5 Years of Champions – Ohio State Buckeyes
9/23/2006 12:00:00 AM | Football
Sept. 23, 2006
By Tim Stried
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A shrill ring pierced the early morning darkness and the veteran coach awoke swiftly. With one blink he shook off the affects of a night’s sleep and was ready for the day with the kind of energy one gets from the first day at a new job.
Only his job was as the head football coach at The Ohio State University.
He picked up the telephone, not quite sure what duty might present itself to the new leader of one of the most storied programs in all of college football.
“Good morning Mr. Tressel,” the familiar but impersonal voice said from the other end of the connection. “This is the front desk with your 6 a.m. wake-up call.”
And so it went for Tressel, who, for the first six weeks of his coaching tenure at Ohio State, resided at the Holiday Inn on Lane Avenue. He was a block away from where he would go to work everyday – The Woody Hayes Athletic Center – as well as the edifice he grew up dreaming about – Ohio Stadium.
Those six weeks at the Holiday Inn went quickly enough and, just the same, so did his first five years “in office.” Last January when he ended his first five years, one might have guessed it was only natural for a time for reflecting. Though it might have been for some, it was not for Tressel.
“No, not in my mind anyway,” Tressel said when asked if he had a five-year plan in mind when he began his work at Ohio State in January 2001. “I signed a five-year contract, though, so there might have been a five-year plan in the eyes of the university, but in our eyes it was just day to day.” Therein lies the method to his madness – focus on the daily details – that in the last five years has produced a period of success at Ohio State that ranks among the best in the program history. The Buckeyes won 50 games during Tressel’s first five years, the most in any five-year period in the 116 years of OSU football.
“We had to focus on each day,” Tressel said about his first few weeks on the job. “Our goal was to get as good as we could get everyday at everything, whether it was academics, football, strength and conditioning or being involved in the community. In that moment we were just thinking about getting better.”
It was a process that, by design, began on day-one, Jan. 18, 2001, to be exact. That day Tressel drove to Columbus from Youngstown, Ohio, home of Youngstown State University, where he had just spent the last 15 years building a dynasty I-AA program that had won four national championships and been to the playoffs 10 times.
It was the day he was announced as Ohio State’s 22nd head football coach and later addressed Buckeye fans at a men’s basketball game, proclaiming in now legendary style OSU fans would be “proud of our young people in the classroom, in the community, and most especially in 310 days in Ann Arbor, Mich., on the football field.”
The cheers inside Value City Arena were thunderous, but nothing like what Buckeye fans would bellow when the Buckeyes upset No. 11 Michigan that season, 26-20. Nor like how Ohio Stadium would roar when Ohio State won 14-9 in 2002 to win the Big Ten and earn a trip to the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl for a showdown with No. 1 Miami to play for the National Championship. Insert highlight tape here.
And the winning did not stop. The Buckeyes won 37-21 in 2004 over that “team up north” and 25-21 in the final moments of the 2005 game at Michigan, giving Ohio State a share of the program’s 30th Big Ten championship.
A promise given that cold, January night, which actually was not so much a promise as it was just an honest commitment. An easy one, at that, because it is the only method Tressel has known. Like an elementary teacher advocates, “if you never lie, you never have to try to remember what you said.”
Truth be told, in December 2000, Tressel was not thinking about beating Michigan, or anyone else on Ohio State’s 2001 schedule, at all.
“I was pretty engrossed in my own team and didn’t have much time to follow the Buckeyes,” Tressel said. “But I lived in Ohio, so I knew the scores and so forth and I would always catch the bowl game because even if we were in the playoffs we were done by then.”
It just so happened Youngstown State’s playoff run ended a bit earlier than normal that 2000 season.
“The thing I remember about December 2000 was being disappointed we had been knocked out of the playoffs,” Tressel said. “It was my seventh year as athletics director and head football coach and I was really soul searching if that was the fairest thing to the football program. Perhaps I wasn’t giving the team 100 percent. There are only so many hours in the day.”
Meanwhile, 1,100 miles away in Tampa, Fla., the Buckeyes were handed a 24-7 loss by South Carolina in the Outback Bowl, capping a two-year span in which Ohio State went 14-10 and failed to beat Michigan or win a bowl game. For Tressel, a coaching search in Columbus meant the chance at a dream come true.
“In January of 2001, the first couple weeks were filled with optimism and anxiety,” Tressel said. “I only came to Ohio State once during the interview process, but I also met with Andy (Geiger) and Archie (Griffin) in Youngstown and a week later I met with the search committee.”
As could be expected, Tressel spent the afternoon of Jan. 17 with his squad in Youngstown. The day also included a phone call from Columbus.
“I had just met with my team a couple hours earlier,” Tressel said. “I told them I didn’t know if I would be offered the Ohio State job, but I probably wouldn’t see them again if the offer was extended. We had already handed out our winter conditioning program so the team was already concentrating on that.”
