Great post. I tend to think of Cooper as a bridge between the era of Woody and Earle, and JT. He couldn't get over the hump with scUM and some of the bowls, but he really did bring Ohio State back to the national stage.
I was just about to edit my post to say the same thing about being a bridge between the "old guard" and new.
Problem is, he was the anti-Earle...he could recruit like hell but sometimes it seems he couldn't coach for shit.
Now part of that is that the talent won a lot of games in and of itself. The problem is that Cooper's recruiting took a slight dip in the late 90s (meaning, guys who hit their primes from 1999-2001), and his coaching couldn't overcome that. If you are going to say Boston doesn't come to OSU if Earle was there, I could easily counter with I don't think there's a prayer in hell that the 2002 team wins the NC with Cooper as the coach, despite the fact that he basically brought them all here.
True...but he wasn't a good enough coach to do that, which was the problem. I do agree that he breathed life into what had become a somewhat moribund program at the time though...imagine what would happen if we lost a bunch of games to Indiana and a 3-8 team like Wisconsin nowadays.
That's the thing about Cooper, he drives one nuts because you can both love him and hate him at the same time...he got some of the best talent we've ever had, hell beating ND twice, at that time, was one of the greatest things ever to happen here...and then you think of LLLLLoyd and that fucking smirk on his face every year. Fucking. Smirk. Every. Fucking. Year. God I hated that fucker. And by proxy, I hated Cooper for losing to that fucker. But for a lot of other things, he was good for this place.
One of my first memories of my fandom, is the goddamned Liberty Bowl against AFA. I remember being so excited about the game. Then...well. No thirteen year old should be forced to sit through three hours of dreck with a "WTF" look frozen on his face. That was traumatic. Then the friggin' pedtard debacle in '94. scUM in '95 crushed me. Crushed me again in '96. The final straw for me was MSU in '98. What in the blue fuck was that? I was in Spain at the time in support of Operation Desert Fox and was listening on AFN radio. That same "WTF?" look was frozen on my face for two weeks following that bullshit. That was supposed to be the year all of the hell of the previous 10 years was made right. FUCK.
Because it shows the contrast between our semi-dottery uncle who was never quite as good as we hoped he'd be and their guys who lather themselves up in peanut butter and stream midgit porn while wearing their grandma's underwear?
I would not disagree.Problem is, he was the anti-Earle...he could recruit like hell but sometimes it seems he couldn't coach for [Mark May].
I met him a few times, he is a decent man, a nice man, he knows how to relate to kids, he knows the game of football...but it takes a special edge to succeed at a place like Ohio State when it's all on the line in rivalry and bowl games. Unfortunately he didn't have it.
