Recruiting of different era built Ohio State's 1968 team - ScarletBuckeye

OSUBasketballJunkie · 02-03-2012, 07:03 AM

Dispatch

Quote:

Bob Hunter commentary: Recruiting of different era built Ohio State's 1968 team

By Bob Hunter
The Columbus Dispatch
Friday February 3, 2012 5:39 AM

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 yesterday.

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.”

Continued.........

PHATBUCK13 · 02-03-2012, 08:58 AM

It's interesting to think about how much time has changed everything in life, even recruiting.....