John Cooper's Ohio State legacy was still unwritten in 1990.
His record against Michigan is a grisly sarcophagus filled with bad luck, hubris and an overwhelming, unacceptable amount of what football scientists refer to as big game puckering.
Today, we mostly remember the puckering. But that was not the guy Ohio State hired.
It sought and secured a national recruiter obsessed with winning. Ohio State hired a coach whose teams had finished first or second eight times out of his eleven years leading programs.
Columbus offered him his strongest platform yet, and he worked quickly.