Published: Friday, 10/2/2015 Buckeyes continue Hayes tradition of honoring feats of military BY DAVID BRIGGSBLADE SPORTS WRITER COLUMBUS — Alabama was not the Germans. The Superdome was not Omaha Beach. A football game was not war. Not even close. But as Ohio State headed into the final minutes of its playoff showdown against Alabama last season, the Buckeyes had a different sort of victory squarely on their minds. D-Day at Normandy. Ohio State coach Urban Meyer gave The Blade an inside look at the depths of his appreciation for the U.S. military and the untold ways he uses its culture and past to galvanize the top-ranked Buckeyes. This may not seem especially unique in a sport forever cast — often clumsily — in war terms. But with Meyer continuing the legacy of his childhood idol, Woody Hayes, few programs are more influenced by the armed forces than Ohio State, where the biggest wins of its national championship season were inspired by some of the biggest moments in American history. Consider Ohio State’s upset victory at Michigan State last November. The Buckeyes that week leaned on the Navy SEAL Team Six’s capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. Players were issued dog tags to be worn during the game and watched clips from Zero Dark Thirty. In the final scene, after a SEAL kills Bin Laden, the team leader asks him, “Do you realize what you just did?” In the locker room, coaches asked the players: What are you going to do when the chopper hits the ground? “When contact is made, you resort back to your training,” Meyer said. “The theme going into the Michigan State game was, we’re training, we’re training, and then all of the sudden the helicopters start warming up, and we board the choppers ready to go. That was the theme in the locker room there, that was the whole theme afterward, and it carried on throughout the year.” Including into the first College Football Playoff and Ohio State’s semifinal against heavily favored Alabama. Before the Buckeyes departed for New Orleans, players received a postcard featuring a photo of a Higgins boat, the World War II landing craft built in the Big Easy and used by the Allied forces during the invasion of Nazi-occupied Normandy. Like the men on those boats, they were instructed to write a note to someone close to them — a reminder of for whom they fought, or, in their case, played. Many wrote to their parents. Linebacker Joshua Perry wrote to Joshua Chambers, the 5-year-old son of Perrysburg native Jeremy Chambers, whose battle with leukemia had touched the team. “We told them, ‘These were men just like you. Their mission was a much greater mission, a much more dangerous mission, a much more worthy one, but they were just like you,’” cornerbacks coach Kerry Coombs said. “Before we got on the plane, we collected all the postcards. We were going on a mission too.” When the plane landed, each player received a clicker…
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