Which Buckeye great would you honor with a statue outside Ohio Stadium?
If Ohio State decided to honor someone with a statue outside Ohio Stadium, former coach Woody Hayes would be the people's choice.Columbus -- When Ohio State reaches Madison on Saturday, the Buckeyes will find two statues guarding the entrance to Camp Randall Stadium -- current and former athletic directors Barry Alvarez and Pat Richter bronzed for eternity outside the home of the Badgers.
If the Buckeyes miss Alvarez and Richter there, they might run across them somewhere else. They're both still around, Alvarez, who is the winningest football coach in school history, as the current AD and Richter as a fairly recent retiree who hired Alvarez as football coach 20 years ago.
Those statues went up four years ago, and now college football is on a statue streak, with current-day notables like Florida Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops and Alabama coach Nick Saban among those ready to be replicated. But in the Big Ten, for the most part, less has been more when it comes to building lifelike monuments to legends of the game.
In addition to the Wisconsin duo, only four other Big Ten sportsmen have been honored by full-sized statues -- Red Grange at Illinois, Nile Kinnick at Iowa, Magic Johnson at Michigan State and Joe Paterno at Penn State. And the two schools with the greatest athletic histories, Ohio State and Michigan, have no plans to join the crowd.
"Our place has never been overt in terms of publicity or adulation," Michigan spokesman Bruce Madej said. "We talk about the University of Michigan, and that it. It's always the team, the team, the team. We don't individualize. That's how we believe things should be done."
On this, the gridiron adversaries seem to be in lock step. Michigan just finished a $226 million stadium renovation, and while statues were discussed, Madej said they were never seriously considered. Ohio State Athletic Director Gene Smith said there are no serious current statue talks at Ohio State, and OSU senior vice president for administration and planning Jeff Kaplan said that part of the issue is the overwhelming number of candidates, mentioning off the top of his head two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin; Chic Harley, the football star who helped create the passion for OSU football a century ago; iconic coach Woody Hayes; and international track and field legend Jesse Owens.
Two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin would certainly deserve consideration to be honored with a statue. Here is running against Michigan during the 10-10 tie in 1973. "Where do you start and where do you stop?" Kaplan said.
There is a life-size statue of golf legend Jack Nicklaus, but that's in the Nicklaus Museum at the edge of campus. It was commissioned by Golf Magazine when he was honored as the golfer of the century and really isn't directly associated with the university. The only statue of an individual on campus is of former university president William Oxley Thompson in front of the library that also bears his name. The abstract sculpture "Celebration of a Champion" was dedicated in 1984 and rests outside Ohio Stadium, but many fans who walk past on game day may not realize the four pyramids honor Owens and are inscribed with quotes and lists of his accomplishments.
A bronze Red Grange in a leather helmet with a football tucked under his arm, for instance, is a little more straight forward. Dedicated in 2009 outside Memorial Stadium at the University of Illinois, it's the latest statue addition in the Big Ten.
"It was an easy decision for us," said Illinois associate athletics director Warren Hood. "Nobody else stood out like Red Grange."
That was because the stadium renovation project at Illinois was built around Grange, who was a star in the '20s when Memorial Stadium first opened. Hood said fans have welcomed the statue with open arms, "but the debate already started as soon as we put it up," Hood said. "It wasn't up half an hour and it was 'Who are we going to do next?' That's the world we live in."
Linebacking legend Dick Butkus is the next most obvious choice for Illinois, but Hood said nothing is in the works. As with Grange, Iowa had a similarly easy choice with its statue honoring Nile Kinnick, the school's only Heisman Trophy winner who died in flight training for World War II. Other schools, like Oklahoma, have erected statues for every one of their Heisman winners. Any Ohio State Heisman garden would be six strong, but Harley, the school's Grange equivalent as an early star who helped lay the foundation for the program, might be the most appropriate statue recipient. An outside push for Harley has existed to varying degrees over the years.
"There are always preliminary discussions about someone or something," Ohio State's Kaplan said. "But nothing that really has legs."
While a school like Ohio State will always have plenty of options, choosing to sit out the statue trend is always an option, too.
"First, it's not an inexpensive thing to do if you're going to do it right," Illinois' Hood said. The Grange statue cost around $350,000. "And I think it needs to be someone who stood alone."