http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/budwithers/2008174489_withers12.html
Somehow, Ohio State and USC haven’t played a football game since 1990, which doesn’t seem right. That means when the two programs get together Saturday night in the Los Angeles Coliseum, they’ll have passed about one-sixth of the operative history of college football without having met, which is strange.
“If you look at it in terms of not having matched up in the Rose Bowl, yeah,” says USC coach Pete Carroll, without hubris.
That means the guys playing this game were either toddlers or at best, tossing Nerf balls back in 1990. Their appreciation for the other program might not date further back than Maurice Clarett or Carson Palmer, the ex-Trojans quarterback now with the Bengals, who said recently he’s sick of hearing about Ohio State football.
The name Woody Hayes might not mean anything to USC players. They might not know about how he once sequestered the Buckeyes in a monastery before a Rose Bowl back in the ’70s.
Or how one of his players, Archie Griffin, is the only one to have won two Heisman Trophies. Or how, during Hayes’ reign as coach, the Ohio State faculty, concerned that there was too much emphasis on football at the school, voted in 1961 to deny the Buckeyes, 8-0-1, a trip to the Rose Bowl.
A writer friend tells a great Woody story. He was a college kid at Northwestern and remained an Ohio State fan after Hayes’ forced retirement in 1978. In Columbus one time, he and a buddy found it in a phone book, there for all to see: “W W Hayes … ”
Seattle Times
9/12/08
Magnolia Tribune
