The four men on stage for a roundtable discussion at the Ohio State coaches clinic on Thursday night are each in different stages of their careers in football, but they all have one thing in common: They helped Ohio State win a national championship.
Evan Spencer, who now works as an entrepreneur, was a starting wide receiver for Ohio State’s 2014 national championship team, making one of the most famous plays in the Buckeyes’ title run when he completed a touchdown pass to fellow wide receiver Michael Thomas on a trick play in Ohio State’s eventual College Football Playoff semifinal win over Alabama.
Current NFL draft prospect Will Howard was the starting quarterback, current wide receiver Carnell Tate was the Buckeyes’ No. 3 pass-catcher and current offensive coordinator Brian Hartline – himself a former Ohio State wide receiver – was the wide receivers coach for Ohio State last season as the Buckeyes won four CFP games in the first 12-team playoff to win OSU’s first national championship in 10 years.
In a roundtable discussion moderated by Ohio State play-by-play radio commentator Paul Keels, each of them shared some of their favorite memories from their respective experiences winning a national championship at Ohio State.
Howard said his favorite memory from Ohio State’s national championship run was Jack Sawyer’s scoop-and-score against Texas in the CFP semifinal at the Cotton Bowl – and the celebration that ensued on the sideline afterward.
“Going up to him afterwards and punching his chest and like, I think I said some like expletives and got in his grill, and the funny thing is is that if you ask him about that, he has no idea what I said to this day. He just saw that my mouth was moving and I was fired up,” Howard recalled. “So that was like one of the craziest I've ever been going in my life. I don't know what I was saying when he was running down the sideline, but I was losing my mind.”
Read more about "The Greatest Run in College Football History," the story of Ohio State's dominant run to the national championship.
Tate and Hartline both said one of their favorite memories from last season was Tate’s emotional return to his hometown of Chicago, where he caught two touchdown passes in Ohio State’s 31-7 win over Northwestern. Tate put that memory alongside the national championship game as his favorite moments from last season.
“The natty, the experience there was like crazy, unbelievable,” Tate said. “That's like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and all the things that we've done to get there and all the preparation we’ve put in, it's still crazy to this day.”
Hartline also shared a funny story from one of Ohio State’s game-planning meetings before its CFP quarterfinal against Oregon at the Rose Bowl that led to Howard’s 42-yard touchdown pass to Emeka Egbuka.
HOWARD EGBUKA
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“Will loves to come in and game plan with us, so we're just trying to pick his brain about what he likes ... and he's like, ’You know me, I like a good pipe. A good pipe call.’ I said, ‘You like what?’ He rode with it, he was like ‘Yeah, man, just call pipe.’ I'm like, ‘OK, we got it,’” Hartline recalled. “So long story short, then we kind of get through the week and come to find out, we got a tempo call, we called pipe just for Will and he scored down the middle of the field with Emeka Egbuka at the Rose Bowl for a touchdown.”
“Pipe’s a damn good play,” Howard deadpanned in response.
Spencer said that while the trick-play throw against Alabama was the play that defined his Ohio State career, there were actually two other plays in that game that meant more to him: his catch on Alabama’s late-game onside kick attempt and his block that sprung Ezekiel Elliott’s legendary 85-yard run through the heart of the south.
“Those are the moments where it's like, ‘Hey, it's mano-a-mano. It's me versus you.’ Right? I don't care what a 40 is, I don't care what a vertical is, it's how bad you want it, right?” Spencer said. “For me, (the onside kick recovery) was one of the most fulfilling because it had to come down to that. My teammates were relying on me, everybody was relying on me and at the end of the day, it was a team-based goal. I didn't do it to catch a touchdown. I didn't do it to do anything else but to secure the win for my brothers because we had to grind in order to get there. So that's one of the things that's most fulfilling for me.”
Those memories came as part of a more than 25-minute discussion in which Howard, Hartline, Spencer and Tate also talked about the impact football and their coaches have made on their lives and answered a question about what they wish their high school football coaches would have demanded more of from them. You can hear the entirety of their roundtable discussion in the video at the top of the page.
