Thirty Years Ago Against Iowa – Ohio State Buckeyes
11/12/1998 12:00:00 AM | Football
November 12, 1998
COLUMBUS, Ohio –
Ohio State ’68
All The Way To The Top
by Steve Greenberg and Larry Zelina
“Ohio State ’68: All the Way to the Top” will be released in mid-September. Reserve your copy now by calling 1-800-327-5557.
November 6, 1968
Ohio State 33, Iowa 27
Iowa Stadium, Iowa City, Iowa
Book it: Michigan at Ohio State for the Big Ten Conference championship and a trip to the Rose Bowl.
OSU rated No. 2 and winning its eighth game of the season and twelfth in a row over two seasons, had its hands full this day.
The host Hawkeyes, even after trailing 19-0, found a way to answer OSU in the second half. They scored twenty-one fourth-quarter points, the last with nine seconds left. OSU pounced on a second-consecutive, on-side kick and ran out the clock.
Finally, it was time to begin thinking about the game with Michigan.
But for this day, the headlines belonged, for the most part to the rushing attack. Out of the Tight-T formation, fullback Jim Otis romped for a career-best 166 yards and two touchdowns.
“Maybe we’re not running him enough,” Coach Woody Hayes said of the junior bruiser.
Rex Kern went all the way at quarterback, steering the Buckeyes to a slight 420-387 margin in total yards. Support came from halfback John Brockington (10 carries for 62 yards, including a 22-yard touchdown dash) and wingback Larry Zelina (six carries for 50 yards and four receptions for 67 yards).
The OSU defense bottled up Iowa’s sensational running back, Ed Podolak, limiting him to 45 yards on 15 carries. But the concerted effort to stop Podolak resulted in the Hawkeyes’ quarterbacks having a good day. Larry Lawrence was 13-of-20 for 178 yards and an interception and Mike Cilek was 7-of-11 for 68 yards and an interception. Iowa coach Ray Nagel was effusive in his praise of Ohio State.
“They’re a fine, fine football team,” he said.
“There’s no doubt about that. Gosh, I’m impressed with (Otis). He’s a fine, fine runner. Ohio State is strong on offense and defense, but I would say their greatest strength is on defense.” Said Hayes of the late Iowa scoring barrage: “I would rather be in the position of playing stay-ahead football instead of catch-up football. Given a choice, I would always prefer the former.
“It wasn’t easy to stay ahead of an explosive team like Iowa. We had that twelve-point lead at halftime, and in the second half managed to stay that much ahead of them … right up to the end.”
And since the final score is all that counts, there’s ample reason to rejoice over the onset of Michigan Week.
The post-game huddle
Stillwagon: I actually remember …
Zelina: Sullivan?
Stillwagon: Yeah, Tim Sullivan. He got in a motorcycle wreck the next year and they had to take half his foot off. But he was tough … and they started running up the middle. And who was that guy, Niland? He used to play for Dallas? He was over there. I came out and my face was all bloody, and someone on the sideline said to me, “Oh, my God. You should see your face.” I said, “Why?” He said, “It’s all bloody. I don’t know if I want to get into this stuff!” So Billy (Urbanik) gets in and we take Sullivan-there were two or three of us who took him into the other side-and we were getting up, and he gets up and hits Mark Stier. And Billy goes up to him and says, “Don’t you ever hit my man! I mean it!” and he kicks him in the head. … That was a heckuva game, wasn’t it?
Zelina, Nick Roman (in unison): It sure was.
Jim Roman: They told us not to take our helmets off.
Stillwagon: Oh, yeah, I forgot about that …
Polaski: Iowa City was one of the worst places we played. … This was one where they spat on you when you come out of the tunnel. They poured Cokes on you. You were told to put your helmet on when you came out of the locker room. The stairways came down, and they were really steep; you had to worry about getting hurt coming down the steps to get to the field.
Stillwagon: That’s when the kid said-when Woody Hayes was giving his (pre-game) speech-and the kid comes in and says, “Wait a minute.” Woody says, “What the heck do you want?” And the kid says, “I’ve gotta tell you one thing. Tell your team to keep their helmets on, because people will drop stuff on them.” And (Woody) heard that and went back into his speech. We (the Super Sophs) only played out there one time, didn’t we?
