The Five: "That's Not His Fault" (1988)
College football is ridiculous, but then, so is the world right now.
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I.
In 1988, after a decade of solid-but-unacceptable seasons under coach Earle Bruce—a likable doormat with sartorial flair who had the unenviable task of succeeding the Pattonesque force of personality named Woody Hayes—Ohio State hired a new football coach. His name was John Cooper, and he was an outsider. He showed up in Columbus, recorded a series of cringe-worthy hot-tub commercials that Woody Would Have Never Made, lost 14 games in his first three seasons, and, most crucially, could not seem to figure out how to beat Michigan.
Eventually, John Cooper began to win games. He had several very good seasons and produced a number of very good professional football players, but by then it was too late, because the narrative had been fixed. In the end, one of the fundamental problem with John Cooper—the reason he received no grace from his own fan base—was that he did not come from Ohio. Woody Hayes spent his entire life in Ohio, save for a stint overseas during World War II; over time, Woody Hayes—reactionary, intellectual, brilliant, anachronistic, and furious—came to embody Ohio.
And John Cooper? John Cooper grew up in Tennessee, graduated from Iowa State, coached in Kansas and and California and Oklahoma and Arizona, and spoke with a southern warble that branded him as a foreign entity every time he opened his mouth. The thing about John Cooper was that he could recruit athletes, and he could win football games; he just couldn’t win the right football games, including this one in 1998, which helped to build the legend of the greatest college football coach in modern history, the one who managed to transcend every criticism of him:
That loss to Michigan State—combined with 10 losses to Michigan in 13 tries—were the reasons why, despite winning over 70 percent of his games in 13 seasons as Ohio State’s coach, John Cooper’s career was ultimately branded a failure. The fan base saw him in that hot tub and did not believe he ever truly cared about Ohio State football in the same way that they did.
“Whether it's fair or unfair, that comes with the territory -- the coach has to have Ohio ties, or at least has to have played here,” former Ohio State running back Keith Byars told The New York Times in 2002. “With John Cooper, some people never forgave him for that. That's not his fault. Just because he wasn't from here, and he didn't go to Ohio State. That's two strikes, and they were looking for the third strike.”
II.
Over the weekend, another Ohio State coach who did not grow up in Ohio or play college football in Ohio lost a football game to the University of Michigan. It was an inexplicable loss, given that Ohio State is the most purely talented (and most well-paid) football team in the country and Michigan is most certainly not that this season. But the thing about that loss was this: Ryan Day, in his sixth full season as Ohio State’s head coach, has still won 66 games and lost 10. And even with that loss to Michigan, Ohio State is still pretty much guaranteed a berth in the 12-team College Football Playoff.
And yet people in Ohio do not like or trust Ryan Day, in large part because he is an outsider who cannot seem to win the game that matters most to them. He is now the first Ohio State coach to lose four straight games to Michigan since John Cooper, and in the aftermath of Ohio State’s 13-10 loss, as Michigan attempted to plant a flag on Ohio State’s homefield, Day stood around in a daze and watched as police officers began to use pepper spray on his own football team.
“What happened?” Day appeared to be asking someone, as the animus exploded all around him, and it is very possible that this will wind up being the lasting image of Ryan Day as Ohio State’s head coach—that he will be branded as yet another interloper who never fully understood the meaning of the program he’d been charged to lead.
III.
Viewed from the outside, and viewed through the lens of history, all of this feels completely ridiculous. The day after Ohio State’s loss to Michigan, a college football message board—the absurdist precursor to Elon Musk’s toxic social-media site—floated wackadoodle conspiracy theories about Day that were so utterly bonkers you’d literally have to bend over and insert your head into your posterior in order to have them make any sense at all. But Ryan Day already had two strikes against him, and this was the third. (Though what happens if Ohio State does rebound and win the national championship? Does an entire fan base just move on pretend none of this ever happened?)
