Their Coach Isn’t the Same, and Neither Are the Buckeyes

Well,I’m certainly glad Woody Hayes wasn’t around to see that! Woody would have been in the bunker demanding to know if Paris was burning.

Well, no, but I sure would have hated to be the one to go down to the locker room and say brightly, “Well, Woody, how did it go?!”

It went USC 42, Ohio State 3. You heard me.

Now, we know what a Buckeye is. A land animal most often found on its own 20-yard line.

If there’s anything Woody Hayes hated worse than getting beat, it was getting beat by the forward pass. Woody thought the forward pass was responsible for most of the troubles of mankind, beginning with the Johnstown Flood, was worse for you than cigarettes.

Many years ago, in the Coliseum, Woody’s team lost to USC by a mere 17-0. That was bad enough. But a USC tackle, the mastodonic Dan Ficca, whom Woody had tried to recruit, stood out in the hallway, jeering at Woody. Ficca was out of reach. So, Woody turned and slammed two sportswriters to the floor.

When last seen on a coaching sideline, Wayne Woodrow Hayes was busy socking a Clemson football player who had the temerity to intercept an OSU pass. That was the way Woody came to terms with defeat. And that was by two points, 17-15, not 39.

It was some kind of ultimate irony that the forward pass should have terminated his career abruptly. Woody considered it a sissy tactic, anyway. Real men didn’t throw passes.

So, I went down to the Ohio State dressing room to see how the new coach was taking defeat by the forward pass (four touchdown throws by USC’s Todd Marinovich).

I listened at the wall, didn’t hear any sounds of glass breaking, furniture splintering or helmets being battered by a fist.

Pretty soon, the coach, John Cooper, appeared. He looked around. “I’m relaxed,” he confided. He even smiled. Smiled! The only time I ever saw Woody Hayes smile after a game was just after he beat SC in the Rose Bowl, 42-20.

“We started out playing good football. Then, they took our confidence away with that big play. I mean, we had them third down-and-five almost on their own goal line and they complete an 87-yard touchdown pass.”

It was scarcely a Hayes-ian interview. Woody’s losing-game interviews were shorter than Hollywood marriages. Cooper stayed as long as anyone still had a microphone to thrust in his face. He was generous. “We didn’t have the ball much and when we did their defensive linemen were too fast for us.” When someone wanted to know why, when his running attack started out so well, he went to the forward pass, Cooper cocked an eyebrow. “Did you happen to notice the score at the time?” he inquired. “21-3, as I recall it.”

It was hardly a Hayes-ian game. Ohio State, out of 59 plays, threw 30 passes. That would be a season for Woody Hayes. Maybe, two.

The game started out with an overnight prediction the on-field temperatures might reach 100 but SC took the field expecting Snow, a lot of Snow.

Well, Snow fell. Carlos Snow started the game like the second coming of Hopalong Cassady or Archie Griffin. The first three times he carried the ball, he went for seven, four and 25 yards. He made 70 yards in the first quarter.

Then, the Snow melted. The blizzard was over.

If anything, the game was the return of USC as the citadel of tailback, the student-body-right.

He had a hard job convincing anybody he should be the successor to the guys who made SC Tailback U. but apparently Ricky Ervins has made it.

The job that once belonged to the Mike Garretts, Ricky Bells, Marcus Allens, Anthony Davises and Charlie Whites and O.J. Simpson now belongs to a guy who spent three years trying to catch the coach’s eye.

It wasn’t easy for Ricky Ervins to get the football--and you can see why. Unlike those other guys, Ricky doesn’t look like something that fell off a trophy. Ricky weighs 200 pounds but it’s so configurated, he looks like a bowling ball with arms. Defensive linemen have a terrible time with him because first they have to find him. You have a mental picture of these exasperated 6-6, 280-pounders rummaging frantically around in the line of scrimmage saying “Wait a minute! He’s in here some place! I just saw him!”

Ricky is listed on the program at 5-8 but the consensus is, that’s a prediction. Ricky may get there when he’s full grown. Ricky’s running style is based on a pinball he says. He just keeps bouncing off bumpers till he finds a hole. Then, he’s gone. He doesn’t need much of a one. He accelerates quicker than a guy who just heard a tombstone talk, or the cops coming. He tends to disappear in pileups--and come out the other side running like a guy who just stole a pie.

But he’s had a terrible time persuading football coaches to give him the football. They tend to think he just wandered over from the Glee Club. They prefer guys with a bigger strike zone for some unfathomable reason. Ricky rolled up 2,209 total yards and 25 touchdowns in high school but college football coaches looked at him and wondered, “Have you ever thought of defensive back, kid?”

Ricky thought of it but wondered privately why someone who could run 4.3 in the 40 should have to spend his career running backwards.

Even when he got to SC, they kept giving the ball to people like Ryan Knight, Steven Webster, Scott Lockwood and Aaron Emmanuel. Ervins was their caddy, the guy who went in when they got hurt or needed a breather.

The caddy took over the tee Saturday. Ricky Ervins got the ball 21 times and ran up 120 yards through, around and under the Ohio State defense. The game was won by the four touchdown bombs thrown by Marinovich but it was saved by the fact the ball was kept out of enemy hands by a little round man who may not look like an SC tailback. Until you remember Mike Garrett and Anthony Davis did not exactly put anybody in mind of John Wayne either.

The moral of the story is, you don’t have to be big to be SC tailback. Just good. They don’t measure your height, just your length--and Saturday’s 120 yards made Ricky stand mighty tall. Big enough so Woody might have wanted to hit him.