In light of Ohio State's recent championship win against Notre Dame and the coaching carousel surrounding college football, Remember When takes us back to a time when Ohio State almost poached Fighting Irish legend Knute Rockne.
Born in 1888, Rockne was an immigrant from Norway who came to the United States with his parents when he was five. The family settled in Chicago, and in later years Rockne would go on to foster close ties with the state of Ohio. In his early twenties he was a lifeguard at Cedar Point, where he met his wife Bonnie, and they later married in Sandusky. Rockne also briefly coached for the Massillon Tigers, a pre-NFL professional football team.
But his playing and coaching career at Notre Dame is why most sports fans know about Rockne. As an end with the Fighting Irish (just "end," early 20th century football was awesome), he's credited with helping popularize the forward pass, most notably in a 1913 game against Army in which the underdog Notre Dame squad stunned their opponents and won 35-13. Contrary to popular myth, it wasn't the first time the forward pass had been used in a game and Notre Dame wasn't likely even the first team to do it regularly, but it did capture national attention and made Rockne a household name.
Later becoming head coach for the Fighting Irish, Rockne continued to utilize the forward pass and win games, leading Notre Dame to over 100 victories and winning three national titles. His quarterback George Gipp, who died of pneumonia in 1920, is one of the most well-known of his players (thanks to Ronald Reagan's portrayal of him in Knute Rockne, All-American; "Win just one for the Gipper"), but Rocke also coached Curly Lambeau (who would go on to found the Green Bay Packers) and the famed "Four Horsemen."
One little-told story is how in 1929, Ohio State, needing a new coach after the resignation of the legendary John Wilce, approached Knute Rockne with an offer to take over the Buckeye program. Written about by Maureen Zappala and Jack Park in their book Buckeye Reflections: Legendary Moments From Ohio State Football, and by Bob Hunter in a 1979 article for the Columbus Dispatch, Rockne either did or came very close to accepting the offer from the Buckeyes.
Apparently dissatisfied with Notre Dame's facilities (and perhaps enamored with Ohio Stadium, built just a few years before), Rockne and Ohio State were close to sealing the deal, except, according to Hunter:
There was also a qualifier. Rockne had been embarrassed by a similar situation concerning an offer from Columbia a couple of years before, so he predicated his interest in the OSU post on the fact that nothing be released to the press until he had time to discuss the situation with Notre Dame officials and beg out of his contract. [...]
That's when a Columbus newspaperman, sports editor Clyde Tuttle of the old Ohio State Journal, entered the picture, found out about the Rockne contact, and printed the story.
The deal quickly fell apart as a result, and Rockne returned to Notre Dame. He would go on to coach for just a few more years before tragically dying in a plane crash in 1931, and Rockne remains one of the most enduring figures in Notre Dame football history.
It is wild to think about the implications of that particular part of Ohio State and Notre Dame lore. Notre Dame would continue to dominate college football for the next few decades, but Ohio State didn't make out too badly, either: even though there were a half-dozen head coaches between John Wilce and Woody Hayes, they were all some level of good-to-great, including College Football Hall of Fame members Francis Schmidt and Wes Fesler.
It's comforting, in a way, that the connection between these two colleges continues to this day; both through games played and the coaching on the sidelines. Granted, it'd probably be harder to wax poetic about this if the Buckeyes had lost to Marcus Freeman's Fighting Irish on Monday, or if Jim Knowles decides to skip town for South Bend.
But in a sport that feels increasingly distant from the one we great up with, it's nice to know that some things don't change all that much, even after 100 years.
Thanks to Matt Gutridge for putting in the research legwork for this article.