Of course, college football has always been an inherently ridiculous pastime. It is the personification of the American id, and at a moment when we are surrounded by virtually nothing but id—a country on the verge of descending into a dark era of revenge-driven eff-you impulsiveness—it probably isn’t surprising that this tribalistic fury exploded onto football fields in Michigan and beyond, and wound up with several teams fighting each other in the aftermath of the game. In the midst of a moment when the country feels irreparably fractured, why wouldn’t we retreat into the familiar, and into the parochialism and regionalism that’s been embedded into so many of our souls since childhood? Why wouldn’t we look askance at the outsiders who simply don’t understand these things the way that we do? Why wouldn’t we lash out at our leadership for failing us, without even thinking about the big picture?
IV.
I had a moment a few weeks ago, during Penn State’s excruciating one-point road victory over Minnesota, when I gave into this kind of facile thinking, as well. The narrative among Penn State fans about its own coach, James Franklin, is that he is an outsider who did not attend the university (even if he grew up in Pennsylvania) and cannot seem to win the big game. Franklin still exists in the shadow of Joe Paterno, another legendary coach who went out, like Woody Hayes, in an inferno of scandal. The narrative about Franklin is that he short-circuits in big moments, and that he has turned Penn State into a paper tiger of a program, and that he is all talk and no action. And the longer it goes on, the more I want the toxic and insufferable pessimism of this narrative to be proven wrong.
Midway through that game against Minnesota, with Penn State trailing, their quarterback, Drew Allar, experienced a moment of on-field frustration that seemed to signal a team in disarray in yet another crucial moment. I thought it was all happening again; I thought that perhaps everything everyone had said about Franklin was correct, and that his team was rattled because its coach was rattled, and that they would implode under pressure once again. I can’t explain why, except to attribute it to my own tribalism, but I felt the pressure myself over the course of those three hours, in ways I hadn’t since Franklin took the job. It felt like this was it, the future of the program hanging in the balance. It felt, weirdly, like Franklin’s failure was a reflection of my own failures. The only person I felt comfortable texting with during that game was my old friend from first grade, who had grown up a mile from me in the shadow of the Penn State campus, because I knew he could relate.
Franklin sat with Allar and calmed him down. They had a rational discussion in the midst of an irrational moment. Franklin did what coaches are meant to do in situations like this: He displayed leadership. And Allar did calm down, and Franklin’s risk-reward decisions all paid off for once—you might call him an overrated coach, but he’s also been an unlucky coach—and Penn State won the game by a point. And I don’t know if this means that Franklin is the “right” coach for Penn State in the long run, but I know enough to know that there’s a hell of a lot that I don’t know at all.
V.
Everything about college football is changing at a moment when it feels like the world is spinning out of control. It’s hard to know where the meaning lies; it’s hard to know how to define success anymore; it’s hard to know anything at all. And so we find ourselves lashing out at our leadership, willing them to fix our problems, and demanding they be replaced when they don’t fix our problems. At some level, it’s always been that way, but it feels more intense now than it’s ever been, so much so that even if Ryan Day or James Franklin were to win a national championship this season, either one of them could wind up taking another job just to escape the noise.
Being a college football coach in the modern NIL era is a near-impossible job in which one must be a CEO, a salesperson, a marketer, and a tactician; it is an extremely well-paid job that is ripe for criticism and second-guessing, but as with politics, I think there are moments when the discussion reaches an unhealthy level of tribalism and toxicity, when it’s up to us to rise above our own id and try to restore some rationality to our own thought processes. It’s the only way to find our way back from this place where no one ever seems happy at all.
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This may be too obvious to write, but we are shaped by our childhoods. I grew up on LI where there was no big-time university football. My family could not distinguish photos of Lou Carnesca from Joe Paterno. St John's basketball was a bigger deal than PSU football to them. Big time university football would be better understood as a farm system to the NFL. I agree with the central premise of your article but it fits best in pockets of the country dominated by university sports.
Another one for the time capsule.