The entire season, the Ohio State football team has played great at home, while it struggled on the road.
Good thing the 2003 Fiesta Bowl was a home game.
While each school was allotted about 15,000 tickets for the Bowl Championship Series national championship game, OSU fans so outnumbered the Miami Hurricane fans that Ohio Stadium was seemingly relocated to Tempe, Ariz.
“It was great,” said linebacker Matt Wilhelm. “It felt like we were at home. We felt like we were playing at the Horseshoe.”
While no official numbers were given concerning the number of fans each team had, the “O-H-I-O” cheers more than drowned out any cheers the Miami fans could muster.
“Our crowd was electric,” said OSU football coach Jim Tressel.
Throughout Mill Ave. — the main shopping strip at Arizona State University — OSU fans made the sidewalks a stream of scarlet and gray. In the makeshift merchandise shops, Buckeye goods made up about 70 percent of the Fiesta Bowl merchandise.
“I was thinking ‘I love our fans for how they always travel.’ It was unbelievable,” said two-way star Chris Gamble.
During the game, the crowd was never quieted by anything Miami did and kept on cheering for the Buckeyes.
“Our crowd was a huge factor,” Tressel said. “It felt like a home game. It was loud when we needed it loud and wasn’t loud when we needed it softer.”
