IOWA CITY — In the early 1970s, amid the Iowa football team’s 19-year streak without a winning season, the former University of Iowa president Willard Boyd arrived early to a Big Ten meeting and made small talk with his friend Novice Fawcett, the president of Ohio State.
Coach Ray Nagel had just left Iowa. Ohio State, one of college football’s most pedigreed programs, had just been to the Rose Bowl and was a couple years removed from a national championship.
So when Fawcett asked Boyd whom he planned to hire to replace Nagel, Boyd pithily replied with the name of Ohio State’s already legendary coach: “Woody Hayes.