Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Ohio State has lost at least three games in a row in a season only 16 times.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- On a late spring day in 1890, about 700 people showed up to watch a curiosity known as "Foot Ball" being played at Ohio State.
The players sent a letter to a sporting goods company for a copy of the new game's rules and then had to take up a collection to buy a ball.
Joseph H. Lange scored Ohio State's first touchdown -- worth four points -- to polite applause by the bemused onlookers in what became a 20-14 victory over Ohio Wesleyan.
The rosy start to the Buckeyes' 115-year odyssey in football was misleading. They lost their next five games over two seasons.
Now, 759 wins and 29 Big Ten championships later, Ohio State is almost back where it started.
A 33-7 loss at Iowa on Saturday was the Buckeyes' third in a row, all in conference games. Heading into this week's game at home against Indiana, the fans are angry, the players are discouraged and the coach is searching for answers.
"You stop [the streak] by getting better and deserving to win a game," said Jim Tressel. "We haven't deserved to win any of our Big Ten games. That's a fact."
Occurred 16 times before
Tressel is not alone in such misery. Research by The Associated Press shows the Buckeyes have lost at least three games in a row 16 times in a season. Woody Hayes had two teams that did it, as did Earle Bruce and John Cooper.
NFL and college hall of fame member Paul Brown's 1943 team lost four games in a row -- the last time Ohio State has strung together so many defeats in a season.
But that was in the middle of World War II, when the Buckeyes' best players were either fighting or prevented from playing because of Army ROTC duty.
Twice the Buckeyes have lost five consecutive games: in 1897 and in those next five starts over two autumns after the program chalked up that first win.
Bruce was an Ohio State player, an assistant under Hayes and had been a successful coach when he took over after Hayes was fired for slugging a Clemson player on the sideline at the 1978 Gator Bowl. In nine seasons as head coach, Bruce won more than 75 percent of his games, captured four Big Ten titles and had a winning record over Ohio State's nemesis, Michigan.
Slump led to dismissal
Yet the three-game losing streak late in the 1987 season culminated in his firing by the university's president at the time, Edward Jennings.
Bruce's Buckeyes had lost three games in a row before, but they were to Stanford (led by John Elway), Florida State and Wisconsin -- all at home -- in 1982. Bruce survived that but not the firestorm that came five years later.
The last time before 1982 that Ohio State had lost three in a row, Hayes put on a memorable display of fury and lack of self-control. During the Buckeyes' third loss in the string, a 10-7 loss at hated Michigan, quarterback Don Lamka threw an interception.
Hayes protested to officials that the Wolverines' Thom Darden had interfered on the pass. They weren't listening, so he rushed the field and was assessed a penalty. Completely losing it, he grabbed the downs markers and snapped them over his knee and then threw the pieces on the field before ripping up the orange first-down indicator with his hands and hurling it onto the field.
Tressel's view
The detached Tressel, as emotional as a robot, did not blow up in Iowa City.
"It's like life," he said. "You've got to keep grinding, keep believing in each other and learn what it takes to win games. Perhaps we cognitively know it, but we haven't demonstrated it."
The players, however, expressed shock, embarrassment and anger.
"I hate losing more than anything else in the world," linebacker Bobby Carpenter said. "Right now it means more to some guys on our team than it does to other guys. That's not good enough."