It’s all relative. This would be a First World Problem if the First World included only one country. NATO claims 31 of First World countries. Modern standards of living suggest there could be as many as 70.
We’re repurposing this term as a metaphor for college football. Since WWII, there’s been one program which has suffered exclusively from First World Problems. Congrats, it’s your team.
I just spent a couple of weeks in Europe where temperatures were pushing 100 every day. The locals said it was 34 degrees, and choosing Centigrade over Fahrenheit to measure weather temperature is a First World disqualifier. The only people in America allowed to believe that numbers in the 30s are hot or high are Iowa fans.
Europeans deal with scorching temperatures by imagining what functioning air conditioning feels like while taking little sips of room temperature bathwater because ice cubes and Big Gulps are too extravagant and as accessible to the continent as moon landings.
They have their own non-temperature related perks. It’s nearly impossible to suffer a medical bankruptcy in Europe. I’ll take my chances with central air and giant slushies in the First World.
This is what being an Ohio State fan is like. Sure, Alabama just had a run like no other the sport has seen going back to when there were only six serviceable programs in the country. But they ate a lot of shit before that. This isn’t a Bama column, but look it up if you’re curious. That’s never happened in Columbus.
The Bottom for OSU means Not Winning the Rivalry Game, and that historically means Not Winning the Conference or the National Title – it’s all connected. The upcoming 2024 season will test that history like never before, with a polite nod to 2022, which was bizarre and exceptional.
The unknown frontier ahead of us is all but guaranteed to create new history which barely resembles the previous 25 years, let alone the previous century. There are worse fates than Ohio State’s nightmares, or at least that’s what literally every other fan base claims.
The Buckeyes went 9-3 every season during the large swath of my childhood. I was told as an impressionable child by responsible adults this was a departure from national relevance that bordered on blasphemy. It was a crime against our Saturday religion. If the Ohio State high clerics issued fatwas, they would have done so. Going 9-3 was an affront to God.
Also, why did Earle Bruce struggle with Wisconsin? Let’s stick with religion metaphors – it was like Jesus consistently losing to Bartholomew in cornhole. During that decade it was nearly impossible to find a more mediocre peer to get owned by in such embarrassing fashion. Bottom is relative.
Earle won nine every year and beat Bo more often than he lost to him. It felt like hell.
The guy who succeeded him built a national powerhouse that manufactured excruciating ways to lose to good and mediocre Michigan teams alike. He got unlucky right off the bat, stumbled during the rebuild and then accumulated enough radioactive juju to lead some of the beastliest teams Columbus had ever seen into the gaping maw of a generational letdown. Annual event.
Squandered titles are The Bottom. Indiana’s last conference title was 1967. It’s relative.
Coop helped swing what had been an even rivalry for 20 years over the northern border, where it was owned and operated out of Ann Arbor by three different coaches for over a decade. Ohio State was blamed by the takes purveyors of that era for diminishing what was once The Greatest Rivalry in Sports by ceding the competitive balance out of what made it a national pastime.
It surrendered The Game’s reputation to Dollar Store regionalities like Florida-Florida State. No one outside of Florida gives a shit about that game. Ohio State helped elevate it during that decade.
There’s nothing logical about college football and the program in Columbus operates at the center of that nonsense, which explains how under Cooper the Buckeyes kept getting better while their reputation kept getting worse. Whenever it came time to close, they folded. Even when they had the best hand at the table.
Once the 1998 team blew what truly was a gently obstructed BCS Title run on a crystal platter, Coop never recovered and two seasons later he met the same fate which greets every man who has ever sat at the big desk in Columbus.
And that’s the context we had entering the Jim Tressel Era, the second-most important and consequential period in the history of Ohio State football. Disagree? That’s your right. There are three sides to Ohio State football. You have yours.
The truth is out there, somewhere. Today you get mine. Enter: Senator Tressel.
PART THREE: AND THERE WAS LIGHT
Coop coached for a decade after Desmond Howard did the Heisman pose. He beat Michigan twice, total. Two Heisman winners from Ohio. Three points in 1991. Zero points in 1993. Tim Biakabutuka. Nine points in 1996 as a 17-point favorite at home.
Top five finishes tinged by November sadness. One Heisman. A Biletnikoff. Korey Stringer. Orlando Pace. David Boston. Andy Katzenmoyer. Coop coached a decade after The Pose.
And yet the accumulation of greatness couldn’t have happened without him, but every coach post-Fesler would have taken what he built to a tier on their watch which eluded him. It’s why the post-pandemic stretch Ryan Day has taken us on feels so eerily reminiscent. This isn’t a Connor Stalions column, relax. Your program should be more secure than to allow infiltration like that.
