Oct. 1, 1994
The Wildcats led a brilliant offensive attack through the first half. They went into halftime ahead 9-0 on three field goals, including a career-best 52-yarder by kicker Sam Valenzisi.
But the game got sloppy in the second half. Ohio State held NU to minus-11 yards in the third quarter while putting up 17 points of its own.
The Cats scored with five minutes to play on a 5-yard pass by quarterback Tim Hughes – but it wasn’t enough.
Final: Ohio State 17, NU 15.
It was the closest the Cats had come to beating Ohio State in more than 20 years.
It’s a streak, but coach Randy Walker and his Cats hardly wish to acknowledge it. They don’t want to carry a 30-year grudge into The Shoe on Saturday night. They don’t want to look at Ohio State any differently than anyone else they’ll face this season.
But by the same token, the Cats do not want to lose 44-10, the average final score since they last left Columbus as the victors – back in 1971.
Sure, the Cats are better this year – they’re favored to win the Big Ten title – but a streak is a streak.
And on Saturday night the Cats have one of their best shots at snapping it.
Nov. 13, 1971
Ohio State took an early 7-0 lead, but NU countered quickly when Greg Strunk returned a 93-yard kickoff for a touchdown.
But it was NU’s defense, not its special teams, that put on a show for 85,000 Buckeyes fans. The teams traded interceptions and fumbles, but the Cats managed to wipe out Ohio State’s famous rushing game.
Down 10-7 after a Buckeyes field goal, a punt pinned the Cats deep in their own end. But NU’s Al Robinson and Randy Anderson carried the ball 64 yards and stuffed it into the end zone from three yards out.
It was a lead they never lost.
Final: NU 14, Ohio State 10.
Of all the games Alex Agase coached at NU, his 1971 win at Ohio State ranks at the top.
Thirty years later, Agase remembers every moment of that final touchdown drive as if he were still on the field calling the plays. After the Cats’ defense shut down Ohio State’s run game, the offense gave the Buckeyes a taste of their own smash-mouth style.
“We put on a drive of what we called ‘Ohio State football,'” Agase said.
The win came in a different time for the Big Ten – or the Big 2 (Ohio State and Michigan) and the Little 8, as Agase says it was called. Then-Ohio State coach Woody Hayes was a legendary bully to his conference and his team. NU quarterback Maurie Daigneau remembered a scene similar to the one that cost Hayes his job in 1978: Ohio State was trying to drive late in the game when a Buckeyes receiver caught a pass, tried to go out of bounds, but was wrapped up by an NU defensive back. Woody grabbed his player by the jersey and shook him like a rag doll, Daigneau says.
It was a huge win that helped the Cats break the Big 2’s stranglehold on the conference, and Daigneau doesn’t hesitate to call it his most memorable victory. He remembers the euphoria in the locker room after the game and the disappointment the Cats felt when they lost 27-14 the following season.
But if Daigneau had known the Cats wouldn’t come that close for another seven years, he might not have felt as badly as he did.
Nov. 14, 1981
The game was close for the first 20 minutes. NU held Ohio State to a touchdown through the first quarter, and it even put a score on the board when quarterback Mike Kerrigan led an 80-yard touchdown drive with 10 minutes left before halftime. After 20 minutes, the Cats were down 14-6, and things didn’t look so bad.
But in what were possibly the longest 40 minutes in the program’s history, NU sat back and watched the Buckeyes score at will.
It wasn’t the worst loss in school history – it may not have been the worst loss of the season (Iowa beat NU 64-0). Still, the triumph of 1971 seemed so long ago.
Final: Ohio State 70, NU 6.
Walker knows Ohio State football. Not as a player, not as a coach, not yet as a competitor, but as a fan. He knows what it’s like to walk into Ohio Stadium and see the Buckeyes run onto the field as the crowd roars and the band plays.
He knows because in his hometown of Troy, Ohio, (about an hour from Columbus), listening to Ohio State football on Saturday came second only to attending Friday night’s Troy High School games.
“We went to about (one Ohio State) game a year or so,” Walker says. “We’d get tickets from somebody and my brother and I and my mom and dad would go. First thing you’d do is go to St. John Arena and listen to the band play.”
