Against "Bo-stalgia"

You have to give Bo Schembechler and his doctors credit. Having lived 37 years after his first heart attack, he was a miracle of modern medicine and the determination to live that makes it possible for modern medicine to work.

But that doesn't make Bo Schembechler a great football coach.

Schembechler was to football what General Motors was to cars. General Motors thrived for decades because their only competition was Ford. They didn't have to innovate; they didn't have to streamline; they didn't have to care. After all, they could sell 50,000 units of anything at a good profit. GM wasn't a very good company but they didn't have to worry because they could make a lot of money anyway.

Schembechler didn't have to care either. At a time when the Big Ten was the Big Two and the Little Eight, he was in the ideal position of not having to worry about competition. Sitting on prime football recruiting grounds in Michigan and Northern Ohio, Schembechler was always going to have big-time players. Likewise, Ohio State was the only team that Bo had to take seriously every year. As a result, Bo didn't have to worry about keeping up with new defenses, wishbone offenses, or innovations in the passing game. All Bo needed to do was line up his big, fast, and talented players against the smaller and slower guys at Northwestern and Illinois and call the same run left, run right, and run between the tackle plays he had always called. He won every time. Bo didn't need to worry about Ohio State either because Woody Hayes was just as committed to the stale old ways as him.

In many ways, Bo and Woody were like Bear Bryant and the last generation of segregation coaches in the South--great coaches as long as they didn't have to play outside their particular little sandboxes. Likewise, just as the continued idol worship of Bear Bryant masks a deep nostalgia for segregation among Southern whites, the urge to glorify Bo Schembechler masks a longing to return to the days of effortless domination.

It's unfortunate. If there was anything admirable about college football in the seventies (and that's a big "if" given the huge recruiting scandals), it would have to be found in the Southern Cal, UCLA, and the wishbone teams out of the Southwest. Those were the teams that moved the game forward while the work of Darrell Royal, Barry Switzer, John McKay, John Robinson, Terry Donohue, Dick Vermeil, and Bill Walsh turned Bo Schembechler into a nostalgia item long before he retired.