CANTON — The way Jim Tressel sees it, there are three reasons why Ohio State is annually one of the top five football teams in the country — and Buckeye fans can thank Stark County for the first one.
“No. 1, when Paul Brown became the head coach (in 1941), all of a sudden, the players in Ohio started selecting Ohio State much of the time above the rest,” said Tressel, who went 106-22 with the Buckeyes from 2001-10. “Prior to that, they didn’t. Prior to that, they would go to Notre Dame or Michigan or Purdue or Wisconsin or Penn State. So Paul Brown really gave us our first bit of credibility.”
The second reason is that the Buckeyes poured millions of dollars into their facilities in the 1990s, allowing them to recruit
against any program in the country.
“When Coach (John) Cooper was there, he and (athletic director) Andy Geiger decided, ‘You know what? I’m not sure Ohio State knows how good they can be,’” Tressel said.
The third reason is OSU stopped losing some of its best players to Michigan, a trend that had haunted the Buckeyes during the 1990s when Cleveland’s Desmond Howard and Fremont’s Charles Woodson won Heisman Trophies for the Wolverines.
“We closed the door in 2002, and Michigan no longer could get good players here,” Tressel said. “That door closed and has not even cracked open since then.
“As I look at my knowledge of Ohio State, without any one of those three … who knows how quickly we would have gotten where we are? I’m not sure we would have been enjoying the times that we’ve been enjoying this century.”
Tressel joined Cooper on Sunday night for “Coaching Legends presented by the Waikem Auto Family” — an hour-long question-and-answer session in front of several hundred Buckeye fans at the Canton Palace Theatre. Tressel, whose father Lee coached Massillon in 1956 and 1957, earned legendary status with the Buckeyes by going 8-1 against Michigan and winning the 2002 national championship.
Cooper, meanwhile, went 2-10-1 against OSU’s arch-rivals and 3-8 in bowl games, two marks that overshadow his 111-43-4 record in Columbus.
“My record against Michigan is not very damn good. As a matter of fact, it’s awful,” Cooper said, drawing laughter. “But I don’t think I ever lost to a bad Michigan team. … That program has been down the last few years. They’re not a very good team right now, if you ask me. But they’ll be back.”
Tressel agreed, saying the Wolverines began to decline during his tenure.
“All 13 years Coach Cooper was there, Michigan was Michigan,” Tressel said. “Our first six or seven years, Michigan was Michigan. Really, our last three or four years (it wasn’t).”
The Wolverines’ struggles, coupled with the Big Ten adding a conference championship game, have taken some of the luster out of the rivalry, Tressel said.
“It’s meant so much in history and I think Michigan needs to get a little better so it doesn’t go too long before we lose a generation understanding” the rivalry’s importance, Tressel said. “What have they won, twice this century?”
Here are some other highlights from the event:
Cooper, on how he became a coach:
“I grew up in the hills of east Tennessee,” he said. “I jokingly tell people I was born so far out in the country that you had to come toward town to find a place to go hunting. Where I came from, whatever job you could get out of high school, that’s basically what you did the rest of your life. So one day, I was going through my coach’s office and the coach had a sporting goods salesman in the office. He introduced me to this salesman and said, ‘John is my quarterback. Someday he would make a good coach.’ From that day on, all John Cooper ever wanted to do was coach football.”
Tressel, on why so many football coaches come from Ohio:
“The game of football in Ohio from way back is just part of the culture, the fabric of the state,” said Tressel, who was born in Mentor and spent most of his childhood in Berea. “I think in large part that we were a state that grew with the industrial revolution … and many of them moved from outside of this country and they moved into these communities and the communities became bigger than life. And what the communities loved was football.
“I think the young people got so interested because it was so important to the community. Then you have the good fortune of having someone grow up in Stark County like Paul Brown. Those of us growing up in Ohio got to be around the impact of football and one thing leads to another and we spread out all over the nation.”
On college football having more than 40 bowl games each year:
“I think we have too many,” Cooper said. “A bowl game is a reward for a great season, or a good season. Going 5-7 or even 6-6 at most places is not a good year. Hell, I got fired for going 8-3 and we did go to a bowl game.”
Added Tressel, “Especially with the fact that we now have a playoff and so much glamour put on that playoff. I think back when maybe there were a dozen bowl games, it still was pretty darn special because it was the top 25 or so teams in the country. … I’d like to think what you might want to try to consider is maybe go to a 16-team playoff and forget the rest of those bowls. Or maybe go to a 24-team playoff.”
Tressel, on upsetting Miami in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl:
“We had 43 days (between the Michigan game and the Miami game) for America to tell Miami they were unbeatable and to tell us that we couldn’t beat them,” he said. “That’s a great advantage. We knew how good Miami was, but I’m not sure they knew how good we had become.
“The game itself is one of the great ones. If you took the two team photos, 87 of the people were in the NFL at one point. Those were two talented groups and it was a wild football game.”
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