Reunions can be weird.
They're weird because the central conceit behind them is that if a group of people shared one thing in common at one point in time, and that one thing is that they happened to occupy the same space for an extended length, then that same group of people will happily occupy another space for a much shorter length of time 10, 25, or even 50 years down the line. Provided that second space has finger sandwiches and punch.
Okay, I will admit that that's admittedly a pretty cynical way to look at relationships that you create during your formative years as a human being. What you do in high school in college is just as important as who you do it with, even more so if they're good at providing alibis or acting as a reference on an application to Home Depot. Those connections do mean something, especially if you worked together to accomplish something lasting.
Anyway, recently Marcus Hartman of the Dayton Daily News dropped this little tidbit in a story about James Laurinaitis and Brian Hartline, among others, as former Ohio State players who returned to Columbus to help coach the Buckeyes:
Ohio State has had at least one former Buckeye player on the on-field coaching staff every year but one since at least 1912 https://t.co/X4oEgQgtOX
— Marcus Hartman (@marcushartman) February 8, 2023
First of all, in all seriousness, massive props to Marcus for somehow figuring this out and not going absolutely insane. I imagine him plumbing the depths of his connections in the dark world of college football ephemera, before finally being guided to some dank, cobweb-infested catacomb in rural France. Hunched over an empty sarcophagus, candle in hand, he spends hours squinting at some brittle and barely legible vellum record of whoever was coaching linebackers during the Great Depression, before nodding silently to himself and putting a checkmark next to "1937" in his personal notebook.
Secondly, while I kind of love that he absolutely buried this legitimately cool tidbit that probably took him a huge chunk of his day to verify at the very bottom of his article, I also really enjoy this quote from Brian Hartline about why he views coaching wide receivers at Ohio State to be significant:
"How many guys are former players coaching their position at their school? I mean, it’s probably pretty few. So the conversation probably just sounds different, which resonates different with the person listening. We can definitely reach back in and talk about past experiences and talk about what it means to us.
Maybe there’s a different passion that comes out of it."
This is interesting to me because I think Brian Hartline is right in saying that having guys like himself and Laurinaitis and others at Ohio State, who can speak from experience from both a playing and cultural perspective, is important.
"Building culture" is a real thing in sports, even in collegiate sports when athlete turnover is baked into the system. But it takes a lot of time, and what I find interesting is that while the football Buckeyes are far from the only program to attempt to do this by bringing guys back to coach, every program thinks of culture differently.
Right now at least 20 FBS head coaches are leading teams at their alma mater (I say "at least" because I'm not as meticulous as I probably should be and my chief source was Wikipedia). Some of these names immediately come to mind: Jim Harbaugh at Michigan, Pat Fitzgerald at Northwestern, Kirby Smart at Georgia, and so on, but I think that even with some impressive resumes a big part of why these guys got the call in the first place, and why they took the job, was that these schools felt that an alumni "got" the culture of the program already. They could then enhance it without changing what makes, say, Ball State fundamentally Ball State.
The Wolverines occasionally catch smoke for their sycophantic devotion to the "Michigan Man" ideal, but it's borne out of a desire to preserve a certain kind of identity that the University of Michigan feels it has spent over a century cultivating (here I'd normally point out that said identity usually boils down to "being a self-important douche" but the ethics of journalism prevent me from acknowledging this until the Buckeyes beat them again).
I grudgingly respect the effort, and it leaves me trying to grasp just what it is that Ohio State expects their returning players-turned-coaches to represent. Beyond catchphrases or nicknames, what is that "passion" that Hartline is talking about?
It isn't easily answered, but I think if you had to strip it down to the very core meaning, what Hartline is getting at is he's attempting to convey to recruits that joining Ohio State means accepting the weight of history, of sustained excellence, and wanting to uphold it.
And yeah, every coach everywhere says that. From Alabama to Nicolaus Copernicus Community College, coaches are pointing to pictures on walls and numbers hanging from the rafters and go "they did it, now you do it to." I tried pulling that card on one of my younger cousins when we went into a Burger King that still had my division-winning youth soccer team's plaque up, which was not as motivational as I thought it'd be.
What makes Ohio State different is that in the football program, history has no brakes.
You, as an incoming recruit, are given the wheel to a team that in living history has never been truly bad, and almost never even been just average. Literally no one born in the last hundred years can remember Ohio State losing more games than they won in back-to-back seasons. So either you drive this thing off a cliff or drive it into the sunset, and no one has ever driven it off a cliff before.
That is the difference between the Buckeyes and almost everyone else, and that is also an enormous amount of pressure! For a 17 year old kid, being told that "so yeah, this team has been good or great pretty much always and if it ever isn't heads will roll, possibly yours" has got to be both exhilarating and terrifying. Here's a recent quote from Laurinaitis:
"[W]hen you’re at a place like Ohio State, you come here, and once you’ve lived it, you understand what the standards are."
Impressing that upon potential recruits is a big deal, and difficult, and even more difficult is finding recruits who accept and embrace it. Maybe that's why, for over a century, Ohio State has brought back alumni to teach its gospel.
