Editor’s Note: This is Part III of a three-part series commemorating the 30th anniversary of the 1992 Madison football team. The Rams went 10-0 in the regular season, won the Ohio Heartland Conference championship, finished fourth in the final Division I AP poll, and reached the playoffs. Part I was published on Sept. 27. Part II was published on Sept. 28.
MADISON TOWNSHIP — The 1992 Madison football team knew it was going to be good. The players knew it. The coaches knew it. The community knew it.
The 1990 squad reached the Division I playoffs for the first time in school history. It was led by tailback Steve Whitfield (Rob’s older brother), who went on to play at Eastern Michigan, and linebacker/fullback Obie Stillwell, who walked on and worked his way into the two-deep at Ohio State.
That 1990 group went 9-2. The 1991 team went 9-1 (with the loss later forfeited by Mansfield Senior for using an ineligible player so technically, that squad actually went 10-0).
Still, the 1992 team figured to be even better than either of those outfits.
“Our class had always been very good, we were undefeated in 7th grade,” quarterback Joe Schag said. “After experiencing the success of the 1990 and 1991 seasons, we were expecting to keep the train rolling.
“The seniors on the 1992 team had a three-year high school record of 28-2 (in the regular season). Our entire starting 11 on offense were seniors. So we anticipated having a big year. We believed we could go undefeated.”
Perhaps the biggest hurdle for the season was handled before the campaign even began. Coach Dana Woodring had two elite but very different talents in seniors Nate Whitcomb and Rob Whitfield. Both were electrifying playmakers, Whitfield with speed, Whitcomb with brute power.
Woodring dabbled with the I-Bone two years earlier after Colorado had success in the offense featuring Eric Bieniemy. Woodring did it with the focus on Steve Whitfield in 1990.
But his choice to feature in the I-Bone in 1992 was Whitcomb, who was better suited to moving the chains and durable enough to wear down a defense.
Sensing he may lose Rob Whitfield, who was also an outstanding basketball player, Woodring pulled him aside the previous spring and broached the subject of moving his fleet star to receiver — a position he’d never played.
“(If we stayed in the wishbone), neither Nate nor I were good blockers, so nobody would be blocking for anybody,” Whitfield remembered with a chuckle. “I still remember having that talk with Coach Woodring outside the baseball field. He had me sold on the move.”
No one could have predicted how wildly successful that decision would be — for everyone involved.
“That was the unveiling of Rob Whitfield, and what he could do with the ball if you just got it to him in space,” Schag said. “He was incredible. I could throw a 10-yard slant and he would turn it into a 65-yard TD pass.
“He did that all year.”
With Whitcomb as the feature back, Schag calling audibles at the line based on defensive alignment, and Whitfield and Lee Montgomery posing as the deep threat and possession receiver, respectively, the Rams presented a pick-your-poison offense.
Madison’s dynamic potential exploded from the very first game, a 59-7 beating of Shelby. The Whippets aligned to stop the run, so Schag hit Whitfield for four passes covering a stunning 281 yards and 3 touchdowns (of 93, 77 and 72 yards).
“I remember that like it was yesterday,” Whitfield said. “I would look at Joe and he would look at me. He was like a wizard. He would call the audible, throw it up there and I would just run under it.
“We broke them early. After that game, I really had the confidence that, wow, I can play this position.”
Whitcomb blasted for three short touchdowns, too, as the Whippets exposed their secondary to stuff the run, then had to try and adjust.
“The play that I see over and over again in my mind was at Shelby,” Woodring said. “We were backed up inside our 10. The coaches saw it and I knew Joe (Schag) saw it. They brought their safeties up and were going to bring the house with an all-out blitz. The two corners came up to bump-and-run Rob (Whitfield) and Lee (Montgomery) in tight man coverage.
“Joe checked off to a quick fade route to Robby, completed it up their sideline right in front of Shelby’s head coach Tom Stacy, who threw his clipboard up in the air, and watched him sprint away from the defender for a 93-yard TD.”
The beat, and beatdowns, continued every week.
“We really didn’t have a weak link on our depth chart,” Woodring said. “Our biggest decision was how to feature Nate as the tailback in the I-Bone and get Robbie to wideout. With him and Lee Montgomery, we had two outstanding receivers. Then with Joe at QB calling plays at the line, it gave our opponents fits.”
However, the coach had some anxiety anyway.
“The toughest thing about that season was the stress,” said Woodring, a quarterback at Northwestern who played under Alex Agase in college. “Each week, it’s so hard to go 10-0. It’s very rare. You’re always concerned, is this the one where we let down? Is this the one they take for granted and don’t respect the opponent? Is this the upset week?
“I can say for me that ’92 was the worst as far as stress goes. That’s why it’s so meaningful. So special.”
Madison never did suffer that letdown. In fact, the challenge was finding creative ways to keep pushing a team that was blowing out everyone in its path.
“A classic memory for me was the week of the Lexington game,” Schag said. “Coach Woodring had Joe Carey (our statistician, history teacher and friend) dress up like a Lexington spy, wearing a purple ski mask, and hide in the bushes with a clipboard like he was secretly scouting us. When we saw him, no one knew who it was, and like dumb high school football players, we didn’t consider that it might be someone we knew.
“One of the players yelled, ‘Get him!’ Mr. Carey, realizing his life was in danger, dropped the clipboard and took off running as fast as he could. Nate (Whitcomb) and Robbie (Whitfield) ran him down and tackled him. The whole team piled on him. Then we picked him up and someone yelled, ‘Throw him in the bushes! And we threw him in a briar patch.