Back to Katzenmoyer, a generational linebacker who somehow justified unretiring the then-unofficially-retired number of the two-time Heisman winner and patron saint of Ohio State football before he had played in a single game…the fact that was allowed to happen tells anyone who missed the era what condition the program was in despite its national relevance.
After Katzenmoyer, Ohio State began adding formality to its hallowed jersey numbers. The Heismans, Chic Harley and Bill Willis all went up in the north end zone. But Archie endorsed what ended up being a three-year lease on no.45.
I think in a world where the program wasn’t on the ropes with Michigan while it was doing everything it wanted to the Big Ten except winning it, no.45 unretiring doesn’t happen. A cresting program tells an alien like Katzenmoyer to pick any other number. But in 1996 coming off the Biakabutuka game, what ended up being the first edition of the Silver Bullets needed the juice.
The guy whom Ohio State needed to save from itself was never going to be Holtz, a grifter who left scandals and slobber everywhere he coached. The guy OSU needed was in Ohio all along. In 2001, it was finally his time.
They needed it again when Andy Geiger fired Coop coming off an Outback Bowl clearly nobody gave a shit about, especially the players. Coop never recovered from the 2nd half of the 1998 Michigan State game, and two years later it was all over.
The moment so many hardliners had hoped for finally arrived and there was no obvious guy to tap in to fix it. The dog caught the car. Coop was finally gone! Wait. Uh oh.
Those 15 January days between Cooper’s termination and Jim Tressel’s hiring were harrowing. Every day a different successor’s name floated into the ether. We were definitely getting Bob Stoops. Then we were definitely getting Mike Bellotti. Then Chris Spielman – whose primary qualification was being Chris Spielman – was in the cards.
Jon Gruden was required by law to be a part of every coaching search in 2001. He was in his 30s and coaching multiple NFL teams into conference championship games during that era, so why wouldn’t he jump at the chance to coach the Buckeyes? His name would be tied to every coaching search for two more decades.
Gruden currently advises the Milano Seamen of the European League. He’s about to turn 61 and still available, by the way. He didn’t get an interview, but Ohio State listened to pitches from a bunch of native Ohioans and chose Tressel. He’s from Mentor.
I can’t remember if I saw his introductory speech live because I’ve watched it so many times and memories get blurry. The men’s basketball team was hosting Michigan that afternoon, and Tressel came onto the court to address the crowd as if he had done so a thousand times.
He was absolutely comfortable and unbothered giving his first address in a job where every occupant eventually gets fired. And in 2001 Ohio State’s head coach had no right to call his shot like he did.
Tressel delivered his message in the most respectful, confident and passively aggressive way imaginable. He didn’t talk about the score or the rivalry. He didn’t show any emotion whatsoever.
He simply talked about being proud of a team which hadn’t won on that game while wearing white jerseys since 1987, which took place the same week the coach two coaches ago was fired. He made a promise to bring ancient history of what was then The Bottom back into our lives. The Bottom never sounded so good.
Pushing a 15-year drought and guiding a listless program which had just eaten shit in America’s strip club capital was a daunting task. OSU stock was pretty low at that moment. It had just taken New Year’s Day humiliation at the hands of an SEC bottom feeder led by a coach who had said in 1978 he didn’t want to take over for Woody Hayes, but for the coach after Woody Hayes. The 2023 Cotton Bowl was hideous, but the 2001 Outback Bowl was worse.
And Lou Holtz was always a shifty coward. The guy whom Ohio State needed to save from itself was never going to be him, a grifter who left scandals and slobber everywhere he coached. The guy it needed was in Ohio all along. In 2001, it was finally his time.
Tressel had a plan. He had a vision. Michigan and the rest of the conference were cooked and didn’t know it yet – and that isn’t hindsight. You don’t say what Tressel said how he said it on live cameras unless you can feel the inevitability coursing through you. The winner of every chess game sees checkmate three moves in advance.
When he took the microphone that afternoon, there were Michigan fans in attendance, watching U-M basketball lose. They were warned. It’s understandable if they didn’t take it seriously. They had just spent over a decade enjoying the Buckeyes.
I always watch the cameraman in the background of the shot who stops recording and begins to walk away right as Tressel delivers the 310 days part, absolutely unplugged from the crescendo about to shake the Schottenstein Center.
Just an all-time fumble by that guy. You stopped recording then? What, did you have somewhere else you needed to be? The moment he realizes his error and tries to recapture the moment he missed is amazing.
After watching Cooper – whom I genuinely admired, appreciated and had empathy for –Â chewing his fingernails down to the carpels while watching his all-star laden teams find ways to break a million hearts, I was ready for a guy who spoke like this about that job before even having his own business cards.
Fun speech. Maurice Clarett verbally committed to Ohio State in the days that followed. About 15 months later once practices began in what was still the whisper-down-the-lane era of Ohio State football gossip, we realized how big of a deal that commitment was. But Tressel’s first team would have to succeed without him.
