Columbus Monthly / December 2010 / The brothers Boren

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The brothers Boren

Two years after he switched sides in the biggest feud in college football, Justin Boren, along with his brother, are stalwarts of the Ohio State offense. It's not an outcome their father, a disciple of Bo Schembechler, expected.

‘Where are the new superstuds coming from? Hayes manages a tight smile and points [toward] millionaire alumnus John Galbreath’s Darby Dan Farm, where a new breed of football player has been developed, mixing the best qualities of humans with thoroughbred horses.”

—National Lampoon’s Annual College Football Preview: The Top Ten Teams for 1975

Woody and Galbreath are long gone, of course, and it’s a shame that human-horse hybrid operation never actually happened. Nonetheless, the superstuds continue to roll in at Ohio State, freakish amalgams of size, speed and power in 20-year-old bodies. And you wonder: Where do they get these guys?

Meet the Borens. Clone this family, incubate them in football-mad Pickerington, put Dad in charge of their youthful training and they might fill the Buckeyes’ recruiting quota for guards, fullbacks and linebackers for years to come. A few more families like this and Jim Tressel might never have to recruit outside of Central Ohio again.

The two eldest Boren boys, Justin and Zach, have been linchpins of the Ohio State offense for the past two seasons. Waiting in the wings is high school junior Jacoby, who’s already been offered an OSU scholarship, one he almost certainly will accept. That’s about 900 pounds of Buckeye.

You might assume that the Boren Buckeye Pipeline is painted scarlet and gray, that when you have a dad who grew up in Columbus, a mom from Cleveland and kids raised just beyond the outerbelt in Pickerington, loyalty was never an issue. What kind of kid grows up here, plays football and doesn’t dream of being a Buckeye?

The Borens didn’t.

For the Borens, the road from Pickerington to Ohio State took a long detour through Ann Arbor. The Boren story could even be seen as a microcosm of the last 30 years of the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry. For those whose blood still boils at the thought of the enemy Up North or Down South, those who troll Internet fan sites and vent their spleens, the Borens have provided explosive fodder.

Mike Boren, growing up on the east side in the 1970s, was one of those kids who did dream of being a Buckeye. He was a hellacious linebacker at Independence High School before transferring to Eastmoor to play for legendary coach Bob Stuart. Mike had good size, won awards, was a beast on the field. Woody may have snapped him up, but by 1980 Earle Bruce was in charge and he relied on a stopwatch.

“I showed up, ran a five-oh 40, and that was it,” Mike says. Bruce’s nemesis, canny old Bo Schembechler, swooped right in and saw the value of plucking this kid, burning with hurt, right out of OSU’s backyard and fanning the flames. If only for the Ohio State game, Schembechler would have a lunatic on the field.

“Bo would get on me. ‘They didn’t want you,’ ” Mike says, doing a fine impression of his coach. He didn’t need much motivation; he played like a mad dog every game, ending up as Michigan’s sixth-leading career tackler. He was en route to the NFL, or so he believed, until he blew out his knee his senior season, leaving him with an education degree he didn’t much care for and uncertain career prospects. But he had Hope, as in his wife, a long-jumper on the Michigan track team he’d met in anatomy class.

Mike worked for a trucking firm near Chicago before moving to Pickerington, starting a landscaping business and raising his family. Which included, of course, coaching his kids in pee-wee football before sending them into the high school programs of Pickerington, a growing suburb crazy about football.

Justin, cut from the same block of granite as his dad, was a star at Pickerington North, playing both sides of the line, growing to 6-3 and 315 pounds and becoming one of the most recruited guards in the country, with Ohio State and Michigan the top two contenders. This was trouble.

Mike took Justin to visit Schembechler, now done with coaching but still active at UM, who was incredulous that the son of one of his former favorites was even considering Ohio State. “You’re his father! You tell him where to go!” he told Mike, who insisted it was up to Justin. He picked Michigan, a high-profile recruiting loss for Tressel.

Justin became a starter as a true freshman, rare for an offensive lineman, and cemented his status during his second year. Unfortunately, UM coach Lloyd Carr didn’t survive a season that saw the Wolverines embarrassed at home by Appalachian State. Enter new coach Rich Rodriguez with a new offense and a style worlds away from Carr.

Exit Justin Boren, just weeks into spring practice. Justin explained by releasing a statement praising Carr because “Michigan football was a family . . . I have great trouble accepting that those family values have eroded in just a few months.”

