http://www.wsj.com/articles/ohio-states-new-president-tackles-football-1447893940
Ohio State’s New President Tackles Football
Watching the Buckeyes from the president’s box, there’s one big question: How long can this last?
By
Ben Cohen
52 COMMENTS
Columbus, Ohio
Ohio State president Michael Drake, a physician by training, has only been on the job here for 17 months. He was hired away from UC-Irvine, a smaller school on the West Coast that doesn’t even have a football team, much less one responsible for $72 million in revenue last year. Though he had served on the NCAA’s board of directors, and his own father played college football, Drake was a pilgrim on the shores of major college sports. In a story about his hiring, even the local newspaper called him an “unlikely candidate” for the job.
Drake himself admits that at Ohio State “the campus is twice as big, the medical center is twice as big, we have twice as many students and the athletic program is 15 times as large.”
Drake, a bespectacled and mild-mannered 65-year-old who is the university’s first black president, was lured to Columbus largely to help grow the school’s increasingly important medical center. He was something of a departure from the previous president, the affable, outspoken and perpetually bowtied E. Gordon Gee, who once famously joked, after being asked if he might consider firing then-head football coach Jim Tressel, that he was “just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”
On the night before one football game this month, inside an enormous ballroom in the school’s student union, Drake had been tapped to give a speech before a crowd of 800 donors, many of whom had paid handsomely over the years for the privilege of picking at wedge salads while listening to university dignitaries talk about the way forward.
As he spoke to the crowd, Drake did not seem like a man unfamiliar with big-time college sports. He was full of school spirit. His usual conservative suit had been replaced by something else: a checked sports coat in scarlet and gray. After the event, Drake said he rarely wore the jacket, which had been made especially for him. He said the other men to own one were Gene Smith, the Ohio State athletic director, and Archie Griffin, the two-time Heisman Trophy-winning running back who is the school’s most revered football player.
The event that night wasn’t just a standard pep rally. This thing that had brought out all of those alumni, the occasion that had encouraged Drake to break out the Archie Griffin jacket, was a 50th birthday party for Brutus Buckeye, Ohio State’s mascot.
Such is the state of things on the Ohio State campus right now: It’s the kind of moment when an anthropomorphic nut can be feted with a three-course dinner and then bring the house down with his best Whip and Nae Nae.
Ohio State is enjoying an era of good feelings that may be unmatched in the school’s history, according to interviews with officials, donors and students.
By all accounts, this collective contagion was enabled and embodied by the undefeated football team, which won last year’s national championship and is currently ranked No. 3 as it prepares to take on Michigan State and archrival Michigan in the next two weeks. The team is on such a magical run under coach Urban Meyer that fans seem to be inventing problems. One of the complaints making the rounds, for example, is that the Buckeyes aren’t winning games by big enough margins. “This thing is at another level now,” said Smith, the athletic director.
But there have been victories outside Ohio Stadium, too. Undergraduate applications are up 72% since 2010—as are the academic credentials of incoming students as measured by their average ACT composite scores and class rankings. The school’s endowment has nearly doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, the city of Columbus, once derided as “Cow-lumbus” for its general lack of glamour, has the state’s healthiest economy with unemployment dropping to pre-recession levels as hip new Brooklynesque entertainment districts pop up with pour-over coffee places and cold-pressed juice shops.
Alex Shumate, a Columbus attorney and university trustee, said the last five years have given Ohio State “the momentum and confidence to believe we’re going to be one of the most-talked about universities in the country—not just the most talked-about football team.”
If there’s any one lingering question about this place, though, it’s something a little more existential: Is Ohio State’s sense of contentment different this time, or is it still an extension of the football team?
During a football game against Minnesota this month, Drake sat on the aisle of his open-air, heated suite. On the field below, the Buckeyes were on their way to a record 30th straight Big Ten win, continuing their unbeaten stretch dating back to last year.
Drake came to Columbus just as the college-football money spigots had opened up with a new round of lucrative television deals. The growing scale of the institutions has forced school presidents to take on issues their predecessors never imagined. As Drake mingled with boosters in his box, Missouri’s football players were only hours away from demanding the ouster of that school’s president, Timothy Wolfe, and ultimately having their demands met. The most serious concern of Drake’s tenure so far only involved football tangentially: The school’s famous marching band was hit with allegations of improper behavior and found to have mocked Holocaust victims in a parody songbook, which resulted in the firing of the band’s director.
