Michigan’s Mike Keller talks about the legendary 1969 Michigan-Ohio State game, the practices leading up to it and how the Wolverines shocked the college football world.
The ’69 game shot the rivalry into the stratosphere. That Ohio State team was really a juggernaut and nobody gave Michigan a chance, especially because it was Bo’s first year. But we were a pretty good team — we went into the game 7-2.
What people didn’t realize was that after we lost to Michigan State, which made us 3-2, we started really coming together. We started beating people. It was 35-9 against Minnesota, 35-7 against Wisconsin, 57-0 against Illinois and 51-6 against Iowa. So we were a really good football team that everybody had kind of written off as good but not good enough to ever challenge Ohio State.
So we went into that week and Bo was at his best. He was talking about how they’d embarrassed us and he talked to us about the history and tradition of Michigan.
There was snow during the week and it was pretty cold. I was a starter, fortunately, so I didn’t have to go out to the field until it was all shoveled and ready to practice. But the coaches were out there shoveling, the freshmen were out there shoveling, the back ups were out there shoveling and I think even Dave Brandon, who is now the chairman of the board at Domino’s, was shoveling.
And when we came out it was a constant reminder of what Ohio State had done to us before, it was a constant reminder of how good we had gotten, and it became a fact that this was one time – playing at our house – that we could beat these guys.
The amazing thing is that I think any other team would look at Ohio State and what they did to everybody during the season and think Michigan can’t beat these guys. But we really believed that we could beat them and Bo convinced us that we could and we went out and took the field and we took it to them.
Defensively, right away, we were flying around like mad and we were knocking them back on their heals. It was like a big train leaving the station: the more we started picking up steam, the more momentum we had and the more we came out aggressively.
One of my memories from the game is hitting Rex Kern really hard a couple of times and he was kind of whimpering. And I was thinking “Oh my God. These guys: I don’t know if they’re quitting but they don’t want to be in the game anymore.”
I think Woody and all those players from the Ohio State team would’ve told you that they’d never had anybody take it to them like we did that day.
Ohio State didn’t know what they were coming into and they hit a buzzsaw and, as part of the defense, we just kicked their butts and the offense moved the ball. It was just one of those games that as a football player — even though you’ve played as a kid and then in high school, college and the pros— you look back on it and you say, “That was the greatest moment that you ever had on the football field.”
I don’t think any of us ever had a better experience before or after as a player on the football field.
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Mike Keller is a former DE/LB that played under Bo Schembechler at Michigan.
Got a question or comment? E-mail him here
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