Clarett didn’t know his way around campus yet and was putting upperclassmen refugees of an 7-5 team in their rightful place. He was an angrier Jonathan Wells; an 18-year old in a 25-year old’s body who had already lived three lifetimes before ascending to college life.
It’s not a hot take to say Clarett and Wells were the same running back. Somewhere in the deleted bowels of pre-ESPN, pre-247 Bucknuts takes you’ll find me begging readers to see what eventually became this chart.
\CLARETT’S FRESHMAN YEAR vs. WELLS’ SENIOR YEAR
OSU RB
RUSHES
YDS
AVG
TD
CATCHES
YDS
AVG
TD
WELLS ’01
232
1257
5.4
15
11
117
10.6
0
CLARRET ’02
222
1237
5.6
16
12
104
8.7
2
Wells evolved into a ruthless, effective running back for a program in decline and barreling toward a rebuild. It took him all four years to get there. He just run out of eligibility when Ohio State turned the corner. Clarett showed up as a true freshman and basically matched what he had just produced out the gate. No.13 was a prodigy.
They were the same guy on different timelines. One was ludicrously ahead of schedule, arriving in college at the end of what a normally talented guy would call the completion of his journey toward being NFL-ready. Zero drop-off from 2001 to 2002 in that backfield.
But Clarett had another season at Warren Harding still before he would arrive in Columbus. Tressel’s first team played one game before 9/11. It lost game two a couple of weeks later in the Rose Bowl, looking every bit like a junior varsity squad trying to calibrate on the fly for a new head coach in America’s most anxious month since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
I made the trip to Los Angeles, however harrowing the idea of air travel felt during those days, because some of us were dying to feel normal again. Ohio State losing a big game felt, well, quite normal. America was back, baby.
Here are the five losses Tressel took that first season –
at UCLA by a TD. Bruins were no.4 in the polls in late October before the wheels came off
Wisconsin by a field goal. A bad loss to a bad team
at Penn State by two. A bad loss and a blown huge lead
Illinois by 12. Possibly the best Illini team to play on color television
South Carolina by a field goal. A bad loss
Year One. Huh, they can play with anyone! And they can lose to anyone. Interesting.
Every one of those games except Illinois was in Ohio State’s grasp, and if you have any memory of how Steve Bellisari played in Pasadena…it’s practically witchcraft the Buckeyes weren’t run off the field. Nearly going 11-1 isn’t how I remember Tressel’s first season. It’s not how anyone remembers that season.
It’s the trip to Ann Arbor. This is how most football seasons are indexed for a lot of us. What happened during that final game on the schedule? That’s not where it begins, but it’s where it ends and it’s how the whole season is memorialized. One game.
I was a high school freshman in Columbus when the Buckeyes carried Earle off the field in what was his final game as head coach. I was 27 years old and living on my own in Chicago when Tressel took his first team up there and went into the locker room at halftime up 23-0.
Text messaging was still primitive and clumsy in 2001 and social media was non-existent. I had one text message at halftime. It arrived while adrenalin had me on the verge of fainting on account of excessive mirth.
don’t call me. don’t call anyone. don’t jinx this
Radio silence. From 1987 to 2001 I had doubled my years in between Ohio State wins in Ann Arbor. Tressel had given that speech in January, dragged his team through rock fight after rock fight during that 2001 season and then took the biggest lead of the season into halftime the only game anyone truly cared about.
They held on to win via what we would soon embrace as Tresselball. The telegraphed art of securing a win by simply running out the clock and daring the opponent to try too hard. Ohio State sells tickets by being Ohio State. Ohio State coaches survive by winning the most important games. Tresselball understood the assignment from the jump.
Clarett arrived the following season and the Buckeyes escaped nearly every other week en route to the first perfect regular season since Earle’s first year back in Columbus. I skipped Ohio State’s September game against Kent State and went with some friends to Gainesville to see the defending national champions visit the Gators.
It’s still the loudest stadium I’ve ever been in, a top-five in-state matchup that doesn’t happen too often. Miami treated the home team so rudely, it truly felt like they hated Florida and wanted to hurt them.
I sat in that stadium and marveled at what I was seeing, which was a team so skilled, crisp, fast, punishing and disciplined that I briefly flirted with the idea that the 2002 Hurricanes could be competitive with the NFL’s worst team. That, of course, is bullshit.
The NFL’s worst team beats the national champions every season by 50 points because the national champions only have NFL players at some positions and college kids at most others. But as I walked out of The Swamp (Florida’s stadium) toward The Swamp (a bar across the street) I remember saying to myself God bless the team that earns the right to lose to these guys in Tempe.