Zelina: Yeah, just once.
Muhlbach: You guys remember this? Woody sent the team out. And then Woody came out on the field by himself, because he loved it when they booed him. I could never understand why he wouldn’t come out with everybody else-at least to protect himself. But after years of looking back and knowing the way he was, when he came out on the field and everybody was booing, he loved it.
Stillwagon: That’s when McCullough says (going into the southern accent), “Jest rim-im-ber, bo-ahs. They laid out all week now, and they started packin’ the dogs and the girls and the farm stuff so that when they git to the game, ever’body would be here.”
Muhlbach: Do you guys remember (equipment manager John) Bozick? This was HIS team, the Iowa Hawkeyes. He always did something a little special during Iowa week.
Stillwagon: I think every game was Homecoming (in the minds of the opponents). Every game was The Game, and when you got by that then you started all over again. That year, what I remember the most was that there was never a breathing time. We’d win one game … well we did slip through …
Zelina: You look at the scores and there was a lot of close games.
Stillwagon: We were in passing gear a lot, so …
Polaski: And with McCullough being defensive coordinator, it was a deal where no matter what we did the week before we didn’t play “well enough, not as well as we should.” They always beat into your head (that) there was room for improvement and they always did a great job of selling the next opponent. There was never walking on the field feeling that you were gonna steamroll somebody because we were obviously better than they were, but you felt like you had to play every week and we were always prepared. I’ll go back to what Jim said earlier: Whether we liked Lou or not, the man prepared us. We never set foot on the field during that period of time that we weren’t prepared for what the other team was gonna show us. They never surprised us by giving us something we hadn’t seen. … (Getting back to the Iowa game, especially the post-game:) It was nice to be warm and dry …
Muhlbach: It was miserable, miserable weather to play a football game in.
Zelina: This was a tough game in bad weather. They scored twenty-seven points.
Tatum: They did that late in the game with passing. They brought in another QB by the name of Larry Lawrence. He came in and was throwing passes all over the place. Got them back in the game. I don’t think we were looking beyond this game. I think we were too keyed up to stop Podolak. And I think once we got him stopped we might have kind of relaxed a little bit. And we weren’t prepared to stop the passing game.
Zelina: Do you think we looked past Iowa with Michigan coming up?
Otis: No. You’re only looking at the score, because we beat the crap out of Iowa. The only thing that Iowa did was pass at the end of the game. The only place we bent a little bit that game was pass defense. And they made the game closer than it was. I don’t know what Podolak had that game, but it wasn’t much.
Polaski: Like I said, their fans were downright nasty. I can remember being on the sideline when I was out of the rotation and having somebody actually throw something at me and hit me with it and telling me, “Polaski, 15, YOU! Get down! I paid for these seats and I didn’t pay to look at the back of your head.” I mean, we were that close to them …
Zelina: Yeah, that was a terrible place to play.
Polaski: They were just ugly.
Stillwagon: That game was a big game. Podolak had just set the record that stood for many years. After the game …
Zelina: I don’t remember anything from after the game until we got back to practice on Monday (the first official day of Michigan Week.)
SCORING
Ohio State 6 6 14 7 – 33 Iowa 0 0 6 21 – 27
OSU – Otis, 7-yard run (kick failed). OSU- Kern, 3-yard run (pass failed). OSU – Otis, 1-yard run (Roman kick). IOWA – Lawrence, 1-yard run (kick failed). OSU – Kern, 1-yard run (Zelina kick). IOWA – Podolak, 3-yard run (Melendez kick). OSU – Brockington, 22-yard run (Roman kick). IOWA – Manning, 12-yard pass from Lawrence (Melendez kick). IOWA – Reardon, 9-yard pass from Lawrence (Melendez kick). Attendance – 44,131
TEAM STATISTICS
OSU IOWA First downs 22 23 Rushing 71-337 45-141 Passing 5-12-83-2 20-32-246-2 Total yards 420 387 Punts-avg. 5-37.8 6-42.3 Punt returns 3-17 2-40 Kickoff returns 5-34 5-49 Int. returns 2-17 2-9 Fumbles-lost 0-0 1-1 Penalty yards 29 45
