EDITOR’S NOTE: Months of research led to a series, “Year of the Quarterback,” being presented in three waves. The first wave — 10 articles covering the volatile new world of the transfer portal — was published recently. This is the 10th part in the second wave, which tracks then-and-now journeys of 10 Stark County quarterbacks.
Wonderland glistened on Todd Blackledge’s face.
He had just turned 18. He had just led Hoover to its first Federal League basketball championship. He had just committed to a Penn State football team fresh off the nation’s game of the year, No. 1 vs. No. 2.
Hoover basketball coach Don Eddins gave his postgame speech and stepped outside for a victory cigarette. Blackledge appeared in the hall, floating through the clouds of happy North Canton faces.
Flash forward 45 years. At 63, Blackledge is as familiar as almost any face in college football, an analyst who hopped from ABC to CBS to ESPN and now is a top dog at NBC.
Might his football life have been much different had he not swerved through North Canton?
“It might have been,” he allows.
On his way to playing quarterback on Penn State’s 1982 national championship team, before the family moved away, Todd was a little boy in Stark County.
There was plenty of moving as Todd’s dad, Ron, climbed the coaching ladder.
Ron was a star athlete at Canton Timken High School who followed an older Canton guy, Don Nehlen, to college. They roomed together at Bowling Green.
Nehlen was 23 when he became head football coach at Canton South High School. By the time Todd was born on Feb. 21, 1961, Ron was with Nehlen at South, soon to be on the move to high school jobs at Timken and Glenwood.
“I remember living in this giant white house in Greentown, right on Cleveland Avenue as you’re heading to the square at Greentown from North Canton,” Todd said. “The house is still there.
“I went to Greentown Elementary School for first grade. I remember being at Cook Park, watching dad play baseball in the Class A League. My sisters were younger.
“By the time dad got a job at Ashland College, I was old enough to realize this was the life of a coach. We were never anywhere more than two, three … four years at the most.”
Ron coached offensive line for college football’s Cincinnati Bearcats, Kentucky Wildcats and Princeton Tigers as Todd moved through grade school and junior high.
“We were living in Cincinnati when dad got the job at Kentucky,” Todd said. “Mom, my sisters and I stayed in Cincinnati until the end of the school year.
“I visited dad one weekend during basketball season and saw Kentucky play Tennessee in old Rupp Arena. Tennessee had Ernie Grunfeld and Bernard King. Kentucky had Kevin Grevey, who was from Hamilton, Ohio, and Jimmy Dan Connor.
“I was captivated.”
Playing basketball for the Kentucky Wildcats became his dream.
“I didn’t play organized tackle football until I was in seventh grade at Tate’s Creek Junior High School in Lexington,” he said. “We had one team for all three grades. Seventh graders were scout team, tackling-dummy guys.
“Our coach was an old-school, heavyset, gruff, phys ed teacher, Harry Johnson. Everybody was terrified of him. In some ways I’m kind of surprised I stuck with it.
“I played tight end and linebacker in eighth grade because we had a ninth-grade quarterback, Landon King, who was a good player.
“When I played quarterback in ninth grade, it changed things for me with football.”
Ron Blackledge had a dilemma.
“I wanted to watch Todd play on Friday nights, but I wasn’t going to be able to do that with my job at Kentucky,” he said. “Bob Casciola, the head coach at Princeton, offered me the offensive coordinator job, with a good raise in pay.
“Working for Bob, I thought I would be able to go to Todd’s games on Fridays and make Princeton’s games on Saturdays.”
Ron took the university job at Princeton and arranged for Todd to enroll at Princeton High School, whose games he assumed were on Fridays.
Surprise.
By the time the family realized Princeton High School played football Saturday afternoons, same as the university, it was too late to rearrange things.
Ron went to his new boss with uncomfortable news: ‘I’ll honor my commitment for a year, but I’m not going to stay.”
The new plan was moving “home” to Stark County and worrying about a job later.
“Bob said, ‘I don’t believe you’re doing this,'” Ron Blackledge said.
Ron did it anyway, perhaps planting the adventure seed in Casciola, who worked one more season at Princeton and then took a job with a bank.
Todd grew up hearing about Stark County.
“I immediately thought I would wind up at Canton McKinley,” he said. “I wanted to play football at Fawcett Stadium and basketball in the Field House, like my dad did.”
“I thought for sure that’s where we would end up.”
Instead, Ron identified North Canton Hoover as a “no-brainer” destination for Todd, based on the presence of head coach Don Hertler Sr.