No team existed in 2002 that could compete with what I just watched. I’ll go further – no team existed in my lifetime that could beat these guys. Maybe the 2001 Hurricanes could take them. The 1995 Nebraska team? Yeah I’ll take the 2002 Hurricanes stacking the line and putting Tommie Frazier in hell. Even my beloved 1998 Buckeyes didn’t have the talent.
So the Miami dynasty was basically back and a repeat was inevitable. It was still September.
Maurice Clarett celebrates after he pulled the ball from the hands of Sean Taylor at the National Football Championships at the Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe, Arizona, January 3, 2003. (Dispatch photo by Fred Squillante)Â
Meanwhile, Ohio State beat all of the good and mediocre teams on its schedule the same way every week. It was excruciating. Hey, the Buckeyes won. I aged 20 years, but they won.
We would never survive Tresselball. This was Year Two. Just beat Michigan again, please.
Which…back-to-back wins over Michigan? I had never wished for anything so preposterous, I just wanted the Buckeyes to beat those guys once and having done it the previous year in Ann Arbor of all places, it felt like we had cashed in too many chips.
Our rotting sports brains tell us lies like this. We know they’re bullshit, but they still make sense in my heads. Every time the Cleveland Indians would beat a team by four runs I’d refuse to allow myself to enjoy the win because they could have saved two of those runs for when they need them against another team with higher stakes.
That not how sports works unless you suffer from sports brain rot. Miami was going to win the BCS title and Ohio State just needed to beat Michigan again, because no team was beating Miami. It was a peaceful realization. The leaves were still green in Ohio. My body was not prepared for the following two months.
The first time I nearly fainted during the 2002 season was Holy Buckeye. I was wearing a tuxedo and destined for two weddings that afternoon. Eighteen years later during the throes of a global pandemic, a television production crew came to my house and interviewed me about that day for the BTN special about the 2002 Ohio State-Purdue game.
My body had never been overwhelmed by sports emotion like that before. One of the shittiest, most maddening football games I’ve ever watched in my life, with the added discomfort of Ohio State being undefeated and escaping every week plus being in a tuxedo instead of wanting to die in the end zone bleachers at Ross Ade Stadium.
I was there for the previous visit. Brees-to-Morales, for those still familiar with 24-year old losses in West Lafayette (there have been a few more since, if you don’t believe me look it up). It’s the least pleasant B1G roadie with Penn State a distant second. At least the sun shows up there. You can get good ice cream in State College. West Lafayette is effervescent sadness, but at least the traffic sucks too.
The sound the stadium made when the ref signaled that it would be Ohio’s State’s ball AFTER WILL SMITH RECOVERED JOHN NAVARRE’S FUMBLE was several decades of relief escaping 100,000 bodies. I’ve never heard that sound before or since.
Mike Doss blew the coverage on the deciding play, and I remember his tearful, seemingly unnecessary press conference where he said he would be returning for his senior season to win a national championship. Buddy, you were the best safety on a 7-5 team.
Let’s get back to Earl Bruce-era win totals before we start flirting with the idea of beating a generational Miami team in line to win 35 straight with barely any anxiety. Realistic goals, lad.
The second time I nearly fainted during the 2002 season was the following week in Champaign, a two-overtime angina festival. I was in the building for that one. This was a game Ohio State would have lost a year earlier, similar to the Penn State and Wisconsin squanderings – but this one worked out favorably and no one should ever discount how difficult it is to win in overtime on the road.
When Ohio State’s team rushed the field after the Illini ran out of chances it occurred to me that the Buckeyes had gotten a full complement of revenge from the previous season for the first time I could remember. They only had Michigan left. Oh God, is this going to be 1995 or 1996? There’s no third option, right?
The 1993 team reached Ann Arbor with no losses. They had a tie, which genuinely felt like a win because it was at Wisconsin – darling team of that season – and Marlon Kerner blocked a chippy field goal with time expiring to avoid taking the L. Michigan week felt incredible. Ohio State was undefeated! Big Daddy Wilkinson was unblockable!
They had this fight in them that hadn’t been seen previously, like they were sick of participating in the transition period from Earle and were ready to fulfill Coop’s promise. Anyway, Michigan blanked them, 28-0. Ohio State looked comprehensively uninspired for the only time that season. Great timing, fellas.
Two seasons later they were unblemished heading back to Ann Arbor. A novelty, like if 1993 was a no-hitter going into the 9th inning then 1995 was a perfect game. Eddie George was going to win the Heisman. Terry Glenn could have been a candidate on any other team. Bobby Hoying’s three-year journey to senior QB was now on immortality’s doorstep. Tshimanga Biakabutuka. I can spell it without looking it up.
