Since folks are getting a bit bored already and it is a long way to September, I can share some Buckeye history for you, especially the younger folks. For me these days, younger means anyone under the age of 50. This idea was triggered by the recent rant about negativity.
I have been following the Buckeyes since the late 1950s. The first specific memory I have is the 1960 NCAA National Championship basketball game. We had to go to my uncle’s home to watch the game as we had a hill between our house and Cleveland thus the TV reception was terrible. Our antenna picked up the Wheeling and Steubenville stations the best but they didn’t have the OSU vs. California game. We watched the Buckeyes win their first national championship in basketball on a small (10” screen) television is a massive cabinet. It was a black and white television with lots of snow in the picture for those familiar with old televisions.
My first football memory is listening to games on the radio as few regular season games were televised. I remember thinking that the Buckeyes had an heir to a tractor fortune in the backfield. It seemed like this guy Massey-Ferguson always had the ball which was fitting since Massey-Ferguson tractors were red. At least that is how it sounded on the radio to a 10 year old. These were probably the 1959 and 1960 seasons when Tom Matte was handing off to Bob Ferguson. Both were first round draft picks, Matte in 1960 and Ferguson in 1961.
The first game I attended in the Shoe was in the fall of 1965 when our high school football team got bleacher tickets for a game. At that time, the open end was bleachers such as might be found at a high school stadium although a lot higher. It must have been some kind of alumni game as fans coming past us had these giant turkey legs that they gave to us. A nice treat for a bunch of football players.
Now for some data on how successful the Buckeyes have been for a VERY LONG period of time. Since Woody Hayes was hired in 1951, the Buckeyes have had at least one week at #1 in the AP Poll in 16 of those 64 years and at least one week in the AP top ten in 48 of those years. That is 25% and 75% respectively. That is incredible sustained excellence for such a long period of time.
Then I wondered how other peer teams have compared in the same period of time. Please note that I used the AP rankings including the pre-season since that was simplest. There are some years when a team was preseason top ten but lost the first game and dropped out thereafter, including the Buckeyes a couple of times. I ignored that to save time.
I chose AP since it was the first of the rankings to wait until after the bowl season. Some years such as 1970 had provided incongruous results. The Buckeyes were undefeated in the regular season that year and finished #1 in the UPI poll which didn’t include bowls. The AP had started using bowls by then and the Buckeyes dropped from #1 after losing the Rose Bowl that season to Stanford and Jim Plunkett.
Here are the number of seasons with at least one week at #1 and one week in the top ten during the 64 year period from 1951 through 2014. Each team had one or more national championships during this time period. The fewest titles is TTUN's one.
OSU – 16/48
Alabama – 17/43
USC – 15/48
Texas – 11/46
Oklahoma – 19/53
Notre Dame – 13/46
Penn State – 7/40
TTUN – 6/48
Other teams I could have considered were LSU, Miami, FSU, and Nebraska but I ran out of time. Plus all of these had some lengthy period of non-relevance such as Miami and FSU before the 1980s. If someone wants to look at those teams, my source was Wikipedia using the football seasons category for each team. This provides a game by game progression with opponents, results, teams ranking in the AP, and opponents ranking in the AP. It even includes location and attendance.
Enjoy.
