The Last Mad Dash of Earl Bruce

Ann Arbor, Michigan – November 21, 1987

The sky over Ann Arbor was a dull, Midwestern bruised purple, the kind of sky that stares back at you with dead eyes before it dumps snow, regret, or a loss to Michigan. Welcome to the Big House, where 100,000 drunk and frozen partisans came to bear witness to the football apocalypse: a limping Buckeye team, their head coach already fired, squaring off against their hated rivals like a rabid dog taking one last bite before being put down.

Earl Bruce — fired and fuming — stood there on the sideline like an Old Testament prophet dressed in a scarlet windbreaker and fedora, clutching a laminated play sheet as if it held the secrets to immortality. The man had been knifed in the back by the very institution he’d bled for — Ohio State — and now, they handed him the poisoned chalice of a farewell game in enemy territory.

This was not a football game. This was Shakespeare with cleats.

Bruce didn’t do weepy goodbyes. No farewell press tour, no choreographed tears. Just that same grimace, that same clenched jaw, a man who walked like he’d swallowed a stick of rebar. His players knew. The coaches knew. Even the Wolverines knew. This wasn’t about a bowl game. It was vengeance. The last, righteous charge of a pissed-off general with nothing to lose.

The Buckeyes came out like lunatics. You could see it in their eyes — every hit was personal, every block had teeth. This wasn’t strategy. This was spiritual warfare in helmets and face paint. It was 23-20 when the clock ran out, and Earl Bruce — the Dead Coach Walking — had just punched Michigan in the mouth one last time.

The crowd was stunned. A low, moaning confusion rippled across the Michigan faithful like someone had just killed Santa Claus on the 50-yard line. Meanwhile, Bo Schembechler — the eternal foil in this scarlet-and-maize opera — found Bruce in the chaos and said something only Bo could: “I always mind losing to Ohio State, but I didn’t mind so much today.”

Translation: Respect.

They carried Earl off the field on their shoulders like a victorious warlord, a fedora-wearing ghost of Woody Hayes, floating above the wreckage of one of the greatest rivalries in sports. No speeches. No theatrics. Just the quiet knowledge that for all the bureaucrats in suits who tried to reduce college football to performance reviews and booster moods, Earl Bruce had left his mark with cleats in the dirt.

You could feel the Michigan turf trembling as he walked off — like it knew it wouldn’t see a Buckeye victory again for fourteen years.

Later, in the tunnel, someone asked him how it felt. Bruce just looked ahead, muttered something inaudible, and walked into the gray November light like a man who’d just settled a score written in blood and fourth downs.

If there’s justice in this world — real, cosmic justice — then somewhere in the football afterlife, Woody Hayes was smiling, slow clapping in a cloud of cigar smoke.

Because on November 21, 1987, Earl Bruce didn’t just win a game.
He lit the whole damn narrative on fire.

 

 

 

Earle Bruce was a former American football player and coach. He served as the head coach at the University of Tampa (1972), Iowa State University (1973–1978), Ohio State University (1979–1987), the University of Northern Iowa(1988), and Colorado State University (1989–1992), compiling a career college football record of 154–90–2. At Ohio State, Bruce was the successor to the legendary Woody Hayes, and won four Big Ten Conference titles. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame as a coach in 2002. Bruce returned to coaching in 2003 to helm the Iowa Barnstormers of the Arena Football League for a season and also guided the Columbus Destroyers the following year.

After Woody Hayes was fired from Ohio State, Bruce was offered that head coaching position. Bruce coached Ohio State from 1979–1987. In Bruce’s first year, Ohio State went undefeated in the regular season and played in the Rose Bowl, losing the game—and at least a share of the national championship—by a single point.

The Buckeyes would win nine games in Bruce’s first eight years, including another 10-win season in 1986. They also won or shared three more Big Ten titles (outright in 1984, shared in 1981 and 1986). However, they would only appear in one more Rose Bowl (after the 1984 season–Ohio State’s last Rose Bowl appearance until after the 1996 season) and would only tally one more top ten finish (in 1986). This rankled a fan base used to contending for a national title every year.

In 1987, Ohio State was sent reeling when star receiver Cris Carter was kicked off the team for signing with an agent. Without Carter, the school’s all-time leader in receptions, the Buckeyes appeared to be a rudderless team. They lost to Indiana for the first time in 38 years and never really recovered.

Bruce was fired just prior to the last game of the season—against Michigan—but was allowed to finish out the year. Reportedly, school president Edward Harrington Jenningsmade the move out of pique over a last-second loss to Iowa that dropped the Buckeyes to 5-4-1, meaning they needed to beat Michigan in order to be bowl-eligible. Bruce was able to defeat Michigan at Ann Arbor. This is something Ohio State would not do again until 2001 under head coach Jim Tressel. After the game, Bo Schembechler told Bruce, “I always mind losing to Ohio State but I didn’t mind so much today.”

 After Ohio State

Bruce was the leading candidate to replace Bob Valesente as head coach of the Kansas Jayhawks after the 1987 season, but due to a contract dispute, KU did not hire him. KU instead hired Glen Mason out of Kent State. Bruce took over the head coaching position at the University of Northern Iowa for one year, and then finished his intercollegiate coaching career at Colorado State University. In his second season, he led the Rams to a winning record and a victory over Oregon in the Freedom Bowl, their first bowl appearance since 1948 and their first bowl victory ever. He was fired two years later for, among other things, verbally and physically abusing his players and discouraging players from taking classes that conflicted with football practice.

In his final season at Fort Collins, he coached the Rams to a 17-14 victory over LSU in Baton Rouge. Five years earlier, his final Ohio State team played LSU to a 13-13 tie in Tiger Stadium in a nationally televised game.

After Colorado State, he moved on to the Arena Football League, where he coached the Cleveland Thunderbolts in 1994 and the St. Louis Stampede in 1995 and 1996 before retiring.

In 2003, Bruce came out of retirement to coach the final ten games for the Arena Football League‘s Iowa Barnstormers, guiding them to a 7–3 record. In 2004, Bruce returned to Ohio to become the head coach for the Columbus Destroyers, who were moving from Buffalo to Columbus that year. He retired to a front office position after coaching the Destroyers to a 6–10 record in 2004, and was replaced as head coach by Chris Spielman, who played for Bruce at Ohio State. Bruce finished with a 19–25 record over four seasons in the AFL.

Thereafter, Bruce worked as an Ohio State football analyst for WTVN 610AM in Columbus as well an analyst for ONN on their OSU programming. On October 1, 2016, Bruce was honored during the Rutgers-Ohio State halftime and dotted the “i” during Script Ohio.

In his private life, Earle Bruce is married with four children and eight grandchildren. His daughters’ names are Lynn, Mikky, Aimee, and Noel. It was revealed, on August 25th, 2017, that Bruce was battling the earliest stages of Alzheimer’s disease. His death was announced by his family on April 20th, 2018.