The greatest rivalry in sports isn’t getting just a face lift but instead a full face transplant.
For the first time since 1929, the annual showdown between the Buckeyes and That School Up North will feature head coaches in their first year at the helm.
Luke: 9-5 versus Michigan as a player and assistant coachOn the good side, you have 38 year old Luke Fickell, a lifelong resident of Columbus, state wrestling champ at DeSales, four year starter for the Buckeyes at nose guard and a seasoned vet with 10 years of assistant coaching experience serving as a graduate assistant, special teams coordinator, linebackers coach and co-defensive coordinator during his time under John Cooper and Jim Tressel.
He says all the right things including the proclamation this is him dream job, understands what it means to be a Buckeye, embraces The Game and possesses an outward intensity that creates a gravitational pull with his players. The kids realize their win output will go a long way toward determining whether or not Fickell is offered a contract and galvanized by TatGate’s casualties and media fallout, they have chosen to rally around their leader, hell bent on making sure it’s not one and done.
For Fickell, the pressure of having one shot to earn a multi-year contract to lead the program he’s loved forever has to be immense. Being the successor to Rich Rodriguez is one thing. Being the successor to Jim Tressel is quite another.
After all, Tressel’s shadow features seven conference titles, eight BCS bowls, a national title and finishing 2nd to that national title in importance, a dominant 9-1 record against Michigan. Tressel owned Lloyd Carr (6-1) and he owned and abused RichRod (3-0).
His dominance over Carr swung the pendulum in Cooper’s 2-10-1 wake, giving the Buckeyes and their fans that oh so delicious taste of swagger and his 100-24 outscoring of Rodriguez over the course of three Saturday’s seized the rivalry so fiercely that fans on both sides began to view the game as anti-climactic. This wasn’t just one coach being snakebitten as it was with Cooper. Coop brought teams every bit as talented as Michigan to The Game virtually ever year. Tressel, however, not only owned the opposing coach, he lined up talent only equaled by Michigan in a handful of those 10 years.
How would you fare feeling like you need to carry on that type of dominance, or at least come respectably close?
The good news is Fickell was very much involved in achieving eight of those nine wins, missing only the 26-20 win in Tressel’s first season. As a player, he was just 1-3 but I imagine playing or assistant coaching in a combined 14 meetings with Michigan is enough to prepare him for the bigness of it all and not be blinded on the day of The Game.
We all know Fickell gets it when it comes to the rivalry. He hasn’t spent as much time talking about it this off-season because he doesn’t have to. Unfortunately, the guy running the program boasting a 90% winning percentage the last decade has other more pressing questions to answer.
Hoke: undefeated against powdered donutsOn the dark side of the rivalry, you have the human eclipse, Brady Hoke, and his 47-50 career mark as a head coach in stops at Ball State and San Diego State. It’s easy to pile on the losing record but he did lead the Cardinals to a 12-1 record in his 6th and final season in Muncie and turned around the Aztecs posting a 9-4 mark in his 2nd and final season in San Diego including a big win over Navy in the Poinsettia Bowl.
All sarcasm aside, there’s no question David Brandon needed to hire a Michigan Man on the heels of the destruction caused by an outsider and there’s absolutely no doubt Hoke oozes all the arrogance of a Michigan Man.
He’s the guy forced to answer continuous questions about Ohio State’s decade of dominance.
Though it disputes his comment at the B1G Media Days in which he said, “well, I don't think we're rebuilding, period. I mean, we're Michigan. We've got kids who understand that they're Michigan. I don't put any stock into that”, he has repeatedly gone out of his way to say and do things that suggest a full scale rebuild and remodel.
The guy who isn’t rebuilding refuses to wear red and will only refer to his program’s current owner as “Ohio”. The guy who isn’t rebuilding has installed clocks counting down the days until The Game and signs depicting the number of days since Michigan has beat Ohio State.
He has also reinstalled a big boy football offensive scheme and landed a proven defensive mind in addition to aggressively pursuing kids uneasy about unknowns such as potential sanctions and exactly who will the coach will be for the duration of their collegiate career.
His actions, both punitive and beneficial, have done nothing yet to reverse the bottom line of a rivalry that has admittedly seen a surprising share of impressive runs over 107 meetings but they have clearly removed some of the apathy, or at least malaise, that once lingered in the air like a Chad Henne John Navarre toss in the direction of a waiting Will Allen.
With the hate on blast, how rookies Fickell and Hoke and their respective squads perform on November 26th will go a long way toward determing if supremacy will shift or if the old adage the more' things change the more they stay the same' will ring true in a rivalry renewed.
