College football is a fickle sport for a whole host of reasons, but maybe one of the biggest is the very finite time that players have to try and make an impact on their teams. Unless you're an immediate superstar, there's a good chance that most of your career is spent riding the bench, just waiting for someone to be dumb enough or injured enough to give you a chance at glory.
Or, alternatively, you actually are really good, but just stuck behind a whole host of even better players on the depth chart. This is the kind of situation that comes up a lot at schools like Ohio State, because the amount of talent means that it can be next to impossible for a truly talented player to make an impact in the long run.
And as fans, we always have favorites. Players that we pick out of the incoming freshman class as The Next Big Thing, that we can hang out hats on and crow about loudly to disinterested friends and family members. It's easier to look at a five-star super fire thing kind of player and do this, but it's also a lot more fun to find a diamond in the rough that ends up becoming an All-American.
Well, after many dozens of minutes of research, I'm happy to tell you that... actually doesn't really happen often. At Ohio State, at least. But what does happen is that sometimes players, even recruiting busts, occasionally have their moment in the sun (albeit against really crappy teams), and if they happened to be the horse you randomly picked when they were freshman, that makes that game just that much better. Here's a few of those kind-of-success stories.
THE GHOST LIVES
Ray Small was and is a lot of things. Convicted criminal, failed NFL free agent, dad, probably some positive character traits that we don't know about because he treated Jim Tressel's doghouse like Clint Eastwood treated Alcatraz back in the day.
He picked up his spooky nickname because he haunted Ohio Stadium like a vengeful spirit, making occasional appearances as a competent football player (usually in the spring) and then fading away into the ether.
For one game, however, Ray Small was in fact a corporeal being, to the tune of six catches for 70 yards and a touchdown against a semi-game 2007 Purdue team that was actually ranked (!) at the time of the game. He even had a handful of punt returns for, well, okay, negligible yardage, but they happened, dammit! Small even got in the recap:
Ohio State stopped Purdue to start the game, then scored on its first possession. Boeckman threw a 26-yard touchdown pass to Ray Small to finish a nine-play, 87-yard drive that gave the Buckeyes a 7-0 lead.
"Who is this Ray Small person?" people surely must've thought, intrigued. "I must know more!"
Well they never did. The only time Small came close to replicating that stat line was a few years later in a loss... against Purdue. Fate is a harsh mistress.
JOE BAUSERMAN DID A THING
For one brief, fleeting moment, Ohio State fans could've been forgiven for thinking that ol' Joey B was going to turn into something resembling a competent quarterback. I mean, we did kind of for about a week there.
And it was largely on the basis of his performance against Akron in the opening week of 2011. I remember watching that game, steeling myself for a season without Jim Tressel and competent quarterbacking, and got rained on by Bauserbombs for three hours or so. I mean, yeah, those hopes would be dashed the following week as Joe Basuerman played like Joe Bauserman, but for one glorious game of football, he three for three touchdowns, ran for another, and made people think that things were gonna be maybe kind of okay for a while.
Again, wrong. But don't tell me that you didn't enjoy Bauserman being competent, at least for a little bit; it's like a solar eclipse or Haley's Comet in that you probably will only experience it once or twice in your life, and it's something to tell your very lame grandchildren.
ROSS IS BOSS
Lydell Ross had over 2300 yards as an Ohio State running back, which isn't too shabby until you find out that it took him nearly 600 carries to get there. He's probably the worst four year contributor that I've ever seen at Ohio State, at any position, but there were a few rare moments when the dude would wake up on the right side of the bed and make teams like your Cincinnatis and Bowling Greens and Indianas pay for not remembering the name Lydell.
Actually, what's funny (or not) about Ross is that about 25% of his total career yardage came against those three teams, and his career high came on a crappy October day in Bloomington where he rumbled for 167 yards and made this quote:
"I was reading the holes and I had choices," Ross said. "I was cutting and I could have cut a second time, too, sometimes. I could have had 200 yards today."
Mmm delicious hubris. Lydell would have a few more decent games after this, but this three touchdown day was the high water mark of his career.
WHY NOT JUSTIN ZWICK?
I remember getting into a heated argument with a Michigan fan coworker around 2003 or 2004 about whether Justin Zwick would have a better college football career than Matt Gutierrez. We were both pretty stupid and wrong, but I'm going to go ahead and use the nailbiting Marshall game victory as proof positive that I'm less wrong than he was.
Zwick was erratic during the entire game, but like a kid who figures out Ken's shoryuken in Street Fighter, Zwick figured out that Santonio Holmes was really really good at catching footballs and passes to the future Steeler accounted for 224 of Zwick's 324 total passing yards.
What's funny and ultimately appropriate is that Zwick's coming out party was derailed by the game being won by a Mike Nugent 55 yard field goal, thus ensuring that Columbus always would be a place kicker's town, baby! Screw that forward pass crap, we wanna see how far you can boot it!
Ultimately, none of the players listed above went on to do a whole hell of a lot in a Buckeye uniform. It probably says something that Lydell Ross had the best career out of the group. But still, I believe that college football is about the unexpected, and while none of these guys got to the heights that they felt they were capable of, I still think watching them try was fun as hell.
Occasionally.
