By Bill Livingston, The Plain Dealer The Plain Dealer
View full size Stephen Savoia, Associated Press There's never been any hiding of Mike Vrabel's passion for Ohio State, and the Buckeyes will need that enthusiasm from their new linebackers coach and interim head coach Luke Fickell to overcome their troubled off-season this fall, says Bill Livingston.
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- Luke Fickell and Mike Vrabel were best friends almost a generation ago. They were also big, tough, block-shedding players who gave big problems to whomever Ohio State played.
Now Ohio State has presented them with a big opportunity and an even more outsized task.
After some uncertain moments and some serious backtracking in their support of disgraced former coach Jim Tressel, the leaders of Ohio State finally found their way to the real architects of the program's success, their proud ex-players.
Gene Smith, the athletic director, and E. Gordon Gee, OSU's president, leaned on Fickell in the darkest hour. With Fickell's appointment on Memorial Day on the heels of Tressel's forced resignation, he becomes the first former player to be head football coach in Columbus since Harry Truman was in the White House and Wes Fesler, a three-time Ohio State All-American in the Roaring '20s, was on the sideline.
Fickell, as ex-players do, quickly leaned on an old teammate. Vrabel, his former roommate, was a defensive end who played on the same line in the 1990s when Fickell was the nose guard. Vrabel overshadowed his new boss then, but, after becoming one of the great hybrid defenders in the NFL, he was named Monday to the position of linebacker coach Fickell had vacated.
Everything about the situation is temporary. Most observers expect Fickell to be an interim coach only, with Urban Meyer or one of the Stoops brothers or someone else off a wish list of big names taking over next season.
The Vrabel hiring followed his NFL retirement by hours and brought its own touches of controversy. Vrabel had a legal dust-up in his playing days in 1995 after he and another player fought with a Michigan fan outside a Kent bar. The fan was taunting the two Buckeyes about Tim Biakabutuka's huge game in Michigan's upset victory.
That youthful indiscretion was followed by charges last year that Vrabel stole beer/forgot to pay his tab at a casino in Indiana. Those charges will be dropped if nothing else happens in the next six months.
The hiring is a sop to Fickell, but Vrabel's coaching future is acknowledged to be bright. Both ex-players understand that only overachieving on the field can restore the pride to a humbled program. They made Saturday afternoons special in Columbus in their day. They are the ones who, at a very elemental level, know what it takes to do so again.
Fickell played with enough unquenchable fire that he started in the 1997 Rose Bowl with a torn pectoral muscle and made two tackles in the taut, thrilling, last-minute victory over previously unbeaten Arizona State.
Concerns about how Fickell will handle technical details of the job will also be lessened because this is a season when passion could count for more than calculation.
Fickell and Vrabel both know that adversity is not only a hurdle to surmount, it can be a weapon to use. There are still very good players at Ohio State. Not all of them are marking time until their five-game memorabilia sale suspensions are up. If ever a team ought to have a singular purpose -- playing not to prove points to NFL scouts or to justify national accolades, but for pride -- it should be this one.
Vrabel, for his part, was a fast, smart, standout player who was willing to do whatever it took for the team. He moved from defensive end at OSU to linebacker in the NFL, then from the outside to the less glamorous inside linebacker position. He baffled defenders as a goal-line receiver. He was one of the most versatile players in the league.
Vrabel also has a quick, creative football mind that led him to grill his coaches about the intent behind various schemes and to offer suggestions that were sometimes put in the game plan. Bill Belichick said he never coached a player more prepared to make the transition to coaching than Vrabel, who was practically a player-coach at the end of his career with a young Kansas City team.
His three Super Bowl rings with the Patriots will be recruiting magnets for Ohio State. Also, anybody who could talk football as a near-equal with Eric Mangini and Belichick is obviously going to have a handle on the technical side of the game.
In a landscape of collapse, in a season of scandal, Fickell and Vrabel are not only supporting each other, as they often did on the field. They must also shore up a damaged program and restore its great expectations.
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