A year later, undefeated again – and this time the perfect game would be completed in Columbus instead of Ann Arbor. That was the third and final time Coop would get a team to Michigan with a zero in the loss column. They lost all three of those games in different, excruciating ways.
Seven seasons later, Ohio State was 12-0 and Michigan was coming to town. They were barely surviving every week, including at Purdue and at Illinois. This isn’t inspiring, but having seen The Bottom we had no right to complain about 12-0 despite the lack of cosmetic appeal.
I thought about that during the Illinois game, like there’s no way they blow a run like this to Illinois, of all peasant program but then I remembered they blew a run like this to a Sparty team in 1998 that didn’t even reach bowl eligibility.
Poisonous thoughts trickling from the chewed-cuticles era while a perfectly calm and in-control Tressel team was focused on getting out of Champaign by making fewer mistakes and leaving no regrets. It worked. I nearly lost consciousness.
The third time I nearly fainted during the 2002 season was a week later when Will Smith recovered John Navarre’s fumble after he got sacked. They’re really going to do this. This is really going to happen.
The sound the stadium made when the ref signaled that it would be Ohio’s State’s ball was several decades of relief escaping the bodies of too many people who had experienced too much of The Bottom. I’ve never heard a sound like that before or since.
But then the Buckeyes gave the ball back to Michigan and Navarre began marching the Wolverines down the field with only a few seconds left. I was straddling scrimmage for the final play. One second left on the clock. We couldn’t get our clock operator to let the final second peel off the previous play? If Michigan scored here I was going to find that guy. Not really. Well, maybe.
Will Allen intercepted the final pass, Brent Musberger famously said, let’s party, Columbus (I had no idea, I was busy almost fainting in the stadium) and the Buckeyes were 13-0. An impossible record. An impossible season. Who even cares about the Fiesta Bowl. Ohio State doesn’t really win bowl games. This felt like a national title.
I have no memory of heading down to the field but I did snow angels on the 20-yard line. There was no snow on the ground. It made sense to me. I don’t think I was the only one.
During the Penn State game earlier that season when the Buckeyes couldn’t score an offensive touchdown but still won yet another game a Cooper-coached team would have lost, I decided this Ohio State team couldn’t lose. I booked a non-refundable flight to Phoenix and booked hotel rooms for the BCS championship game, in October.
I had compartmentalized this purchase until post-game beers in what used to be a parking lot across the street from the Varsity Club. The chatter was unified around pre-coping: Miami is going to beat the hell out of us and I don’t care. Two in a row over Michigan. 13-0. It’s gravy.
There were no more close calls that season. When Cie Grant threw Ken Dorsey into the turf and the 2nd overtime of the Fiesta Bowl concluded, I straight-up fainted. Every sad childhood Saturday, all of those disaster finales of the 1990s, decades worth of Why Do I Choose This Life all collapsed on my chest and put me to sleep.
When I regained consciousness there was a stage on the field. Old men were crying all around me.
Ohio State’s Troy Smith, 10, makes his run down the field as he is introduced during a ceremony for the seniors last game at the Ohio Stadium, November 18, 2006. (Dispatch photo by Neal C. Lauron)
This was the dawn of an era that fell short of its promise – it’s impossible to exceed Ohio State standards, which is why we’re so fucking miserable all the time – but still managed to be rewarding in a way nobody could have possibly imagined during the previous decade.
We just wanted Ohio State to beat Michigan once, let alone twice. That’s it. Oh, a natty?
The Teflon Tressel whispers began circulating in the early dawn of the pageviews era when companies like Google and Amazon were trying to figure out how to make the Internet profitable. ESPN published the same article in 2003 when Clarett was earning his way out of student-athlete eligibility and then again during Tatgate. Was it an anti-OSU agenda, or all about the clicks?
Friends, they’re the same thing. Ohio State is a clicks fountain. The reason there are so many dedicated sites, social media accounts and shows about the Buckeyes is because they get clicked on, followed and listened to. The Buckeyes being good is good for Ohio State fans. The Buckeyes losing or screwing up is good for everyone else.
I was writing about Ohio State football. The more people clicked on articles, the more ad revenue the site could command. Site loyalty created communities. Consumer blocs. Buyers and proponents. When I started writing for Bucknuts in the 1990s it looked like we had designed a Microsoft Word document with two colors and web-enabled it. Eleven Warriors didn’t look that much different when it launched.
The Ohio State decade began with an 8-4 record and a fired coach, then the greatest 7-5 season any of us could remember on account of one game, then the 14-0 undisputed, undefeated national champions. Couldn’t wait to see how they would improve on that.
They didn’t. Coop’s players, specifically the guys he recruited in his twilight after seeing Florida State’s Andre Wadsworth nearly murder Joe Germaine in the Fiesta Bowl ran out of eligibility. The 2003, 2004 and 2005 seasons were the transition into a fully-operational Tressel team without any of Coop’s invaluable refugees.
