EDITOR'S NOTE -- This is the latest installment of BSB Flashback, where we look back at some of our readers' favorite stories from the first 22 years of Buckeye Sports Bulletin.

In this edition we look at Eddie George capturing the 1995 Heisman Trophy. This story is reprinted from the December 1995 edition of BSB. It was also included in our 20th anniversary yearbook, published in 2002 and titled "20 Years Of Memories." Enjoy this trip down memory lane with BSB and the Buckeyes!

Even the prim and proper crowd in the Heisman Room at the Downtown Athletic Club got into the act.

“Eddie, Eddie!” the crowd chanted.

No, this wasn’t Ohio Stadium, and, no, this wasn’t a dream — although it was the fulfillment of Eddie George’s boyhood dreams — as George had just been named the 61st Heisman Trophy winner as the nation’s most outstanding college football player on Dec. 9 in New York City.

“I’m glad this is over,” George told the distinguished group at the DAC and a national television audience on ESPN. “First and foremost, I would like to thank God almighty for giving me the strength and health to be here tonight,” he said.

OSU’s “big number 27,” as coach John Cooper has frequently referred to him, became the school’s sixth Heisman Trophy winner and its first since Archie Griffin won back-to-back Heismans in 1974 and ’75.

George, OSU’s outstanding senior tailback and co-captain, won the Heisman by a surprisingly large margin over Nebraska quarterback Tommie Frazier and Florida quarterback Danny Wuerffel. Northwestern tailback Darnell Autry and Iowa State tailback Troy Davis finished fourth and fifth, respectively, in balloting by media members and past recipients.

George, a Philadelphia native, was one of the main catalysts for the OSU offense this season. While Bobby Hoying and Terry Glenn set school passing and receiving records, respectively, George also etched his name into the school’s record books.

He finished the regular season with a school single-season mark of 1,826 yards. Against Illinois’ vaunted defense, he carried for a school-record 314 yards. He led the nation in scoring with 24 touchdowns.

With George setting the table on the ground, the Buckeyes finished the season 11-1 overall. And while winning the Heisman will not make up for OSU’s inability to defeat Michigan and go to the Rose Bowl this year, it certainly takes away some of the pain.

“I would like to thank Coach Cooper and Ohio State for their support and for giving me the opportunity to play four years there,” George said. “I also want to thank Coach (Dave) Kennedy and Dave Langworthy for my conditioning and training and also (running backs coach Tim) Spencer.”

George grew up in a single-parent home in Philadelphia with his mother, Donna. When she sensed he was straying from the proper path, she sent him to Fork Union (Va.) Military Academy for his final two years of high school. Refocused, George signed with Ohio State and arrived in time for spring practice in 1992.

“It’s hard to describe how I feel right now in words,” George said. “This is everything I dreamed of when I came out of high school to Ohio State.”

But the ride was not always easy. After scoring three touchdowns in a win over No. 8 Syracuse early in his freshman season, George found himself benched after a pair of costly fumbles in a loss to Illinois. His sophomore year, playing behind the combo of Raymont Harris and Butler By’not’e, was little better.

But last year, George emerged as the starter and rushed for 1,442 yards. Still, he wasn’t mentioned in the same breath as “star runners” like Florida State’s Warrick Dunn or Texas A&M’s Leeland McElroy when it came time to name the preseason Heisman favorites.

George was even behind players in his own conference — Minnesota’s Chris Darkins, Indiana’s Alex Smith and Purdue’s Mike Alstott — when it came to preseason publicity.

Undaunted, George never listened to the skeptics. He kept his dreams in focus.

“You just have to keep dreaming,” George said minutes after the Heisman announcement. “That’s where everything starts. You just have to keep your eye on your goal and just fight forward no matter how much adversity is in front of you.”

The rap on George, it seemed, was he was too slow and he couldn’t make the game-breaking run. But in preseason interviews, he said he had done everything he could in the off-season to make sure he was ready for his senior year.

It showed from day one when he befuddled Boston College in the Kickoff Classic, rushing for 99 yards and catching passes for 58 more. A pair of 200-yard games against Washington and Notre Dame put George’s name at the top of the Heisman list.

“We all worked hard,” George said of the team’s showing this year. “We never really focused in on individual awards. We just tried to work on making it to the Rose Bowl and trying to win the national championship. We had to understand that all the other accolades would come if we just continued to do our thing.

“If you asked me at the beginning of the season if I had any shot at these things, I would have said, ‘No, I just want to win games.’”

Cooper, present for the Heisman presentation, discussed exactly how far George has come — and how he has gotten there.

“When we recruited Eddie George, he was not the most highly recruited player coming out that year,” Cooper said. “But let me say this: In 33 years of coaching, 19 as a head coach, I have never been around an athlete with a better work ethic than Eddie George.

