Indiana has beaten Ohio State twice since 1951. Those wins can be magic.
About two decades ago in a living room on Grant Street in Elkhart along the northern roof of Indiana, a man in his 30s took out a treasure of a VHS tape and popped it in for another of its occasional spins. A roomful watched and chattered: the man’s four young kids, the family’s great friends the Luccheses, maybe an uncle or two from up the street. The tape showed a football game from almost two decades before that - 1987 - and as it whirred it reached a familiar point that prompted the man to say:
“Hey, guys, watch what I’m about to do here.”
The 21-year-old version of himself was about to do something on the tape that many would perceive as fairly close to berserk. While playing quarterback for that peasant Indiana at a strapping 6-foot-3 and 218 pounds, and wearing No. 11 in road white, and with his offense backed up at its own 2-yard line with a heady but precarious 17-10 lead after a doozy of a 61-yard punt from a Tom Tupa, and with Ohio State’s spine-chilling Horseshoe of a stadium disparaging the visitors with distracting bad vibes, and with the referees conferring over something, this Dave Schnell was about to step back a bit into the end zone, move his hands like something of an orchestra conductor and encourage the Buckeye-bent audience to louden further if it wished.
Bring it on, he essentially said, and so after a good budge to the 8-yard line and a punt, his coach, Bill Mallory, would ask why the hell he did that, and Schnell would reply by quoting what the coach himself had implored so many times: “You’ve got to have poise!”
It became a telltale moment of a game with a meaning even broader than the memorable day for Schnell and Mallory and the great running back Anthony Thompson and the excellent wide receiver Ernie Jones and a swell defense in their rainy and shocking 31-10 win in Columbus on that Oct. 10, 1987.
It reinforced one of the peculiar realities of peculiar old college football.
It displayed the nutty construct of one-sided “rivalries.”
For so much of the 155 years of the sport, people have trudged to stadiums for certain matchups with a clear idea of the impending outcome while everyone treats this walk toward the suspenseless like some rational human behavior. Habitual old series carry harrowing numerals, such as Alabama’s record against Mississippi State (86-18-3) or Mississippi (55-10-2), or Oklahoma’s lead against Iowa State (80-7-2), Nebraska’s against Kansas (91-23-3) or Kansas State (78-15-2), Notre Dame’s against Navy (81-13-1) or Southern California’s against Oregon State (64-12-4). Among all these parched sorts traversing the desert, Indiana has a distinctive place: It stands 11-62 against Michigan and 12-79-5 against Ohio State, for two things, making it curious how the fresh and sudden No. 5 Hoosiers of 2024 (10-0) have beaten Michigan and prepare to play at No. 2 Ohio State (9-1) on Saturday in Columbus.
Anyone with the bent nature to study Indiana’s very mere 12 wins over Ohio State since 1901 will note soil even more arid than imagined. Five of the wins came between 1901 and 1913 (by which time Indiana stood 5-0-1 against Ohio State), a sixth happened in 1924, and four more happened between 1937 and 1951. From 1952 to 2023, the long terrain yawns with a bleak, bleak bleakness. The scoreless tie of 1959 and 27-27 tie of 1990 count as mild aberrations. Only that 31-10 win in 1987 on the VHS and a 41-7 win the following year in Bloomington count as mirth.
The snobbery that gets baked into such a routine arrangement came full force in the postgame words of Ohio State Coach Earle Bruce on that day in 1987, when Indiana busted out of a 10-10 halftime tie for its 31-10 win and outgained Ohio State 406-264. “I’ve known about Ohio State football since I was a freshman here in 1949,” Bruce told reporters in Columbus. “This is the darkest day in Ohio State football since I’ve been associated with it. You saw an Ohio State football team that in the second half got the devil knocked out of them.” He credited Indiana for its preparation even as his tailback, James White, said in the Associated Press account, “In this tradition at Ohio State, Indiana doesn’t beat you.”
Yet there’s something else tucked into the mirth and the snobbery, something that brings value to these oozy, lopsided traditions. It’s strange, but here goes: It’s as if all the years of hopeless formality, all the years with the drumbeat of predictable defeat, shovel meaning onto the rare occasions when somebody snaps the streaks. It’s as if those rare wins would lack something had they not the precedent of the 31 winless tries that preceded the 31-10, or the winless 28 tries still building today after that last non-loss in 1990.
“Oh, I mean, it had a lot of value to him,” said Schnell’s son Spencer, who played wide receiver for Ohio University and Illinois State and played for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. “He used to always preach to us when we were younger, ‘Hey, you have to go into these games and not think you’re playing the big dog.” He saw it as a way of life, a benefit well beyond football. “He loved to talk about those stories,” Spencer Schnell said, “because he wanted people to be able to say that if [he] could do it, you could do it.”
Dave Schnell had been a prized recruit out of Elkhart. He had chosen Indiana over such possibilities as the newfound dynasty of Miami because of his bond with Mallory, intensified with Mallory’s attendance of a memorial service for Schnell’s father weeks before Signing Day. “He adored IU,” Spencer Schnell said. “I mean, he loved Bloomington. He loved everything about Indiana.” As part of happy life in Bloomington, he would hand off often to Thompson, wise given the latter’s 4,965 career rushing yards, including the 1,793 of 1989 that left Thompson a close second behind Andre Ware in Heisman Trophy voting. Thompson got 128 that day in 1987 in Columbus, 190 in 1988 against Ohio State in Bloomington. He would play in five NFL seasons.
Schnell would go to the Buffalo Bills for camp as an undrafted free agent, but he would return home having found pro football a bit too much of a business. He then would do as do most former college football players: He would work in a different field - in his case, insurance. By Spencer’s description, Dave was “high-energy,” a “storyteller,” a “fun guy” who would “glow up a room when he walked in,” and who “always liked to keep things light.” He hunted, fished, camped, took the kids to a lake house in Michigan, ice-fished when that presented itself, cooked ribs on grills, hosted pool parties, coached middle-schoolers at football. “Everywhere we went in our hometown, it always seemed like everybody knew who he was,” Spencer Schnell said. He watched Indiana football and basketball as Hoosiers often do: with the sound down and Indiana broadcaster Don Fischer on the call. He often lamented that the football stadium looked unfilled on TV and would say, “We used to fill the stadium all the way up to the corners.”
At his Indiana sports Hall of Fame induction in 2010, Mallory and Thompson represented him, for he had become too ill with leukemia to attend. He died at 44 in May 2011 after a four-year battle, and 13 years later, that stadium has gone full, a fullness it might know for even a home playoff game, for which Schnell’s three sons - Sam, Spencer and Vinnie - already have booked a hotel just in case. They’ve been watching, and they’ve been watching with relish and meaning, often together in Charlotte where Spencer and Vinnie reside. “Dad used to talk about Indiana football and how they should play,” Spencer said, and clearly this is how they should play.
Their house on Grant Street didn’t brim with mementos of that day in 1987 or otherwise, but the VHS tape of Oct. 10, 1987, did play sometimes. Watch what I’m about to do. “He’d have a nice little grin on his face,” Spencer said, “and then as he did it [on the tape], Laura [Lucchese, family friend] would be looking at him and say, ‘Oh, Dave, you’re such an ass,’ and he would be saying, ‘I know.’” He, after all, had lived one of the meaningful constructs in his beloved sport. He had lived a Saturday to exceed so many other Saturdays, a Saturday in the rain in Columbus, when his Hoosiers accomplished something shocking, and when 90,000 tried to torment him, and when he asked them if they’d torment still more.
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