Luke Fickell's Year of Pain Taught Him How to Coach

In the salad days of 2011 for Eleven Warriors, when we weren't the gigantic media conglomerate bent on world domination that we are today, Jason sent an intrepid Johnny Ginter to take some pictures of Ohio State football media day. I was armed with a camera that took pictures of a quality somewhere between "grandpa's cataracts" and "toddler found the camera button on the iPhone" and camera skills about the equal of the latter.

In short, I had no god damn idea of what I was doing. I drove the 100 miles from Middletown to Ohio Stadium, parked at Lennox (because, again, I need to emphasize that I had no idea what I was doing), walked to Ohio Stadium and prayed that then communications director Shelly Poe didn't mistake me for the complete jackass that I absolutely was acting like at the time. I had to take some incredible, amazing shots of football players milling around for an hour, and I was freaking out.

It's usually a bad sign when you're drenched in flop sweat before you even have a chance to flop, but I soon discovered that I had a brother-in-arms in my effort to look semi-professional despite being clearly unprepared for what was about to transpire: Luke Fickell.

I felt bad for Fickell, who had just taken over for the dismissed Jim Tressel, but that hadn't stopped me from writing a really unnecessary parody piece about him and turning in a pretty optimistic "All is well!" defensive practice report. I also think I wrote something where I predicted that Ohio State fans should put on their safety belts, because four losses in 2011 might be an outside possibility if things went really badly somehow.

In short, expectations were unreasonably high for a guy who was thrust in an untenable position with really no prep time. Luke Fickell was having a rough day, too.

One of my clearest memories from the 2011 Ohio State football media day was Fickell addressing the media, because he was the sweatiest, most nervous person in the entire stadium, which included among its population a certain Joe Bauserman who at this time surely had to have known that he was going to be the starting quarterback.

Here is 18 minutes of Luke Fickell gripping a podium as if it were a life preserver and he was slathered in barbeque sauce in the middle of shark-infested waters:

It was a weird day. I got exactly one amazing photo and Luke Fickell survived his first test as head coach.

Then the team went 6-7, including heartbreaking losses against Nebraska and Purdue, along with the greatest crime of all: giving Brady Hoke some small measure of happiness. Fickell took a lot of heat for the poor performance of the Buckeyes, leading to a lot of speculation that Urban Meyer would take over the team. This is what Fickell had to say after the Penn State loss that year:

Luke Fickell, Ohio State's interim head coach, was dogged by questions of his future. There have been numerous uncorroborated reports out there that the Buckeyes have already reached an agreement with former Florida coach Urban Meyer.

"I don't think this is the time nor the place," Fickell said. "We're talking about the game, and we're going to move on and talk about Michigan (next Saturday). ... Those are the things that I have no control over. So I'm not going to waste a whole lot of my energy on it."

As it turned out, Fickell wasn't the only one struggling with a new job in 2011, as I had just gotten my first full-time teaching position in my own classroom. Sure, I had done my student teaching in grad school, subbed for a few years, and had a cup of tea teaching English in Japan, but this was the first time that I was solely in charge of the historical education of about 100 young men and women.

I was incredibly excited, incredibly nervous, and ultimately went the equivalent of 6-7 for my first year of teaching. As I struggled through year one, I thought more and more about what Luke Fickell was going through and realized that we were kindred spirits. I took a lot of satisfaction from the reception that Ohio State fans gave him as Urban Meyer, his inevitable replacement, introduced him as part of his brain trust. And like Fickell, I stuck with it and got better.

Fickell has proven himself over the past several years to be the kind of coach that is absolutely ready to take over a football team. He's beloved by his players, has received nearly endless praise from his boss, and is starting to be recognized as maybe the most important architect of player development on the team. After a rocky start under Urban Meyer, the defense has evolved to become a consistent part of the team, and there's no small amount of irony that a defensive coach from the Tressel era has helped Urban Meyer win games in 2016 despite an inconsistent offense.

Here's an interview with Fickell from about a month ago:

He still hates the camera, and he's still rocking a beautifully styled hairdo, but he's not the same person who almost had a heart attack in front of the media five years ago; instead, he's a confident, funny, insightful dude who knows what it takes to be a leader. That's certainly in no small part thanks to the tutelage of Urban Meyer, but life experience has taught Fickell well.

It turns out that failure is sometimes the best thing for a person. I firmly believe that my struggles as a cub reporter and as a first year teacher made me better in the long run, and Luke Fickell probably learned more than anyone in 2011. It's like he once said,