In 1968, the Vietnam War was in full swing and Republican Richard Nixon was announced as the president-elect.
Slightly less monumental was the Ohio football team’s perfect 10-0 regular season that played out in the same year. The Bobcats were featured as low as 15th in the Associated Press poll — a compilation they hadn’t been featured in since, leading up to Sunday when they were voted the nation’s 25th-best team.
As the war waned and Nixon was ousted from the White House, the Bobcats’ winning ways fell to the wayside as well, as shown by their three winning seasons during the following decade.
They have finished better than .500 only nine times since.
Of late, the Bobcats are back in the black, as they have posted a 57-40 record since coach Frank Solich’s tenure with Ohio began in 2005. Solich’s .588 winning percentage is second only to former coach Don Peden, who won 121 games for the Bobcats between 1924 and 1946.
The success has been fruitful for Solich, as he has collected performance bonuses totaling $35,000 because of the Bobcats’ winning ways. Last season, Solich pocketed $10,000 because of the Bobcats’ regular season total of 10 wins.
This time around, he’s in the running for a bigger payday, as bonuses of $25,000 loom if the Bobcats are included in the season’s final AP or ESPN/USA Today Coaches Polls.
The season’s conclusion is too far off to realistically speculate, of course, but it’s not far from recent memory that a Mid-American Conference team made its mark on the final polls.
In 2010, Northern Illinois, which eventually fell to Miami in the MAC Championship, was ranked No. 24 in the nation following the conclusion of the regular season.
Historically, the RedHawks are the MAC’s most successful squad on the national scene. They have been ranked for a total of 42 weeks since 1936, when the AP consistently began releasing rankings.
The RedHawks also have appeared as low as 10th in the polls — the best mark of any MAC team.
Ohio has graced opponents’ schedules preceded by a number for only eight weeks in program history, in which it was touted as low as 15th in the country.
The Bobcats are the 114th most historically successful Football Bowl Subdivision team and the sixth-best MAC team, trailing their rival RedHawks, Toledo, Bowling Green, Ball State and recent nemesis Northern Illinois.
Ohio has the least Top 25 appearances of teams making up the current ranking, trailing Rutgers, the next lowest, which has broken into the nation’s elite 34 times.
The Bobcats’ first three MAC opponents — Massachusetts, Buffalo and Akron — have never garnished a vote in the Top 25 poll, while both Eastern Michigan and Western Michigan have yet to be ranked, but have been voted for at least once.
Numbers mean nothing unless the Bobcats continue to put them on the scoreboard as well. Ohio is among the highest-scoring MAC teams, trailing Northern Illinois by a half point per game for the conference lead. It will have to continue to do so to hold its spot on the national scene — that is, if they want 2012 to be remembered as the year of the Bobcat.
Jim Ryan is a sophomore studying journalism and assistant sports editor of The Post. Think the Bobcats will hang around the Top 25 for the remainder of the season? Tell him about it at jr992810@ohiou.edu.