That 2003 loss in Ann Arbor could have tipped things level, but what was the most shocking edition of The Game right up until 2022 when Michigan was mimicking Ohio State’s play calls from the opening drive on took place in 2004, and the hot take I’ll bury in the depths of this screed is that it’s the second-most important win of Tressel’s career. The one they played 310 days after he gave the 310 Days Speech is first.
Three seasons removed from Tempe, they appeared to have that sense of inevitability again. The Texas game plan in 2005 should have worked; your wide-open starting tight end needs to catch a pass in the end zone that hits him in the chest. Their covered wide receiver made an NFL catch, and the rest is details.
We’ll know if Kyle McCord saved Ohio State football from a prolonged version of its bottom in a few months, but there’s a universe where Ryan Hamby solidifies Justin Zwick as Ohio State’s starting quarterback for at least a few more games. They had Texas beaten and let them off the hook.
They didn’t even try to beat Penn State in that first-ever White Out. Troy Smith, Santonio Holmes and Ted Ginn were set up to fail that whole evening. The 2005 Penn State game, the 2007 BCS Title against LSU when Beanie Wells was treated like a decoy instead of riding him in traditional Tresselball fashion to a Tresselball victory.
Two game plans in ten seasons that I hated. No coach will ever top that for me. Impossible.
And that includes the worst loss in program history, the Glendale Nightmare. The opening kickoff. The injury. The exposure of both offensive tackles. Urban Meyer doing what no one else thought of and picking on the Buckeyes’ safeties, which were bad all year.
TBDBITL reenacting the sinking of Titanic at halftime. Maybe it was the cartoonishness of it all, but only going 2-1 in three 1 vs. 2 games in a single season isn’t terrible, that final game was. They probably felt invincible once Michigan was beaten and Florida was trending in another direction. I was never mad. Just sad.
Six weeks of 1 vs. 2 hype with nothing standing between either Ohio State or Michigan made for incredible theater and unsustainable emotion. Bo Schembechler literally died during game week. The question isn’t does Ohio State win if Ginn doesn’t get hurt on the same play. The question is does Michigan beat Florida if they survive Ohio State and the answer is absolutely not.
Florida and USC were both going to eat their opponents. Neither program was surviving that hype.
I’m grateful I was alive to experience 2007, the best season any sport has had in my lifetime – and by best I mean if it was a television show, the writers would have been told to come up with something more realistic.
The offseason coming off of 41-14 was unbearably long, so losing to Illinois on Senior Day again as the sole blemish felt overdue. The Buckeyes hadn’t lost a conference game since that White Out over two years earlier.
Granted, if there was replay in 2007 Illinois would have lost. We have to assume the 2019 Fiesta Bowl replay booth would not have been involved.
Austin Spitler missed the ball along with a chance to spin the 2007 BCS Title Game in Ohio State’s favor.
I sat in the end zone in Ann Arbor the following week to see if my team could do what Appalachian State had pulled off a couple of months earlier, and would you believe they did it by deploying a game plan which would have definitely beaten LSU a month later. I’ll never get over that.
A lot has been made of the moment Austin Spitler found the only way out of 100 simulations to not block an LSU punt for an Ohio State touchdown and completely spin the trajectory of that game in the Buckeyes’ direction. I wonder if Tressel would have fed Beanie following that imaginary moment, like we’ve got this now and I can play to my tendencies.
I think it would have been the Beanie show and he would have gotten ten more carries than he got, which sounds extreme until you peel back the layers of earth which settled on top of that box score. I think the Glendale Massacre may have poisoned the game plan, and Tressel wanted this quarterback to have the chance to perform in a manner his Heisman winner – who ran for his life throughout that game – did not.
The result was an only slightly-less violent version of Smith running for his life, and Beanie not running nearly enough for Ohio State to keep the game in their control – especially after what should have been a turning point simply extended an LSU drive.
TRESSELBALL vs. NOT-TRESSELBALL
GAME
CARRIES
YDS
AVG
TD
RESULT
BEANIE @ MICHIGAN, 2007
39
222
5.7
2
W
BEANIE vs. LSU, 2008
20
146
7.3
1
L
Giving Beanie half the touches he got in Ann Arbor and putting the game on Boeckman’s shoulders was a devastating strategic error. Sixteen years later Ohio State would again lean on an extremely limited quarterback, but this is an era of throwing the football like Columbus has never seen.
Run the Damn Ball never felt more obvious in 2007. What a moment to abandon Tresselball.
And what a moment to experience. Roses started showing up on the Ohio State sideline as the game in Ann Arbor wound down, and players had them in their mouths as the clock struck zero. Made sense. They had essentially forfeited their right to return to the BCS title – to the relief of the whole country which had seen the Glendale Massacre – and the Rose Bowl felt like more than a decent rebound.