Drake also inherited a school that is on the rise academically. Established as a land-grant university that would admit every Ohio resident, Ohio State began selective admissions in the 1980s. The school now enrolls about 7,000 freshmen—the entire student body swells to about 45,000 undergraduates—and their average ACT scores are equivalent to that of the freshmen at Texas. The school has now reached a point academically that allows for administrators to speak openly about a goal that would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago: They want it to be a top-10 public university.
“Football is more visible,” Drake said. “But we also think about the rest of the university and feel it has to be balanced.” The goal, he said, is a school that “looks at things in the proper perspective.”
And yet football at Ohio State is still everywhere. Even the city’s top pop-music radio station, between playing songs by Adele and Justin Bieber, plays highlights from the Buckeyes’ national-title win. “It doesn’t define the university,” said Ohio State donor Jay Schottenstein, the chairman and CEO of Columbus-based Schottenstein Stores Corp. “It unifies the whole town. That’s what the football team does.”
During the game, Drake bounced around his box, bee-lining from one donor to the next while sneaking bites of dinner and a sliver of red-velvet cake. He has given up on trying to watch the entire game—so he has learned to follow along by listening. In the middle of one conversation, as the Buckeyes completed a 44-yard pass play, Drake paused to watch the slightly delayed television feed. “That was almost a scoring roar,” he said.
At times, Drake seems a bit awestruck and a little bemused by the spectacle, as if he is being sucked into the arms of an institution he was chosen to lead because of his otherness. Before kickoff he had gone down to the field to watch the Buckeyes warm up from behind the end zone. “It must be a great challenge to be 19 years old and to run out into a place where there are 100,000 people looking at you and watching everything you do,” he said later.
Trailed by a security detail, he climbed into the stands to take selfies with students, and then he came back down to make small talk with recruits. As he walked away, one football staffer pointed to Drake, bragging to a hulking kid that Ohio State wants for its football team: “See that guy in the red? He’s the president of our university.”
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
Ohio State’s New President Tackles Football
Watching the Buckeyes from the president’s box, there’s one big question: How long can this last?
By
Ben Cohen
Ben Cohen
The Wall Street Journal
CANCEL- BiographyBen Cohen
- @bzcohen
- Google+
- ben.cohen@wsj.com
52 COMMENTS
Columbus, Ohio
Ohio State president Michael Drake, a physician by training, has only been on the job here for 17 months. He was hired away from UC-Irvine, a smaller school on the West Coast that doesn’t even have a football team, much less one responsible for $72 million in revenue last year. Though he had served on the NCAA’s board of directors, and his own father played college football, Drake was a pilgrim on the shores of major college sports. In a story about his hiring, even the local newspaper called him an “unlikely candidate” for the job.
Drake himself admits that at Ohio State “the campus is twice as big, the medical center is twice as big, we have twice as many students and the athletic program is 15 times as large.”
Drake, a bespectacled and mild-mannered 65-year-old who is the university’s first black president, was lured to Columbus largely to help grow the school’s increasingly important medical center. He was something of a departure from the previous president, the affable, outspoken and perpetually bowtied E. Gordon Gee, who once famously joked, after being asked if he might consider firing then-head football coach Jim Tressel, that he was “just hopeful the coach doesn’t dismiss me.”
On the night before one football game this month, inside an enormous ballroom in the school’s student union, Drake had been tapped to give a speech before a crowd of 800 donors, many of whom had paid handsomely over the years for the privilege of picking at wedge salads while listening to university dignitaries talk about the way forward.
As he spoke to the crowd, Drake did not seem like a man unfamiliar with big-time college sports. He was full of school spirit. His usual conservative suit had been replaced by something else: a checked sports coat in scarlet and gray. After the event, Drake said he rarely wore the jacket, which had been made especially for him. He said the other men to own one were Gene Smith, the Ohio State athletic director, and Archie Griffin, the two-time Heisman Trophy-winning running back who is the school’s most revered football player.
The event that night wasn’t just a standard pep rally. This thing that had brought out all of those alumni, the occasion that had encouraged Drake to break out the Archie Griffin jacket, was a 50th birthday party for Brutus Buckeye, Ohio State’s mascot.