“I don’t know if he is the best college football player, but again, nobody is more deserving of this great award than Eddie George,” he said.

While Frazier mixed running and passing the ball to lead Nebraska to the top spot in the polls and Wuerffel’s deadly accurate passing also swayed voters, it was likely George’s durability that swung the vote in his favor.

“He would carry it as many times as you could give it to him, and the amazing thing was that after carrying it 25 or 30 times on Saturday, he would come out and lead our football team in wind sprints (the next day),” Cooper said.

ESPN college football commentator Chris Fowler, who hosted the Heisman show, was surprised by how wide a margin George won the award.

“The voting was not as close as a lot of us thought,” Fowler said. “Eddie won by a pretty convincing margin. He won in different regions of the country. I think what really helped him was he carried Big Ten country pretty convincingly.”

George joins Griffin, Howard “Hopalong” Cassady, Vic Janowicz and Les Horvath, who died recently on Nov. 14, in OSU’s Heisman Trophy class. The school trails only Notre Dame, with seven winners, on the Heisman list.

“There is no finer person to carry on the OSU football tradition,” Griffin said. “Eddie George is a fantastic person. He is a great football player, but even better than that he is a great person off the field as well.”

And George knows that his name will not only be indelibly etched in the annals of Ohio State football, but in the annals of all of college football.

“It makes you feel great to just be mentioned with other names like Tony Dorsett, Earl Campbell, Herschel Walker, Rashaan Salaam and all those guys,” he said. “Now that I am a part of that, I probably will be remembered forever.”

In addition to the Heisman, George has plenty of other hardware to fill his own personal trophy case.

He previously received the Walter Camp Football Foundation player of the year award and the Maxwell Award as the nation’s most outstanding player. He also picked up the Doak Walker Award as the top running back in the country as well as the Chicago Tribune’s Big Ten most valuable player award and consensus All-American honors.

“From a personal level, I guess you could say I accomplished some goals,” George said. “But as far as the overall picture, the Rose Bowl meant a lot to me. It was my last chance to get there and I didn’t fulfill that goal.

“That will stick with me for a lifetime, but I just have to use that as my fuel.”

Prior to heading to New York City for the Heisman Trophy presentation, George ventured to Dallas Dec. 5, to pick up the Doak Walker Award as the nation’s top collegiate running back.

George actually was announced as the Walker award winner a day earlier in a satellite hookup between Dallas and Columbus, where George was still finishing up autumn quarter exams.

George beat out Karim Abdul-Jabbar of UCLA, Tiki Barber of Virginia, Tim Biakabutuka of Michigan, Warrick Dunn of Florida State, George Jones of San Diego State, Wasean Tait of Toledo and Moe Williams of Kentucky.

Davis and Autry, a pair of sophomores, weren’t up for the Walker award because it goes to players within a year of graduating.

“Last year I was a finalist, so I figured I had a shot at it this year,” George said. “In the middle of the season my linemen started teasing me and calling me Doak Walker. That’s when I started thinking I had a shot to win it.”

Obviously, George has had a wild week-and-a-half. He finished up exams on Dec. 4 with a geology test just a half-hour after the Walker award satellite hookup ended.

Then he went to Dallas for two days for the Walker award ceremony.

From there it was on to Orlando and an appearance at ESPN’s College Football Awards Show on Dec. 7. There, he picked up the Maxwell award.

Then it was off to New York City for the Heisman presentation. The same day as that ceremony, though, he and his mother traveled by car to Philadelphia for the funeral of Eddie’s great-grandmother, Mamie Bunyon.

After the Heisman ceremonies were out of the way, George jetted back to Columbus for one night before heading back off to Washington, D.C., to pick up the local Pigskin Club’s national player of the year honor.

Then he was scheduled to head to Los Angeles for the weekend of Dec. 15-16 to tape the Bob Hope All-American special.

From there, George will likely fly directly to Florida to rejoin the Buckeyes for the team’s Citrus Bowl preparations.

“I’ve got permission to miss practice,” George said, laughing.

But in typical George fashion, he was already focused on the Citrus Bowl and Tennessee just an hour after receiving the Heisman.

“Right now I have one more college game left and the pros are next for me,” George said. “I am just going to do what I have to do when that time comes. I am not really focused on that at this time. My mind is just concentrating on Tennessee.”

And diplomatically, George had a simple reply when he was asked whether he’d want the Heisman or the Rose Bowl and a shot at the national title:

“That’s a tough question, but I would rather have it all.”

EDITOR'S NOTE -- In 2002, we published "20 Years of Memories," a 20th anniversary yearbook for Buckeye Sports Bulletin. If you like the story you just read, click on the link below for details on how to obtain this special yearbook with reprints from the first 20 years of BSB.