Pasadena had to be where they were going. They slipped from no.1 all the way to no.7 after the Illinois loss and only had one game left to play. Getting into the top two and gaining an invite to the Sugar Bowl was so impossible that it wasn’t worth agonizing over. After they beat Michigan, the Buckeyes were still no.5.
They had nothing to do except wait for the formal invitation from the Rose Bowl. That’s fine.
Every team ranked above Ohio State lost while the Buckeyes were sidelined. They didn’t just fail up to the top two, the Buckeyes finished the regular season as the BCS no.1 team, having lost at home to Illinois in their last home game. If you cannot appreciate how funny that is, this sport played by giant teenagers probably isn’t for you.
If Ohio State had beaten two-loss LSU, a massively flawed team you simply had to wear down instead of giving them free shots, I would have started buying into the whole Luckeyes thing that gained traction during a decade where they telegraphed their intentions and won anyway.
They would have won with a defense that carried, like, five playable defensive linemen. Nader Abdullah was an enigma. Dexter Larimore was a wrestler. Vern Gholston was an alien. Alex Barrow started the BCS Title game knowing he was going to quit football. Todd Denlinger and Doug Worthington rotated in. Little bit of freshman Cam Heyward, but not a lot.
Would you take that starting line over Mitchell Melton, Jason Moore, Tywone Malone and Edrick Houston? Because that’s probably Ohio State’s 3rd string next month and I would take them over what the Buckeyes trotted out in the Superdome 17 years ago.
Ohio State Buckeyes quarterback Terrelle Pryor (2) slips around the Arkansas Razorbacks defense during first half of the Sugar Bowl at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans, January 4, 2011. (Dispatch photo by Neal C. Lauron)Â
We’re not talking about leather helmet-era comparisons which will never make sense. This was recent Ohio State football in an era where the Buckeyes were either playing for BCS titles or playing and mostly winning BCS bowl games.
Seven years into the Tressel Era the whole country knew exactly what to expect out of the Buckeyes. They’d probably win the conference. The team would do no worse than a BCS doorstep bowl, if not the title game. Their games would do huge numbers, but not on account of entertainment – the brand did most of the work.
And they’d beat Michigan. It was uncomplicated and relatively less anxious. Tressel beat cresting Lloyd Carr, late-stage LLoyd Carr and Rich Rodriguez which is to say he got Michigan’s best, Michigan’s transitions and Michigan’s low point. That’s an easy way to dismiss his record because it avoids the subtext: How do you think Michigan got that way?
The two programs are mirror images of each other because the one on the north side was reinvented 55 years ago by a guy with five sets of Gold Pants. Ohio State’s transition from regional to national program compromised the rivalry game, but the Buckeyes have had that national branding ever since and it wouldn’t have happened without Coop.
Michigan’s clawback benefited the most from Covid and whatever you choose to believe happened that took Jim Harbaugh from dead man walking to national championship. During the Tressel Era they weren’t lucky enough to get a global pandemic and made what appeared to be a terrific hire. Rodriguez was an is one of the game’s great innovators.
He just happened to show up for Ohio State’s 2008-2010 teams, which blew a Fiesta Bowl, won a Rose Bowl and won a Sugar Bowl on the strength of a quarterback who was built in a lab to run Rodgriguez’s offense. Tressel getting Terrelle Pryor to Ohio State instead of his natural landing spot in Ann Arbor was without peer his most important recruiting win.
Penn State would have been a good fit as well, but this was the era where Joe Paterno refused to leave State College for recruiting and required players who just wanted to be Nittany Lions to come see him on campus. My first bout with the elderly refusing to let go of big jobs hit me during the Tressel era, watching Paterno hold the program hostage for his own benefit.
I figured if he was ever separated from the job he would decline quickly and pass away, which was why he was using Penn State as long as possible. Either way, Pryor was a Buckeye playing in a system that left itself vulnerable to him just saving the offense from itself.
So Ohio State got Pryor with its defensive culture, recruiting and philosophy totally locked in. Tressel special teams were always above-board serviceable, not the crippling preventable embarrassment they’ve been the past three seasons being led by a guy who quite literally did not appear to understand the basic rules of football.
Special teams and referees are very similar to each other – they’re operating as you want them to when you don’t notice them or they’re performing admirably with elevated difficulty. Tresselball was willing to sacrifice cosmetic football elements for the stuff that really mattered. If you’ve made it thus far, I appreciate your patience – Parker Fleming Easter Eggs are required until the unit he destroyed is serviceable again.
