It has been a long time since the Ohio State football program was bludgeoned in the desert in January 2007. That Buckeye team was ranked No. 1 all season and steamrolled through the regular season. It finished with an epic 42-39 victory over Michigan in a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup that seemed the prelude to a national title.
It wasn’t meant to be though. A long layoff, a very hungry Florida squad coached by Urban Meyer, and maybe a little complacency led to a Gators romp, 41-14.
Take nothing away from Florida because it was the far better team that night, but that Ohio State team looked like a shell of the one we saw during the season. We’ve received some tidbits from former head coach Jim Tressel before on that game, but we gained a little more from him thanks to the “More than Coach Speak” podcast that dropped this past week.
According to Tressel, it’s the one game that has stuck with him over the years. In fact, he sensed the team wasn’t quite in the right mindset.
“Probably the one that I think about that I knew where we were heading and I couldn’t get us turned around was 2006,” Tressel said. “We were undefeated and we had beaten Michigan, who was No. 2, and it was a big game, we were ranked one and two. And all of a sudden going into the championship game, you could just see our guys were on their phones with their agents, it was an older team, couldn’t get their attention. You could see they weren’t training like we normally trained, and we talked to them about it. That was one of the lowlights of – gosh, how could we have gotten through to them?”
According to “The Senator,” his staff went back and forth on how to handle what they were seeing and feeling but felt the team was veteran enough and had shown enough during the season to not disrupt things too much. The one thing they implemented was to travel to Phoenix a few days earlier to try and get the team refocused, but not much else.
“As a staff, we were talking about, we were kind of vacillating back and forth that, well we don’t want to be brow-beating too bad and hit them over the head, ‘Practice 10 times harder.’ Because this team had just done a great job. They had done everything we asked them to do,” Tressel said. “They won every game. They trained like we wanted them to train. And so we probably erred on the side of thinking you know what, they’re mature enough. As it gets closer, we’ll get more tuned in.
“In fact, we went out three or four days earlier than we normally went because we were sensing we need to get this thing turned around. So I think maybe somehow getting them to address it to each other,” continued Tressel. “I’ve always found that if the players tell each other how they should be thinking — it can be even more effective than the staff doing it.”
Sometimes as a coach, there are strings to pull and it’s hard to figure out which ones get pulled at the right time and the right direction. It ultimately wasn’t enough against an SEC team that felt disrespected and underappreciated, and it showed.
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