You want it to be this way.
You want kids to talk about playing football at Ohio State as something more than a truck stop on the way to the NFL.
You want a kid to tell you, “Ever since I thought about football, I thought about playing for the Buckeyes.”
Then he makes it.
Then he walks to the 50-yard line. He looks around Ohio Stadium and its 90,000 seats.
It takes his breath away.
He opens the Buckeyes media guide. He sees his picture. He smiles. It is a smile no amount of money can buy.
“I always wanted to be in this book,” he said.
That was Dan Stultz at Ohio State media day.
The field wasn’t lined. The stands were empty. But Stultz just kept saying: “I just can’t wait.”
So far, all Stultz has done is wait. He was recruited out of Orrville, Ohio, in 1996, the best high school placekicker in the history of that school–of almost any Ohio high school.
How do you know this?
Because college football coaches often would rather slice off a toe than give one of their precious 85 scholarships to a kicker. They’d rather have a fourth-string tackle than a scholarship kicker. Why?
Because coaches figure if you have 85 good athletes on scholarship, one of them should be able to kick, too.
And if you give a kicker a scholarship and he’s a flop, you’re stuck with a kid who can’t kick–or even be a fourth-string tackle.
But Stultz was too good. His first scholarship offer came from Akron, when he was just a junior.
In coach-speak, he was so long, yet so accurate. In other words, he could boot field goals from one state to the next–and know exactly where the ball was going.
Stultz’s leg was simply too strong for Ohio State coach John Cooper to ignore.
Then came the Graves disease.
One day, Stultz is planning to kick for the only college he ever wanted to attend–the next day, he’s sick.
He’s losing weight. He’s seeing doctors shake their heads.
Strange, that is what it was. Then, scary. Very scary.
So scary that Stultz really doesn’t want to talk about it any more.
“I’m over it,” he said. “I’m healthy. All I have to do is take a pill every day and it should never come back.”
Graves is a thyroid condition that makes you weak.
“But I got over it,” he said. “I gained my strength and weight back. I feel great.”
Cooper agrees.
“You know, we started calling him Pudge,” said Cooper. “Dan had gained too much of that weight back.”
But Cooper smiled as he said it.
He was worried about his kicker. Not because Ohio State needs a kicker, as much as what will happen to this kid with the weird disease.
“You love kids like Dan because they really want to be here,” he said. “When you recruit them, you take them down to the stadium. You play the fight song here in this stadium, and you see them looking around and getting excited.”
Stultz spent the summer in Columbus, working on his conditioning. Cooper says his kicker is in “great shape.” Now, he’ll see exactly what kind of kicker he has in Stultz.
“All I know, is that I have a lot of confidence in my ability,” Stultz said.