Pryor was supposed to be coached by Joe Daniels, who transformed Troy Smith from Ohio State Kick Returner and the last guy to commit to his recruiting class to a player whose name and number are permanently hanging in the north end zone. Pryor never got that coaching; he would have to settle for Tressel. It’s not terribly dissimilar to the permanent arrangement Ryan Day has with his quarterbacks.
Day never had a Joe Daniels, thought he may have one with his mentor now on the payroll, disgusted with what’s happened to the head coach job description he carried for nearly two decades and now happy to just coach football again. Pryor had Tressel and his video coordinator as an assistant, when Tressel was forced into his own job description.
The first time I questioned Nick Siciliano’s credentials for handling what Tressel himself called the most important job in the state of Ohio with governor being second I got a tap on the shoulder about Daniels’ health, his health insurance and why his position was being left open.
The short explanation is Jim Tressel is one of the best human beings to ever grace this planet. Ohio State football was less important to him than it was to most of us dead-enders. His character is an aspiration, as it was when he told six Black kids from largely disadvantaged upbringings to stop taking advantage of their Name, Image and Likeness in 2010. He then “failed” to tell the NCAA about it.
Pryor was supposed to be coached by Joe Daniels, who transformed Troy Smith from Ohio State Kick Returner and the last guy to commit to his recruiting class to a player whose name and number are permanently hanging in the north end zone
Pryor played behind an offensive line with about 40% of the depth the current OSU unit has. Jim Bollman’s philosophy was players with the fluidity to slide over from tackle to guard, from guard to center, from right to left – and that resulted in those dudes backing up each other on the depth chart.
Pryor, Smith before him and Craig Krenzel before him needed their legs to survive. Boeckman’s limitations doomed him from the outset and the Buckeyes still got to the BCS title game because everything else in the Tresselball machinery was functioning properly. I think about that heading into the 2024 season. Will this team of all-stars and veteran, reliable game changers be enough to overcome what might be another clunky offensive line?
My cynicism says no, but then I see how much time Tressel has spent with Day this offseason. Day finally did a lot of the things the most vocal dead-enders among us have been begging for since his ascension – more focus on defensive recruiting, eliminating dead weight friendly faces on the staff, elevating the doers and delegating the assignments he micromanages (though we’ll have to see what happens when the games start).
Tressel surrounded himself with trusted agents and delegated tasks almost as if he were a robot. Day wears his emotions on his sleeve and face, reminiscent of Cooper, Bruce and Hayes. Tressel dressed like a professor and conducted himself like one, rarely breaking from stoicism.
The final three seasons of Tresselball featured one player’s brilliance more than in any other segment of the decade. Clarett was too unavailable to make Ohio State’s performance about him, though when he played his presence was impossible to discount. Tresselball still made Krenzel the leading ball carrier against the Hurricanes. That was head coach’s brilliance on display. Krenzel was just a tool for it.
When Tatgate went down, he became a villain for the press in the dumbest possible way. Gregg Doyel asked Luke Fickell if he had asked players to stay clear of Tressel and Luke looked at him like he had three heads. Are you confusing him with Jerry Sandusky? What are we doing here? He didn’t say that.
The way it ended was a blip in the legacy, in spite of how endless 2011 felt at the time. Tressel’s effect on Ohio State football and all of the lives that came into the program is still present. Day didn’t create this brotherhood culture, and neither did Urban.
The program has always had strong elements of this because of how the state treats this team, but Tressel put structure around it. He made it meaningful, sustainable and transferrable to whomever inherited his desk, which in his case was a Cooper-era legend, then an Earle acolyte followed by one of his own acolytes.
We don’t know what The Bottom looks like because Tressel arrived at the most opportune time for The Bottom to happen, and two years later the team went 14-0 while Michigan spent the first of its two decades in hell.
Without stepping on our upcoming 2024 preview, I think if the Buckeyes are going to get out what they’ve gotten themselves into it will be impossible to treat those visits between Tressel and Day as insignificant reasons. No coach has Gotten It more than him while simultaneously being beloved by players, subordinates and fans alike.
We didn’t realize how badly we needed him when he arrived in 2001. If you look closely at what Ohio State has now, it’s far better-equipped than when he inherited. It’s just missing the right sideline machinery and orchestration.
Day can’t emulate Tresselball, but he can learn what it is to orchestrate efficiently and prioritize what matters. That means deprioritizing nonsense like proving a point to Harbaugh one or two seasons too late.
I’m grateful to have never seen The Bottom without context. I thought it would be 2011 and thereafter, but the foundation Tressel left was too strong. Ohio State won a national title with a third-string quarterback and 82 total scholarships. You win with culture, talent and infrastructure. Tressel coached for a decade and built a 50-year sustainable machine out of what he inherited.
He said we’d be proud in 310 days. It felt audacious, but he was being conservative. How appropriate.
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Publish date : 2024-07-27 13:15:00
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