Osborne broke his own complexity record the next year with the 2013 budget (73 tax measures), and then again in 2016 (86 measures). By 2020 the budget contained a staggering 103 measures. And Reeves’s own first budget, last autumn, very nearly broke this record with 94 measures.

In short, budgets have become more and more complex, chock-full of even more (often microscopic) tax measures.

Read more from Sky News:
What tax measures are expected in budget?
The political jeopardy facing Rachel Reeves in budget

In part, this is a consequence of the fact that, long ago, chancellors seem to have agreed that it would be political suicide to raise the basic rate of income tax or VAT. The consequence is that they have been forced to resort to ever smaller and fiddlier measures to make their numbers add up.

The question is whether this pattern continues this week. Do we end up with yet another astoundingly complex budget? Will that slew of measures backfire as they did for Osborne in 2012? And, more to the point, will they actually benefit the UK economy?