The Jim Tressel experience

By Joe Scalzo

OSU coach touts grades, gratitude

Despite two title losses, he has reason to be optimistic about this season.

POLAND — The quintessential Jim Tressel moment took place around 2 p.m. Monday at Poland High School when the Ohio State coach grabbed a magazine from a young autograph seeker/future Buckeye prospect and asked him two questions.

“Are you fast?”

The boy nodded.

“How good are your grades?”

“Good,” the boy said.

“Good?” Tressel said. “That’s it? You’re supposed to say very good.”

Tressel’s iconic status, which was first developed in Youngstown and has since spread throughout Ohio, is due in no small measure to his tendency to lead football teams to national championship games, and sometimes win them.

But his down-to-earth, likable, I’d-love-to-see-him-run-for-governor-esque demeanor, doesn’t hurt either. Tressel showed both Monday when he spoke to a group of 40-plus football players — most of them in middle school — for Poland’s football camp.

Wearing his national championship ring from 2002, Tressel’s speech combined patriotism (“Every day keep in mind how lucky you are to live in this country”), advice (“Keep working and keep studying; our guys aren’t interested in guys who don’t get good grades and behave themselves”) and, of course, a fair bit of salesmanship about “the great game of football.”

“This is the greatest game there is,” said Tressel, who won the 1993 and ‘94 national titles with Poland coach Mark Brungard at quarterback. “If you keep playing the game, you’ll want to keep being around it.

“I’m a Tiger Woods fan and golf is a great game. But when you see him hit one of those drives 300 feet straight down the fairway, what if as soon as he hit it, he had someone with one of those big blue helmets with a ‘P’ [Poland] on it hit him? How straight do you think the next one will be?”

Although Tressel has been tremendously successful in his seven years at Ohio State, he also realizes his team’s image (and, possibly, its psyche) has been damaged over the past two years due not to blue helmets (he’s done very well against Michigan), but orange (Florida in 2007) and yellow (LSU in January) ones.

But Ohio State returns almost every key player from last year’s team and Tressel said he hasn’t noticed a championship game hangover from his players.

“We’ve got a lot of guys who are very interested in getting as good as they can,” he said. “I’ve seen no lull in how hard they’re working or in their intentions.

“But it’s a battle when your playoffs begin in September. That’s just the way it is in college football. The first thing you’ve got to do is make the finals. We have a lot of work to do before we can go thinking and worrying about whether we have a chance to go back there [to the national championship game].”

Ohio State begins the season Aug. 30 by playing host to Youngstown State for the second straight year, then Ohio University before a pivotal road game against national power USC on Sept. 13.

Although they can’t afford to look past their first two opponents, Tressel said his players are aware of the significance of the USC game.

“I think we’d all be lying if we didn’t say that’s going to be something we’re very fortunate to be a part of,” said Tressel. “I’m sure our guys think about that big stage, going away from home to Los Angeles and playing on national television. That’s real.

“But I think they do a good job of reloading and saying, ‘I’m not going to be ready for that big stage unless I have a great workout today and a great workout tomorrow.’ ”

Tressel will have about 25 seniors and about 40 players entering their fourth or fifth year in the program this fall, so he’s confident his team will have the right mindset throughout the season, not just for the big games.

“We have a lot of guys who really know what it takes and know what we need,” he said. “I think we’ll have excellent leadership.”

scalzo@vindy.com