“I appreciated Don’s knowledge of throwing the football,” Ron said. “North Canton had a couple good quarterbacks and home-grown people. I knew Todd would fit in and be a good player and a good teammate.”
Todd had been away for a long time. Now he was a move-in.
“I played football and basketball my sophomore year at Princeton,” he said. “I got to North Canton during the school year right as baseball was starting.
“They put me on the varsity baseball team. I don’t know if that sat well with a lot of people.”
It didn’t help much, but one of his first at-bats was a home run.
“Our baseball coach, Gordon Knisely, was a great, great dude,” Todd said. “We had a really good catcher. Bobby Sherlock. I played third base or caught the second game of a doubleheader.”
Todd moved in at about the time another quarterback, Todd Maragas, moved out, transferring to McKinley.
“That got interpreted a lot of ways,” Blackledge said. “Todd Maragas was a very popular kid in school in North Canton. It was a very tight community where kids grow up together and go to elementary school together and … I didn’t.
“It wasn’t the smoothest of transitions. The good news was the guys on the teams always welcomed me.”
The Blackledges lived in an apartment at first. Todd was befriended by Mark Blair, an older Hoover teammate.
“Mark would drive over and pick me up for morning workouts,” he said. “I spent a lot of time at his house. He was a really good friend and teammate.
“John DeMarco (now the head football coach at Northwest) was in that class. He was a quarterback and wide receiver.
“We had a running back, Dave Lovgren, who could really run. It was a big loss when he hurt his knee early in my junior season.
“Another teammate, Chris Snyder, went to the University of Cincinnati and became an engineer. He loved baseball. He wound up building a ‘field of dreams’ not far from North Canton.
“He was a receiver. I didn’t have a lot of touch throwing the football then. I threw everything really hard.
“I hit Chris on a slant route. It caught his finger in the wrong spot. It popped his finger. The bone kid of popped through the skin. I felt really bad about that.”
Jeff Logan was a Hoover grad playing at Ohio State then.
“My brother Whitney was a receiver when the Blackledges came to town,” Logan said. “Todd delivered the ball with heat. They had never seen anything like it.
“A lot of times they were just trying to protect themselves from the velocity of the passes.”
Blackledge was Hoover’s starting quarterback in 1977 and 1978, his junior and senior seasons. The Vikings went 6-4 both years, with two losses to Louisville and 1-1 records against GlenOak, Jackson and Perry.
“We played two crazy, back-and-forth games with Dover,” he said. “We played Jackson in a snowstorm my junior year and in the fog my senior year, which was probably the lowest memory of my high school career.”
The snow game became a 36-6 win. The fog game was a 7-0 loss.
Don Hertler Jr., the coach’s son, succeeded Blackledge at quarterback in 1979, when the Vikings won a Federal League championship.
“Todd became more accurate when he got older,” Hertler Jr. said. “He had the arm, the toughness and the intelligence.
“I wasn’t good enough to carry a team and I didn’t have to. After Todd left, we had really good players in key spots. We had really good chemistry.”
Blackledge was a conspicuous star in basketball, an easy all-county pick as a senior. He developed an imposing all-around game while growing to 6-foot-3.
“He was a very physical player,” recalls Larry Wilson, whose Perry basketball teams faced Blackledge. “I thought to myself at the time, I just hope he doesn’t hurt one of our players.
“He was quite a competitor.”
The basketball team was quite entertaining. Red-head Dave Garbutt tore around and could jump out of the gym. Big man Mark Patterson was a relative of North Canton legend Dick Snyder. Guard Mark Taylor also was a wide receiver who played college football at Grove City.
“Winning the Federal League was a big deal,” Blackledge said. “Unfortunately, our tournament draw was Marlington, which was the best team in the league, with us.”
Two big men well remembered at Marlington, Mark Schlabach and Ron Lloyd, led the Dukes past Hoover.
“The whole Hoover experience worked out well,” Blackledge said. “I wish it would have worked out better in football, but I’ve got great memories.
“Thursday nights, we would practice in the stadium, under the lights. On Fridays we wore shirts, ties and these hideous orange blazers. There were pep rallies after school.
“I loved getting to the stadium Friday nights. Dick Miller took care of the fields. He liked cigars. He was so meticulous with the baseball and football fields. Everything was perfect.
“You would walk into the stadium and there was the faint smell of cigar, these wooden lockers. We came through the tunnel from right underneath the stadium.
“It felt like the big time.”
QB vs. QB, Blackledge vs. Offenbecher, was a hot 1978 topic.
