This is the third installment of our gay traipse through recent history, when cheap gas was all the rage, wearing a fanny pack screamed of sex appeal, and Bucknuts.com was still potty training. Two weeks ago we visited the early-mid nineties, last week we checked out the last of the nationally intriguing John Cooper years, and that leads us to this week’s segment, which is sort of like slowing down to look at a car accident.
This was the little stretch where the program unfortunately began to rot from the inside out and the outside in at the same time. Players were losing eligibility as if it were a fashion trend; disposition issues began to sprout like weeds and ten-win seasons were solidly an element of the past. Before this turns into an all-out character assassination on two rosters full of Buckeyes, including a few of whom eventually hoisted the precious glass testicle above their heads in Tempe, lets stop, pause and take a breath to add some context: The program just gone through a period where it had lost a mere 12 games in five seasons while finishing first or second in the conference in each year. Every passing season brought a new exodus of players with remaining eligibility choosing to forgo college for the riches, rigors and often times practice squads of the NFL. A dip in quality was inevitable. That being said, when your team sucks and you’re not used to it, football is excruciatingly painful even for those not getting hit.
1999: The most popular quarterback since Rex Kern was gone, as were most everybody that he handed the ball off or threw to. The defense brought unfamiliar names and numbers to commit to memory. The Buckeyes were a consensus top 15 preseason pick on the assumption that their footballing machine was functioning at a high enough level to operate effectively even without the usual recognizable cogs, and was again ready to dispatch teams not named Michigan or Michigan Something with boring regularity. The first sign of trouble came before the team even reported for Fall practice, with a modern day SEC-like six incoming freshmen failing to gain eligibility for the season, most of whom would ultimately never make it to Ohio State. After several years of defending the team’s graduation rate, the dumb jock caricature that the media had painted over the program and the outing of courses like Ballroom Dancing, AIDS Awareness and Golf as an eligibility-enabling summer course load, losing a quarter of the “reloadees” to grades was, at kindest, alarming to the fans.
The season of renewed promise began in the New Jersey Meadowlands against the Miami Hurricanes, a team that had dominated the 1980s with some of the most exciting, flamboyant and well-paid collegians that the sport had ever seen. However, all of that cheaty stuff had caught up with The U (as bad as Troy Smith’s $500 handshake was, the Canes of the early nineties were proven to have taken $619,500 more than that). As a result, during the Buckeyes’ renaissance of the 1990s, the Canes were toiling in football obscurity. Their probation finally lifted, they looked like they were on the verge of coming back to the world of nationally televised football.
Both teams took the field for the Kickoff Classic (RIP) with the Buckeyes playing the favorite. Sixty minutes of football game later, it was obvious to anyone with even a remedial understanding of the sport that this team was not Joe Germaine’s, Stanley Jackson’s, Bobby Hoying’s or even Brett Powers’ Buckeyes. They were…slow. Slow to react, slow to develop plays, slow to get to the point of attack, slow to get from point A to point B or to any other point. Miami would not truly be great for another couple of years, but Ohio State made them look like contenders that August afternoon. The same names that had been fawned over by witnesses at practice looked absolutely lost in their first real game. The quarterbacking that day – and for just about every game that season and the next – would be comparable to the worst day of quarterbacking from all of the previous five seasons. The Buckeyes lost to the Hurricanes 24-12; the freshmen on both teams heading in opposite directions would not see each other again until their final collegiate game, when once again they’d be at a neutral site and their programs were again heading in opposite directions, very quickly.
At 0-1, the Buckeyes were in unfamiliar territory, with a losing record at any point in the season for the first time in 11 years. The team rebounded by beating a bad UCLA team at the home night opener and then sluggishly overpowering the usual in-state layups before getting run over by Ron Dayne in what is still the most helpless that an Ohio State team has looked at home in decades. Every game awash in bad execution, the Buckeyes returned to Michigan State to enact revenge on the previous year’s nightmare and promptly laid down, losing 22-7 as players fought and screamed at each other on the sideline. The season, like so many others – great or good – before it, ended with two losses. This time however, they were to Michigan and Illinois, as the Buckeyes failed to reach bowl eligibility for only the second time in the Cooper era, and Ohio State exited the 1900s with a whimper.
2000: Now that’s more like it. The Buckeyes shot out of the gate, tearing apart David Carr’s Fresno State team to start the season and then going to Arizona and beating the Wildcats before coming back to beat another in-state patsy (only one on the schedule that year? But how did the university make any money?!) before completely dismantling Penn State in a dominating game marked by the unfortunate paralyzation of Adam Taliaferro. It seemed clear at this point in 2000 that 1999 was merely a palate-cleansing hiccup, separating one era of Buckeye dominance from the other. Ohio State was ranked fifth in the country after beating up on the Badgers in Madison and came home to play Minnesota for homecoming.
The Gophers scored on six consecutive first-half drives while the Buckeyes played as if they had collectively taken a time machine all the way back to…the previous year. Glen Mason took a knee for the entire second half and Ohio State found itself shockingly losing to yet another U of M. With anemic offensive play calling, an iffy back seven and regularly occurring personal foul and unsportsmanlike conduct penalties (you think five against LSU was a lot? The Buckeyes had that many in one quarter against Iowa) these Buckeyes obviously had some degree of talent but barely played anything resembling inspiring football. Ohio State was the least interesting, most erratic two-loss team in the country going into the Michigan game, where they promptly got lit up by Drew Henson, David Terrell and Anthony Thomas, sending them to the Outback Bowl on New Year’s Day on the strength of Associate AD Archie Griffin’s negotiation (see: begging, pleading) with the bowl honchos. The opponent: SEC bottom feeder South Carolina. Had any of the players shown up for the game without hangovers, it might have been interesting. It was not.
The play of the team that morning in Tampa, coupled with the accumulating stench of rotting character throughout the program, as well as those ten inconvenient losses to Michigan in 13 tries resulted in Cooper’s firing. Coop’s sudden dismissal begat a coaching search that rocked the Buckeye nation, which resulted in the dawning of the current era.
Back in 2001, Ohio State hiring Jim Tressel from the I-AA coaching ranks was seen as a “reach” in some circles. Conversely, four years ago Notre Dame gave its atrophied football program to someone who had never played college football or been a head coach, yet he was deemed a coaching genius by the media upon his hiring. Since that worked out so well for the Irish, they just went ahead and hired a guy who has no prior experience as an athletic director to be their athletic director. The guy Ohio State hired after the 2000 season had extensive head coaching experience and had been the school’s athletic director. For the Buckeyes, and their “reach” it has gone pretty well thus far.
Ramzy
Painfully long off-season Youtube video of the week: The Bassist for Chiliwack: Buckeye Fan