The same phase was underway at Ohio State when he took over the program. The foundation began to be set that winter and since then, the Buckeyes are 50-13 overall and 30-10 in the Big Ten with two league titles and a national championship. Since Tressel’s first season in which the Buckeyes went 7-5, Ohio State is 43-8, 4-0 in bowl games and three times has finished in the Top 5 in the nation.
That kind of success is only generated by a leader who himself is successful. Jim Heacock, Ohio State’s co-defensive coordinator, had just completed his fifth year at Ohio State when Tressel became head coach and knew the search committee had made the right choice.
“I knew Coach Tressel through my brother,” Heacock said, referring to Jon Heacock who was Tressel’s defensive coordinator at Youngstown State for seven years and took over as head coach at YSU when Tressel left for Ohio State. “I would get a chance to see a Youngstown State playoff game once in a while and Jim and I both recruited California so I’d occasionally run into him on the road. Through Jon, I heard all the good things about Jim and developed a great respect for him with the way he handled the program and his competitiveness.”
Those traits were first instilled in Tressel by his father, Lee, a coaching legend himself in Ohio. In 23 seasons at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, near Cleveland, Lee was 155-52-6 and led the Yellow Jackets to the 1978 NCAA Division III national championship. Lee’s career, which was honored by enshrinement into the National Football Foundation’s College Football Hall of Fame, not only fueled Jim’s career, but also Lee’s first son, Dick, who won a national championship as head coach at Hamline (Minn.) and now is Ohio State’s running backs coach.
After playing for his father at Baldwin-Wallace, Jim Tressel began his coaching career, first as a graduate assistant at Akron and then with four stops as an assistant coach, including from 1983-85 at Ohio State under Earle Bruce, during which time the Buckeyes went 27-9 and won the 1984 Big Ten championship.
Tressel will be the first to point to his faith and family background as the cornerstones of his success. They both factored into his mode of operation when the morning of Jan. 19, 2001 arrived and his return to Ohio State was complete.
“There was so much to do,” Tressel said of his first few months running the program. “And the most important thing was getting to know everyone who had any contact with the team.”
First and foremost, Tressel’s arrival signaled the rededication of the program to academics. In Tressel’s five seasons at Ohio State, an average of 40 players have been named OSU Scholar-Athletes and the program has led the Big Ten in academic all-conference selections each year. At the conclusion of the 2005 season, 56 Buckeyes had a 3.0 grade point average or higher.
Match those numbers with what his teams have done on the field and the success is staggering. In 2002, Ohio State became the first Division I-A school to record a 14-0 campaign. Tressel is 4-1 in bowl games and 4-1 against Michigan, giving him an 8-2 combined record in the last two games of the season, a record unmatched by any coach in OSU history.
Tressel has coached 14 first-team All-Americans in his five seasons at Ohio State and has seen 41 of his players become NFL draft picks, most of any program in the Big Ten. Five Buckeyes were first-round picks in 2006, the most ever by a Big Ten school. The 14 OSU players drafted in 2004 are the most ever by one school.
It does not stop with winning games, graduating student-athletes and producing pro football players. The demands on his schedule are just as high in the offseason as they are during the season. There are never enough hours in the day.
“It’s impossible to get everything done and see everyone,” Tressel said, noting those demands do not just come from those who he has coached or coached with. “The only thing I wasn’t as keenly aware of before I got here is that it isn’t just OSU graduates who love their Buckeyes. There are people who maybe didn’t go to college or went to another college, but their passion runs as deep. I should have known that, though, because I was one of those.”
So while Ellen Tressel handled finding a house, Tressel and his staff set about the daily process of turning Ohio State into what it so often has been through the years – home of champions. Along the way, the journey has been the joy.
“What we have really set out to do is have an impact,” Tressel said. “We want to impact the kids, impact the school, impact Central Ohio, the community and the state. I think we have done that, but it’s an ongoing process. You’re never finished. You have to do it the right way. It’s exciting to know we’re at an all-time high for student ticket requests and that the alumni association is at an all-time high to get tickets. It’s a continual enhancement of an already great place. That’s all you can do. We’re working on it.”
It is that kind of honest, matter-of-fact, roll-up-the-sleeves mentality which has endeared Tressel in the hearts of millions of Buckeye fans across the world. Win or lose, it is his genuine and sincere demeanor which is front and center.
“That’s the thing,” Heacock said. “He is so very consistent and remains calm through all the highs and lows and the ups and downs. He can handle the good and bad equally. When he was named head coach at Ohio State, I was pretty certain he would be very successful here and that he was exactly what Ohio State was looking for.”
Turns out they were looking for each other. When that happens, the results speak for themselves.