Safety Sean Wieber can relate. His parents are Ohio State alums and season-ticket holders who loaded the family car and drove to Columbus every Saturday. For Wieber, who’s been to countless games in The Shoe, this Saturday is the culminaton of four years of waiting – up to 65 friends and family will be in the crowd to watch him butt heads with his hometown team.
Walker said he stopped being an Ohio State fan in junior high, but both he and Wieber know the pageantry of Ohio Stadium.
“Everything from the band to the stadium to their tradition – as a little kid, it’s a special feeling on Saturday, ” Wieber says.
Nov. 10, 1984
The story was getting old. This was another close game through the first half, but then the wheels came off.
This time, the Cats led 3-0 at the end of the first quarter – then they fell apart.
Just about everything that could go wrong (bungled drives, fumbles, poor punts) did go wrong as the Cats went scoreless for the next 45 minutes.
Final: Ohio State 52, NU 3
Minnesota Vikings coach Dennis Green remembers those games that exposed Ohio State’s mean streak.
“They ran the score up, and they’ve done that many times at Ohio Stadium,” says Green, who coached at NU from 1981-85.
Green has plenty of reason to be miffed, but he plays it cool while recalling the way Ohio State trounced his team. He fell to the Buckeyes four times: The closest he ever got was a 40-28 loss in 1982.
“We played them for about three quarters (that year),” he says.
Green isn’t the only NU coach to remember the Buckeyes’ dominance. NU’s losing streak has outlasted six coaches and hundreds of players.
Headman John Pont (1973-1977) went 0-4 in his tenure, the biggest loss a 60-0 rout. Rick Venturi (1978-1980) went 0-2, once losing 63-0. Francis Peay’s (1986-1991) largest margin of defeat was a 48-7 lashing in 1990 – a close game by comparison. Gary Barnett went 0-5 in his seven seasons.
Other players remember how Ohio State used to stomp them – though less figuratively. Daigneau says the Buckeyes taped running back Mike Adamle’s jersey to the floor of their locker room so they could run over it en route to the field.
While Walker has yet to face Ohio State, other NU coaches have witnessed first-hand what Walker calls “the battle cry of the scarlet and gray.” Defensive backs coach Pat Fitzgerald was a sophomore when NU lost 51-3 in 1994.
Still, Walker insists that he’s ready for an opponent with whom he has a personal history. While head coach at Miami (Ohio), Walker made several returns to North Carolina, where he served as running backs coach and offensive coordinator from 1978-88. He left Chapel Hill, N.C., victorious.
“That was probably the most significant thing for me because I coached there for 10 years,” Walker said. “I grew up, started raising a family.”
His methods for dealing with the past are simple.
“I really think I’m good at erasing all that emotion,” Walker said. “I try to keep my wits about me.”
But Ohio State will be a tougher challenge – and Walker knows it.
Oct. 25, 1997
A bad loss in a bad season. Coming off back-to-back Big Ten Championships, coach Gary Barnett and the Cats (3-6) were struggling as they arrived in Columbus. Even so, the long-awaited matchup would settle a brewing conference rivalry. The two teams had battled for the Big Ten title for two seasons without playing one another.
Again, the Cats went into the break down only 14-6. But by game’s end, NU’s starting quarterback had thrown for fewer yards than Ohio State’s third-stringer. NU’s grand total of eight yards in the third-quarter didn’t
help, either.
The Cats were still stricken with scarlet fever.
Final: Ohio State 49, NU 6.
In the last 30 years, no program has manhandled NU like Ohio State has, but this year’s Cats know they can’t carry grudges into Saturday.
“This is probably (their) year,” Green says. “You have to remind the team that they don’t have to carry the burden from 1981 or 1991 – it’s a whole new year and an opportunity.”
The Buckeyes have had a tough season, and NU comes in with a strong running game, a powerful line and a quarterback who thinks on his feet. Still, as history has proven, a win in Columbus is never a given.
“Ohio State has always been a really powerful football team with tremendous athletes,” Agase says.
One memorable Saturday 30 years ago, Daigneau and his teammates defied the odds and beat those tremendous athletes, answering the battle call of the scarlet and gray.
“What we learned (in 1971) is that we hadn’t won or lost until time had run out and we had more points on the scoreboard than they did,” he says. “We didn’t go down there shaking in our boots. We were convinced we could beat them.”
Funny, Walker has been preaching that same sermon to his Cats.
