Blue White Illustrated

Buckeye fan and give birth to two sons who would grow up to be clones of their father, but that's another story. Dayton is about an hour's drive south- west of Columbus, and the fringe of our television audience overlapped the pe- riphery of the Columbus market. So it was natural for our station to send a two-man crew to cover Ohio State's games in the Horseshoe, and sometimes an away game. That September Satur- day, I traveled with the crew to Colum- bus. When I walked into the press box, some of my Penn State friends were sur- prised to see me. It was like a mini-re- union for me and became even more enjoyable when I ran into my old friend Beano Cook, the colorful, wisecracking former sports information director at Pitt who had joined the ABC Sports public relations team in 1966. ABC was televising the game to a regional audi- ence. This was Ohio State's first game of the 1978 season. Penn State already had played and won two games but had been so unimpressive that it had slipped from No. 2 in the preseason polls to No. 5. The Lions needed a 23-yard field goal by Matt Bahr with 15 seconds left to beat 21-point underdog Temple, 10-7, in Philadelphia, and then they defeated undermanned Rutgers, 26-10, at Beaver Stadium thanks to a school-record- tying four field goals by Bahr. All the hype leading up to the Penn State game was about Ohio State and particularly whether its highly recruited, highly publicized 18-year-old true freshman quarterback Art Schlichter would start over the veteran Rod Gerald. Gerald was the master of the triple-op- tion and a speedy runner who had taken the Buckeyes to a 9-3 record and an ap- pearance in the 1977 Sugar Bowl. Schlichter was a phenom, an exceptional passer who was already being touted in some quarters as a future Heisman Trophy winner. He had never lost a game at Miami Trace High School, a mere 40 miles south of Columbus, and even Joe Pa- terno, among dozens of other collegiate coaches, had tried to recruit him. However, Schlichter did not fit Hayes's traditional "three yards and a cloud of dust" offense. He was a passer who could run, rather unlike Woody's other quarterbacks, who tended to be runners who could pass. Writers speculated that it would be totally contrary to Woody's obstinate, rock-solid personality and lifetime beliefs to abruptly do a 180-de- gree turn with his offense by starting Schlichter. Even with the starting quar- terback a question mark, Ohio State still had enough talent for the oddsmakers to rate the No. 6 Buckeyes as 3- to 6-point favorites. I don't remember it raining that day, but years later when I was doing re- search for my first book, The Penn State Football Encyclope- dia, I discovered it had rained most of the morning, and the artificial turf was soaked and slick when Ohio State kicked off to Penn State. The third- largest crowd in the history of Ohio Stadium, 88,202, watched as the Buckeye defense stopped a Lion drive past midfield, forc- ing a punt that gave Ohio State the ball at its own 20-yard line. Everyone in the Horseshoe looked at the Buckeye sideline. The defense delivers As Marino Paracenzo of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette wrote, "Woody Hayes provided an earthquake. The old leopard changed his spots." Schlichter trotted onto the field to take the snap under center, with Gerald lined up at split end on the right side. After the game, a somewhat flustered Hayes told a skepti- cal media with a straight face, "We de- cided to start Schlichter because Gerald had been out most of the preseason." Frankly, I don't remember that first Ohio State offensive series, but there's a 10-minute highlight video on YouTube that shows what occurred: On the first DYNAMIC DUO Matt Millen (60) and Larry Kubin played major roles in Penn State's success against the Buckeyes. The Lions gave up only 182 pass- ing yards and inter- cepted Art Schlichter five times. Photo cour- tesy of Pattee and Pa- terno Library Archives

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