jimotis4heisman;630334; said:
maybes its me but i dont see any negativity there. what he said was true. and i believe him you need to get breaks, in your schedule and in a handful of games to run the table. if the perception of the university/team was that he had been taking shots would he often times travel with the team and essentially have acess to the extent he does with the team?
say what ever you want about john cooper i know a few things are true.
1 he brought osu into the modern era
2 he brought the team speed concept we are knee deep in now, he made it so every postion had a target time and if you couldnt make it, tough. aka if you couldnt run you werent recruited
3 he changed the big ten, his style team brought the big ten out of the stone age and set the tone what we see now as the "spread" or skilled b10 teams
4 he couldnt beat michigan
5 he coundt get a break, he just never got "lucky"
1-"modern era" is kind of vague, but our program wasn't really in great shape when he left in terms of academics and the product on the field
2-I won't bash past players from his last few teams here, but let's just say skill helps too
3-Actually Joe Tiller did that more than Cooper did
4-obviously true
5-He won plenty of games against Penn State and Notre Dame and Illinois and...seems his luck just happened to be always "bad" the same Saturday every year....coincidence?
Basically, my feelings are that I met Cooper a few times...he was very nice, treated me and the other fans where I was well, gladly signed my helmet, chatted with people, and I certainly don't think he was the horror some people did. I think his problem was, though it sounds cliche', I really think he just didn't get Ohio. At all. He gambled by thinking that recruiting Florida and California and Pennsylvania while letting Ohio kids go elsewhere would work well for him, and he gambled by treating Michigan like every other game. He got burned on both counts. While he certainly had plenty of fine players in the golden days of his era, too many Ohio kids came back to bite us, and the first time he sat on his couch and thought "I don't get it...I beat Penn State, I beat Notre Dame, I finish with only one loss...what the hell is it with the obsession with Michigan?" he was sunk.
Cooper is a Buckeye who devoted years of his life to doing the best he could...I thank him for that and let him go in peace, and I sure am glad I can do that given who we have now.
