In 1955, Ohio State had followed up their national championship season of ’54 with another outright Big Ten title, although they were denied a second straight Rose Bowl trip due to the league’s “no repeat” rule. “Hop” Cassady had won the school’s third Heisman Trophy, and things couldn’t have been any better for Woody Hayes and his charges. But the

Whenever a sports fan, writer or broadcaster comes up with some “all-time greatest” list or countdown, there’s always a tendency for the list to skew to modern times. As seasons pass and years roll, records are broken and memories of yesteryear’s heroes fade. In this day and age of 24-hour sports channels on TV, a good portion of airtime is

A big part of Ohio State’s football tradition is its pantheon of great offensive players, including five Heisman Trophy-winning running backs, not to mention two other runners and an offensive tackle that were Heisman runners-up. The galaxy of stars from “Chic” Harley to Troy Smith is bright, but Ohio State has always had a constant thread of defensive excellence as

All right, quick, what year is it? Ohio State’s head football coach is in his sixth year, the team is coming off a Fiesta Bowl victory over a tough independent team, the defense only has two defensive linemen back while the offense is headed by an experienced senior quarterback who played little in the spring game. The returning tailback went

The John Cooper era couldn’t have kicked off any better. His first Buckeye squad had handled Syracuse 26-9 in the 1988 opener, and it was the first time since 1961 that Ohio State had committed no turnovers or penalties in a game. Even Buckeye Nation’s most cynical members, who had wondered how Cooper found time to coach between Big Bear

Ohio State’s 1982 football season had been on the brink of disaster. The Scarlet and Gray were sitting at 2-3 after a 3-game Ohio Stadium losing streak- the first skid of its kind since the Horseshoe’s inaugural 1922 campaign- and even the much maligned 9-3 mark the team had achieved the previous two seasons looked remote. But the Bucks got

Ohio State has not had many rollercoaster seasons like 1990. They had bounced back from a three-game skid and headed into Iowa City, unbelievably, with a chance to get back into a Big 10 race that they had been all but written out of just a month earlier. The Buckeyes had gotten off to a slow start in the opener

Ohio State had been rolling along with a dream 1964 season as the calendar flipped to November. They were 6-0 and ranked #2 in the country, just behind resurgent Notre Dame, and only two sub-.500 teams- Penn State (still an independent at the time) and Northwestern- stood between OSU and a showdown in the ‘Shoe with TBGUN for the Big

It had been a generation since Ohio State had a new football coach. Seven U.S. Presidents had served while Woody Hayes stalked the OSU sidelines. America had gone from “I Love Lucy” and the Korean War to disco and Iran. Now, as the Buckeyes finished off the winningest decade in school history (the 1970’s would produce 91 wins, which would

With 18 starters returning and a boatload of senior experience at their disposal, Ohio State was a no-brainer pick to win the Big Ten in 2008, but the jury was still out on their national standing. Back-to-back BCS Championship game losses had, fairly or not, made the Buckeyes the main whipping-boy for the entire Big Ten, a league that was