Wolverine fans were predictably rabid in their response: columnists, sports talk shows and Internet blogs wanted to know, “Eroded family values? What the hell does that mean?” Suddenly, despair over the state of the program could be channeled into condemning this traitorous villainy. Speculation and opinion flowed: Justin was a wuss, coddled by Carr and unable to handle the more demanding Rodriguez; a bitter Carr had steered Justin to OSU; the unseen hand of Mike, the controlling dad, well-known for pushing his sons, had engineered this, angry that Michigan wasn’t going to offer Zach, just coming out of high school, a scholarship. Buckeye fans relished the schadenfreude.

Rodriguez, who’d also just seen potential starting quarterback Ryan Mallett and other players transfer, brushed aside questions about “family values.”

“I only talk about the guys who play for Michigan,” Rodriguez told the Detroit News.

“Three years ago, if I had seen in a crystal ball that the whole coaching staff was going to change halfway through his career, I would have never let Justin go to Michigan. I would have told him to go to Ohio State,” Mike told the Dispatch. “I didn’t want this to happen; it’s the last thing I wanted to happen.”

Justin didn’t talk about it until the following fall when he was settled in at OSU (where, because of NCAA rules, he had to sit out a year and forego a scholarship). He said nothing specific, just made it clear he was miserable playing for Rodriguez. “It got to the point where I didn’t like football anymore,” he told the Plain Dealer. “And it was either going to be I was going to go to a different school or I was going to be done with football.”

Justin didn’t do himself any favors when a photo appeared on Michigan fan sites showing him at a Halloween party dressed as, um, Rich Rodriguez. Justin shakes his head now at that idea: “I was sitting out that year and I had too much time on my hands. That is definitely something I wish I hadn’t done.”

Two years later, the vitriol has died down (Michigan fans have plenty of other things to worry about). “My real friends understood,” Mike says. “It’s about your kids.” The Borens have successfully established a legacy at Ohio State instead of Michigan, as God and Woody Hayes would have intended. Justin sat out that year and then spent the last two fulfilling his blue-chip promise as perhaps the Buckeyes’ best offensive lineman.

Zach, playing fullback and linebacker at Pickerington Central, duplicated many of his brother’s feats as All-Everything, though at 6-1 and 250 pounds with less-than-blazing speed, he wasn’t as heavily recruited. He arrived at OSU as a linebacker, but thanks to injuries at back and a surplus of linebackers he found himself inserted at fullback, where he thrived and started as a freshman.

“I told him, ‘What you want to do is get on the field,’ ” Mike says. Zach took the ball and ran with it, as it were, handling the ball as much as a fullback is going to at Ohio State, even catching a touchdown pass in the Rose Bowl against Oregon. This season’s highlight: Zach makes a catch against Indiana and hurdles (!) a defensive back for a long gain.

“He gets that athletic ability from me,” says Hope. Mike agrees, more or less: “Zach was Hope’s boy, a mama’s boy. Justin and Jacoby are more like me.” The common Boren football trait, everyone agrees, is that these boys like to hit. Hard. With a purpose. Their own teammates say that.

“Justin’s mean all the time. I hate to say that,” Mike says. “Zach, it’s when he steps on the field that he gets mean.” The kids say they come by it honestly. “My dad is 10 times tougher on us than the coaches,” Zach says. “He was like that when he coached us in pee-wee, and even during high school at halftime he’d be ripping our butts.”

"My dad is so hard on me,” Justin says. “When I was in high school he almost got arrested one time; it was halftime and he was all over me and this cop came over.”

“He even does it now,” Zach says. “We go home and he DVRs the game on TV, and we have to sit there and go through it.” Justin sounds like he’s had enough of that kind of tutelage: “Yeah, sometimes I get a little pissy with him.”

Mike, who still looks as if he might easily rip your head off, knows that he’s been accused of overbearing, too-demanding perfectionism of his sons. His wife tells him all the time. “I’m always so critical,” he says. “I hate to sound like an idiot, but I find it hard to just say ‘good job.’ I expect perfection. I’m hard on my kids.” He’s as intense as his sons when the Bucks play.

“We would never bring anyone to a game with us,” Hope says. Lest you sense dysfunction here, the rest of the Borens find Dad’s angst pretty amusing. “A lot of the [players’] parents like to party before the game,” she says. “Justin will say, ‘Tell Dad to drink a few beers, try to relax.’ ”

By the way, the youngest Boren is Kallie, who’s 11 and already quite the softball player.

Sign her up.

Jeff Long is a freelance writer.