The Secret to the Most Successful Team in College Football

Issue 152: The "Too Much Talent" effect and why collective rewards might be the key to The Ohio State Buckeyes' ongoing success.

On Monday night, the Notre Dame Fighting Irish and The Ohio State Buckeyes will play for the National Championship in college football at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, Georgia. As millions of people tune in to watch the game, they will hear a variety of stories about each team and how they managed to arrive at the title game.

Ohio State's Ryan Day and Notre Dame's Marcus Freeman are both aiming for their first championships as head coaches. Day is trying to overcome the acute pain of losing to his arch-nemesis, the Michigan Wolverines year after year. Freeman is aiming to be the first Black coach to win the National Championship. But he will have to do it against his alma mater, where he was an all-star linebacker.

If you tune into the game, you will hear countless stories about the incredible talent on both teams and how their coaching staff has inspired and prepared them for this culminating moment. For instance, much has been made this year about how Ohio State spent $20 million dollars on their all-star roster of players. What you likely won’t hear much about is one of the most critical ingredients to their success–a culture of collaboration.

When we arrived at The Ohio State University as postdocs, we encountered two fascinating traditions of excellence. We had both moved to Columbus, Ohio because OSU was widely considered to have one of the best social psychology programs in the world. It was regularly ranked in the top three in the country, with several of our intellectual heroes among the faculty, and it had an incredible sense of camaraderie amongst the students.

Upon arrival, it also became obvious that the university was home to another, even more famous, form of excellence. Indeed, it was impossible to miss the fact that the school’s identity revolved around the Buckeyes football team. On home-game weekends, more than a hundred thousand fans descended on campus dressed in scarlet and gray. Bars overflowed with people, and every restaurant seemed to have the game on TV—followed by countless hours of replays and analysis. It was a spectacle of collective spirit unlike anything we had experienced before.

During our first year in Columbus, the Buckeyes won their first twelve games and went on to play for the National Championship. It was obvious to us that Ohio State and their coach Jim Tressel had tapped into something extraordinary about achieving team success. As people who study group and team dynamics, it became a fascination of ours to learn more about the ingredients that make a team so successful in the face of such fierce competition.

Nearly forty years before our arrival on campus, the Buckeyes had started one of college football’s most famous traditions. It began as the brainchild of head football trainer Ernie Biggs in 1968 when he came up with the idea of motivating players by handing out small stickers after each game to those who had performed exceptionally.

The logic was straightforward: recognizing individual excellence would create a social incentive for players to push harder and stand out. Star players would finish the season with helmets covered in Buckeye decals—like generals decorated with medals. The Buckeyes won the national championship that year, and before long, other teams around the country had adopted the same practice.

Those stickers became an institution.

But by 2001, the team that had once dominated the field had slipped into mediocrity and they fired the current coach. What happened next defined the culture of the team as we know it today.