Athens, Ohio – Ohio University’s Peden Stadium sits right off Highway 682, about the only beauty being the gently rolling green hills of the surrounding southeast Ohio countryside.
The stadium, built in 1929, still seats only 24,000 and inside, the football offices look as industrial as a hospital ward. Few football mementos dot the hallways. Then again, in Ohio football’s 110-year history there hasn’t been much worth remembering.
The head coach is used to better. Much better. Then again, Frank Solich knows it could be worse. It was worse.
“The auditorium where we get all our players to meet was a parquet dance floor,” Solich says with a smile.
Solich is sitting in a barren receivers meeting room in the middle of one of the bigger rebuilding projects in I-A football. When last we left Solich three years ago he was walking off Folsom Field as the nation’s most embattled coach, one who dug deep for one last ounce of redemption to lead his once- mighty Nebraska Cornhuskers to a 31-22 victory over Colorado.
It didn’t save his job. But he has come back, albeit off the big-time football landscape, in these backwoods near the Ohio-West Virginia border. This is where a long spin on the radio dial will reveal nothing but country and Western stations and where the school has proved you can combine serious academics with serious partying.
Residents in this town of 21,000, plus 28,000 students, take more pride in Ohio’s No. 2 ranking among Playboy’s party schools than they do the Bobcats’ football team. That’s understandable, considering last season Solich inherited a program that had 19 losing seasons under five coaches since 1983 and hasn’t been to a bowl since 1968.
He doesn’t look like a Sherpa having to climb another Everest. The diminutive former Nebraska fullback still defies his 61 years. His stomach is flat. His tan face has nary a wrinkle. In a crisp white Ohio Bobcats polo shirt and cream-colored shorts, he looks more like a coach on his first job than one trying to save his career.
“My first year out of Nebraska, I was at Holy Name High School in Omaha,” he says. “I spent two years there. We went from a losing team to a winning team. Then I went to Southeast High School in Lincoln. I spent 11 years there. We built that program fairly quickly. I think if you get everybody believing that it can get done, it can get done.”
The Bobcats haven’t turned the corner yet, but after a 4-7 season that corner no longer looks as if it’s on the dark side of Pluto. Backed by enthusiastic school president Roderick McDavis, an Ohio grad hired just before Solich, and new athletic director Kirby Hocutt, who came from a decent football school (Oklahoma), Ohio is showing signs of going big time.
After hiring Solich, the school raised $1.3 million, which was used to refurbish the locker rooms and training room, complete with a water treadmill. The coaches’ meeting rooms were improved so they weren’t meeting in the press box.
“We had to put up plastic garbage bags to block out the sunlight in the meetings for the linebackers,” Solich says.
His hiring set off a wave of euphoria in a student body that viewed the first half of football games as a cocktail hour before hitting the bars. Even a bizarre driving while intoxicated charge, one he’s still fighting, hasn’t curbed Solich’s popularity. “Got Frank!” T-shirts replaced Ohio State shirts on campus. Season-ticket sales jumped 20 percent to 3,000.
“He’s brought in a new attitude,” Bobcats senior quarterback Austen Everson says. “Everybody’s striving to get better, whether it’s the new training room, the new locker room, new coaches’ offices. Everything’s upgraded. The whole attitude is to bring the program up.”
Solich returned to the national spotlight in his home opener. Playing on national TV in their stadium for the first time, before a school-record crowd of 24,545, the Bobcats upset Pittsburgh in overtime 16-10.
The party school finally had football to party about.
“They burned a couch on the street in front of my house,” Everson says with a laugh. “I actually lost my voice in the game because they were yelling so loud when we had the ball, too.”
Solich ran off the field with less a feeling of redemption than he did joy for a school that gave him a chance. In fact, he says had more satisfaction when he ran off the field in Boulder three years ago.
“And the reason I say that was I thought that football team overcame an awful lot to get ready to play that game and play as hard as we did,” he says.
He’s asked if he thought the Huskers’ win over CU in 2003 would save his job.
“I never thought of it one way or another,” he says. “There were some signs along the way that what was going to happen was going to happen and we didn’t have a great deal of control over that.”
That’s Solich-speak for saying Nebraska athletic director Steve Pederson had an agenda. He fired Solich despite the coach’s 58-19 record, including a 9-3 mark in 2003. Pederson pointed to “creeping mediocrity” in the program, from what was perceived as lackluster recruiting to an option offense.
While he won’t directly attack Pederson, it’s clear Solich won’t invite him to party anytime soon. When Solich mentions the Ohio administration, he talks about “the lack of egos,” a vague reference to Pederson. Ohio made Solich feel welcome in more than just employment.
“You know what? That’s a fact,” he said. “There’s nobody trying to do someone else’s job. There’s no one who thinks that he’s got all the answers.”
But Solich could use a big answer now, like how did he pass out at the wheel of his car outside a restaurant pointing in the wrong direction of a one-way street with the car still in drive? It happened last Nov. 26, the anniversary of his firing at Nebraska. He pleaded no contest, and the shocking story became a mere blip on the national radar. It went away.
But Solich is bringing it back. On June 2 he requested to withdraw his plea. A January drug test in Columbus revealed in a hair sample the presence of gamma hydroxybutyric acid, a date- rape drug known as GHB. GHB can cause everything from unconsciousness to memory loss. Reports vary, but some say Solich had no more than three drinks during a three-hour period. If someone was upset at his high profile or his relatively high salary of $250,000 in one of the poorest counties in Ohio and spiked his drink, it may be revealed at a future court date.
It’s no longer a major issue on campus.
“With students, I think it helped,” says T. David Couch, a sixth-year senior and bartender at Courtside Pizza on Court Street, the main drag on campus. “We’re a party school. That’s all we’re known as. We laughed it off.”
They’ll definitely toast him if he produces the Bobcats’ first winning record in six years. It won’t be easy. During his year off, he toured pro and college training camps, soaking up everything.
“I drew up a ton of pass patterns, of course,” he quipped.
Ohio finished 114th nationally in passing a year ago, and the quarterback job is up for grabs. But Solich has a 1,000-yard rusher in junior Kalvin McRae, improved his shoddy receiving corps and most of the linemen are back. Nine defensive starters return. Victories are possible at Rutgers, Missouri and Illinois.
“We have a lot more team speed,” Solich said. “We’re a lot stronger. We’ve taken some big steps.”
Solich has taken a big step back. Let’s see how fast little Ohio can step forward.
John Henderson can be reached at 303-820-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