Such is the state of things on the Ohio State campus right now: It’s the kind of moment when an anthropomorphic nut can be feted with a three-course dinner and then bring the house down with his best Whip and Nae Nae.
Ohio State is enjoying an era of good feelings that may be unmatched in the school’s history, according to interviews with officials, donors and students.
By all accounts, this collective contagion was enabled and embodied by the undefeated football team, which won last year’s national championship and is currently ranked No. 3 as it prepares to take on Michigan State and archrival Michigan in the next two weeks. The team is on such a magical run under coach Urban Meyer that fans seem to be inventing problems. One of the complaints making the rounds, for example, is that the Buckeyes aren’t winning games by big enough margins. “This thing is at another level now,” said Smith, the athletic director.
But there have been victories outside Ohio Stadium, too. Undergraduate applications are up 72% since 2010—as are the academic credentials of incoming students as measured by their average ACT composite scores and class rankings. The school’s endowment has nearly doubled in the last five years. Meanwhile, the city of Columbus, once derided as “Cow-lumbus” for its general lack of glamour, has the state’s healthiest economy with unemployment dropping to pre-recession levels as hip new Brooklynesque entertainment districts pop up with pour-over coffee places and cold-pressed juice shops.
Alex Shumate, a Columbus attorney and university trustee, said the last five years have given Ohio State “the momentum and confidence to believe we’re going to be one of the most-talked about universities in the country—not just the most talked-about football team.”
If there’s any one lingering question about this place, though, it’s something a little more existential: Is Ohio State’s sense of contentment different this time, or is it still an extension of the football team?
During a football game against Minnesota this month, Drake sat on the aisle of his open-air, heated suite. On the field below, the Buckeyes were on their way to a record 30th straight Big Ten win, continuing their unbeaten stretch dating back to last year.
Drake came to Columbus just as the college-football money spigots had opened up with a new round of lucrative television deals. The growing scale of the institutions has forced school presidents to take on issues their predecessors never imagined. As Drake mingled with boosters in his box, Missouri’s football players were only hours away from demanding the ouster of that school’s president, Timothy Wolfe, and ultimately having their demands met. The most serious concern of Drake’s tenure so far only involved football tangentially: The school’s famous marching band was hit with allegations of improper behavior and found to have mocked Holocaust victims in a parody songbook, which resulted in the firing of the band’s director.
Drake also inherited a school that is on the rise academically. Established as a land-grant university that would admit every Ohio resident, Ohio State began selective admissions in the 1980s. The school now enrolls about 7,000 freshmen—the entire student body swells to about 45,000 undergraduates—and their average ACT scores are equivalent to that of the freshmen at Texas. The school has now reached a point academically that allows for administrators to speak openly about a goal that would’ve been unthinkable a decade ago: They want it to be a top-10 public university.
“Football is more visible,” Drake said. “But we also think about the rest of the university and feel it has to be balanced.” The goal, he said, is a school that “looks at things in the proper perspective.”
And yet football at Ohio State is still everywhere. Even the city’s top pop-music radio station, between playing songs by Adele and Justin Bieber, plays highlights from the Buckeyes’ national-title win. “It doesn’t define the university,” said Ohio State donor Jay Schottenstein, the chairman and CEO of Columbus-based Schottenstein Stores Corp. “It unifies the whole town. That’s what the football team does.”
During the game, Drake bounced around his box, bee-lining from one donor to the next while sneaking bites of dinner and a sliver of red-velvet cake. He has given up on trying to watch the entire game—so he has learned to follow along by listening. In the middle of one conversation, as the Buckeyes completed a 44-yard pass play, Drake paused to watch the slightly delayed television feed. “That was almost a scoring roar,” he said.
At times, Drake seems a bit awestruck and a little bemused by the spectacle, as if he is being sucked into the arms of an institution he was chosen to lead because of his otherness. Before kickoff he had gone down to the field to watch the Buckeyes warm up from behind the end zone. “It must be a great challenge to be 19 years old and to run out into a place where there are 100,000 people looking at you and watching everything you do,” he said later.
Trailed by a security detail, he climbed into the stands to take selfies with students, and then he came back down to make small talk with recruits. As he walked away, one football staffer pointed to Drake, bragging to a hulking kid that Ohio State wants for its football team: “See that guy in the red? He’s the president of our university.”
Write to Ben Cohen at ben.cohen@wsj.com