Massillon senior Brent Offenbecher had a better record, 9-0-1, and more polish. Blackledge had a more prototypical build and a bigger arm.
Lots of eyes were on Offenbecher from the time he transferred from Sebring. As a senior, he opened 1978 with TD passes of 44 and 58 yards to Ron Wright in a 27-6 win over Perry in front of 17,930 spectators.
Two weeks later in North Canton, Hoover beat Perry 27-14.
Blackledge was more heavily recruited.
Ohio State was going through strange times, foreshadowed by a 19-0 loss to Penn State in the 1978 opener.
In a loss to Jackson and a win over McKinley, Blackledge and Offenbecher played their last games at Hoover and Massillon on Nov. 10 and Nov. 11, respectively. On Dec. 29, Buckeyes head coach Woody Hayes punched a Clemson linebacker late in a bowl game.
Hayes was fired and replaced by Earle Bruce.
“Ohio State talked about playing Todd at linebacker,” recalls Todd’s father, Ron, chuckling.
Ron had made four college stops and knew the ropes.
“Todd and I did our little research,” he said. “I wanted him to go to a place that had stability and also wanted him to throw the football.”
Michigan’s option offense was ill-suited for Todd, eliminating Bo Schembechler’s Wolverines.
He was all ears duing pitches from Penn State’s Joe Paterno, Michigan State’s Darryl Rogers and Tennessee’s Johnny Majors.
“Darryl Rogers probably had the closest offense to what Todd wanted to do,” Ron Blackledge said. “Joe Paterno was more apt to be at Penn State for Todd’s duration.
“Penn State had never thrown a great deal, but Joe said, ‘If you become our quarterback, we would throw the football, because that’s your strength.’
“When Joe came to our house, he kicked his shoes so he wouldn’t track in snow. At the end of the conversation he said, ‘I think you can lead us to a national championship.'”
On a visit to Michigan State, personable receiver Kirk Gibson made an impression.
“The night Todd made the decision, Darryl Rogers was in our house,” Ron Blackledge said. “I was sure Todd was going to say he was going to Michigan State.
“Todd − an 18-year-old kid − told Darryl, ‘I don’t think you’re going to be there in four years, and that’s my prime concern.’
“I was shocked when Todd said that. Darryl’s response was to get on the phone to someone who told Todd, ‘Oh, no, Coach Rogers is going to be here.'”
It was the winter of ’79 when Blackledge selected Penn State. Less than a year later, Rogers relocated to Arizona State.
Blackledge cast his lot with the 51-year-old Paterno, Penn State’s head coach since 1966.
Offenbecher joined 34-year-old John Mackovic, a former Barberton Magics quarterback, at Wake Forest.
Ohio State came back into the picture for both of them.
Mackovic left Wake Forest after the 1980 season to coach Dallas Cowboys QBs. Offenbecher transferred to Ohio State.
Offenbecher sat out 1981 while Art Schlichter finished a fourth year as the Buckeyes’ starter.
In 1982, Bruce chose between Offenbecher and Mike Tomczak.
Tomczak got the nod, but with the team at 2-2, Offenbecher started Game 5. After a 6-0 loss to Wisconsin, Tomczak returned and won the next seven games.
Meanwhile, Blackledge sat out his freshman year of 1979 and then opened Penn State’s 1980 season behind Jeff Hostetler. The Nittany Lions were 2-1 after a 21-7 home loss to No. 3 Nebraska when Paterno switched to Blackledge.
Penn State won seven straight to set up a showdown against Pitt, quarterbacked by Dan Marino. A 14-9 loss left the Nittany Lions in the Fiesta Bowl against Ohio State.
Schlichter had a big first half as Ohio State took a 19-10 lead. Blackledge helped Penn State rally to a 31-19 win.
Hostetler’s older brothers Ron and Doug wound up as linebackers at Penn State, but Jeff wasn’t interested in Paterno’s invitation for him play defense.
Hostetler transferred to West Virginia, whose head coach was Don Nehlen. He sat out 1981 before starting in 1982.
Shortly after the 1982 Mountaineers upset Oklahoma, Sports Illustrated featured an upcoming duel between Hostetler and Blakcledge.
Hostetler’s mom, Dolly, told writer Jack McCallum, “Joe (Paterno) had to make a decision, and he made it. It’s just that he made the wrong one.”
That became debatable.
NEXT: How Blackledge wound up at Penn State and a look at how his life has turned out.
Reach Steve at steve.doerschuk@cantonrep.com
This article originally appeared on The Repository: NBC analyst Todd Blackledge’s journey from North Canton to Penn State
