Jim Stillwagon was the last player recruited for the best football class Ohio State ever had, and he didn’t even factor in how good the group was before making his decision.
“Nobody knew that,” Stillwagon said Thursday.
Then again, that was the Stone Age. There were no recruiting gurus. No five-star recruits. No high school news conferences. No recruiting websites. No ESPN.
Back in those days, all fans could do was hope that coaches had recruited players who could win championships. They weren’t told which high school players were going to win the Heisman and Outland trophies, or even that in three years their favorite team would be woefully thin at linebacker.
It was like living in the dark, as inconvenient as riding a donkey to work or cooking a microwave dinner over an open fire. But again, this was the Stone Age, the spring of 1967.
“Ranking systems have probably changed recruiting,” said former Ohio State coach Earle Bruce, an assistant on Woody Hayes’ staff that year. “We used to get recommendations from people we trusted and do our evaluation on film. Usually they do jump out at you in the film. They make plays no one can make. … But sometimes we had 8-millimeter films to look at, and they were terrible. You couldn’t tell what the speed was. It was different than 16-millimeter, and you had to project.”
Two days after this year’s national signing day, when we all think we know how every school did in recruiting and have rankings to prove it, it seems remarkable what fans didn’t know in 1967. After a signing day that might have been any other day, no one knew that Ohio State was bringing in a group that would win the 1968 national championship as sophomores and go 27-2 during a three-year period.
The coaches in those days knew good players when they saw them, just as they do now. But they had to count on the recommendations of others to find some of the players, and that didn’t always happen.
When Ohio State assistant coach Larry Catuzzi was recruiting Jack Tatum in New Jersey, he was at a track meet that spring watching Tatum and other athletes. On a slow cinder track, Tatum stumbled out of the blocks in the 100-yard dash but quickly caught his stride and won the race in 9.9 seconds.
“Who’s that?” Arizona State football coach Frank Kush asked Catuzzi, who was standing nearby.
“I don’t know,” Catuzzi lied.
It was a different time. Stillwagon grew up in Mount Vernon, but he was going to school at Augusta (Va.) Military Academy. He didn’t like Ohio State and didn’t think he would even have gotten recruited there if his brother hadn’t played for Jerry Stoltz, who was on the staff at Michigan State.
“[Stoltz] knew about me and he recruited me,” Stillwagon said. “What happened in the Big Ten, if somebody recruited a player, all of the Big Ten recruited him. They didn’t know why. They just wanted to know why Michigan State was recruiting me. So all of sudden, I get a call from Ohio State.”
Stillwagon made a visit to Ohio State because there was no limit on visits — “I made like 40 visits” — and said when he got there, Hayes liked him because he was in military school, had a short haircut and said “yes, sir.”
Stillwagon liked Hayes because he immediately asked him what was the last novel he had read — “I had never read a [bleeping] novel in my life and I said Moby Dick because I had just seen the movie” — and Hayes spent the next 45 minutes lecturing on the subject. He also liked Hayes because he didn’t lie. “He said, ‘I will promise you two things: If you’re good enough, you’ll make it; and if you’re not, you won’t.’ ”
So Stillwagon went to Ohio State, not knowing that Rex Kern was going to be an All-America quarterback, that Tatum would become the national defensive player of the year or that 13 members of that freshman group would be drafted into the NFL.
He didn’t know that five of those players would be among the first 29 picks in the 1971 NFL Draft, and that didn’t even include three All-Americans — Stillwagon, Kern and Mike Sensibaugh — or second-round pick Doug Adams. He didn’t even know that this incoming group of freshmen would be good enough to beat the varsity in scrimmages, but he would soon find out.
“That was unbelievable what was put together with that group,” Bruce said. “When they were freshmen, we could have won the national title. I know that sounds unbelievable, but it’s true.”
It makes you wonder where today’s analysts would have ranked that class on signing day.
Bob Hunter is a sports columnist for the Columbus Dispatch.
