It’s a funny thing, this journalism stuff.
The type of person who looks to make a career out of it usually is the one who runs towards the fire when everyone else is running away from it. And, when there is no fire, sometimes you start one all on your own.
But I’m even worse than that.
I combine that attitude with the cynicism toward my teams that comes from being a Boston Red Sox fan and an East Coast native.
I always think my team is going to screw it up, choke, fall apart and find a new way to lose. I wait for something to go wrong.
That is probably why I’ve gotten e-mails after every Ohio State football column I’ve written that imply I have something against Jim Tressel.
Maybe that’s just how I’ve come off when commenting about Steve Bellisari’s true position, his driving under the influence charges, the “Cooper Guys” and Tressel’s honeymoon ending, among other things.
So, as the sun sets on my run at The Lantern and my college years, I want to write something positive and try to set the record straight while I’m at it. And I think it’s fitting to write about the sport I love and the one that the majority of you want to hear about (we can all ask the vocal minority to shut up), even though it is only June.
When Jim Tressel was hired, close to 17 months ago, I wasn’t happy. I thought the coach would be overmatched jumping from the 1-AA level to the “big time.”
My dream coach would’ve been Bob Stoops, who had resurrected the Oklahoma program quicker than you could blink. But since he was about as realistic a candidate as Vince Lombardi, Minnesota coach Glen Mason was my choice.
Mason played at OSU and was a head coach at Kent State and Kansas before taking over the Golden Gophers. He was the perfect candidate, and I was sure he would get the job.
My friends from Youngstown had told me about Tressel. Being as arrogant as possible about the whole thing, I dismissed what they said as hometown bias and chalked it up to their lack of knowledge of the game.
Man, was I wrong.
Tressel, who I thought would not be prepared for the big time, was more ready than John Cooper ever was. He stood at the podium or in the interview room, with 50 reporters hanging all over him, and toyed with them.
He handled everything with grace and class, displaying the never-too-high, never-too-low demeanor that all the greats have. That is to say nothing about his abilities as a coach and mentor to his players.
All of Tressel’s players do not love him. Some just don’t buy into the “football family” philosophy that he has.
But the guys who do usually prosper.
Take a look at Jonathan Wells, who had been touted as the next great OSU running back when he signed in 1998 but had done nothing, except for a few flashes, going into last season.
Wells got off to rough start, again looking like a 230-pounder trying to be Gale Sayers, with mediocre performances against Indiana and UCLA after rushing for over 100 yards in the opener against overmatched Akron. Many coaches would have looked to the young studs in the stable – Sammy Maldonado and Lydell Ross.
But Tressel stuck by his senior, even in a year where it was obvious the team wasn’t going much of anywhere.
He pushed the right buttons, tweaked his running style, got him to run with square shoulders, pressured him with the increasing presence of Ross and watched Wells bust loose for 179 yards in a blowout win over Northwestern. From that point of the season on, Wells was where everyone thought he would be when he inked his grant-in-aid – among the top 10 backs in America.
Wells listened to Tressel, and it produced results the diminutive former Penguins coach could be proud of. Tressel capitalized on raw talent and guided a player to reach his potential.
That more than any rah-rah speech, any well-polished quote or any wind sprint or weight room rep, is what separates great coaches from mediocre coaches.
At a place like OSU, there will be talent. That is not an issue. It is what you do with that talent because schools like Texas, Michigan, Florida, Miami and Florida State are getting the same level of prospects.
When I called for Mason, I failed to look at one aspect that relates to this.
Mason turned around three moribund programs and made them competitive. Tressel took one moribund program, made it competitive, then put it over the top.
OSU does not need a coach to make it competitive. It needs a coach to put it over the top, something that no coach has done here since 1968.
Now I’m not going to make any wild predictions about how many national titles Tressel will win or anything like that. But I will say this – sooner, rather than later, it will be clear what Andy Geiger did when he chose this relative nobody to lead one of the nation’s most powerful programs.
The right thing.
Albert Breer is a senior in journalism from Sudbury, Mass. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected].