“He crawled his way out, still wearing the ski mask, and like an episode of Scooby Doo, we took the mask off, and it was Mr. Carey! I about died! At the same time, I felt horrible about it. It was one of the funniest things I’ve ever experienced in my life.”
Like a Hollywood script, the game of the year was against arch-rival Mansfield Senior. It was played in a surreal atmosphere at a sold-out Ram Field as the city reached a fever pitch in anticipation of the clash.
On the night of the game, Mansfield Senior’s bus parked behind the field and the Tygers walked through the woods and made a late entrance through Madison’s practice field. A ploy? Gamesmanship? Happenstance? Perhaps the bus simply got rerouted in the early-arriving and overflow traffic of the enormous crowd.
Whatever the case, no further incentive was needed for either team when it came to these two arch-rivals.
“Hey, it’s all love between us now. We knew those guys and they knew us. We all lived in the same town and had been playing against each other since junior high. But that really fired us up,” Whitfield remembered. “They came in our backdoor, but we kicked them out the front.”
Whitcomb too mentioned this incident.
“They came walking through the woods like they were the boogeymen or something,” Whitcomb said. “They definitely wanted to set the intimidation factor.”
Schag also remembered the Tygers warming up on Madison’s practice field before the game.
“The adrenaline was off the chart,” Schag said. “We respected them and they respected us. What a great rivalry that game was in the ’90s.”
I covered the Rams that year, and Ken Gordon was covering the Tygers, both of us for the News Journal. We even wagered a steak dinner on the game (it was delicious).
The week of the rivalry was filled with pregame hyperbole. The city needed little to prompt an attendance bump. Seating in the tiny Madison press box was at a premium, yet Madison grad and Ohio State assistant coach Lee Owens (now the Ashland University head coach) found a seat next to me.
That week, Gordon penned a feature story on the Mansfield Senior secondary, which to that point in the season had not allowed a passing TD. Woodring vowed to me (off the record) that would be the very first order of business his team would complete.
Sure enough, Madison took the opening kickoff and smartly marched 69 yards, with Schag drilling a 10-yard touchdown pass to Montgomery to complete the drive.
“Coach Woodring called the 12P Pop Pass,” Schag said. “We brought Lee Montgomery down on the line as a tight end. I faked a handoff to (fullback) Ryan Ohl up the middle and threw a TD pass to Lee in the back of the end zone.
“We went nuts.”
While Senior High never led, the Tygers hung right there with a superb squad that showed its grit in a magnificent contest.
At halftime, with Madison clinging to a 17-14 edge, I turned to Gordon and said, “I don’t think we built this game up enough.”
The Rams eventually pulled away for a 24-14 win, as Whitcomb dominated the second half on a game-clinching 90-yard drive to finish it.
“The atmosphere for that game, the packed house, the noise, the anticipation, the electricity was in the air,” Woodring said. “Sitting here, I honestly can’t recall much of that game.
“It comes back when I see the highlight film, though. I love it!”
The Rams finished the perfect regular season with a 28-7 win against a very solid Ashland squad that was also unbeaten in the OHC going into the regular-season finale. Madison pulled away from the Arrows in a strong second-half showing amid frigid conditions.
Woodring’s crew then turned its attention to the playoffs. Fourth-ranked Madison tangled with fifth-ranked Pickerington in a blizzard.
It was a miserable night, and the conditions crippled the Rams’ passing game. Still, Madison took a 13-0 halftime lead before falling to a second-half rally, 22-19. The game wasn’t decided until the Tigers intercepted a pass at their own 5-yard line in the waning seconds.
“We were fast and explosive. Pickerington was big and physical. The weather really hurt us that night,” Schag said. “We were up 13-0 at halftime and we thought for sure we were going to win. This game still haunts us.
“The toughest thing to happen was my last pass as a Madison Ram — an interception with like 16 seconds left in the playoff game. Sometimes I still find myself daydreaming about it 30 years later! If I had only thrown it out of bounds.”
Pickerington grabbed the lead by scoring TDs on its first two drives of the second half. But Madison charged back in front, then missed a key two-point conversion when Whitfield’s catch was ruled out of bounds — a call the Rams dispute to this day.
“It felt like we chased those points the rest of the game,” Woodring said. “But you have to give credit to Pickerington for coming back the way they did in the snow.”
It was a tough ending to an unforgettable season.
Whitfield collected first-team All-Ohio honors at receiver and earned a scholarship to Toledo. Today he’s the assistant athletic director at the Houston Independent School District in Texas. He has two sons, 12 and 9, and brings them back to Mansfield once or twice a year to visit family.
I asked Rob if his boys knew how good their father was as a high school football player.
“I don’t know, I think they’re more impressed with their uncle Steve,” he said.
Whitcomb was a second-team All-Ohio choice. Today he and his wife live in Clarksville, Tennessee and own the Agape Realty & Management company.
Schag was also a second-team all-state selection. He and his family live in Willard where he works as a CPA and is the CFO of a construction company. His son scored his first varsity TD this fall for the Flashes.
Look how long this story is, and it would’ve been far longer if I had talked to so many other key members of this special team, including Brent Billingsley, Ryan Ohl, Tom Snow, Lee Montgomery, Josh Hrivnak or Jason Schag, all of whom earned all-district honors. Matt Loughman and Billy Bays were instrumental players for this group, too.
The coaching staff was a fun crew as well, and included Steve Hill, Matt Godsil, Tom Moore, Tom Wolff and Harold Dean.
I remember specifically after the 1992 regular-season finale at Ashland when Rob Whitfield pulled me aside and asked if I could mention Hill in the newspaper. He felt the defensive coordinator was a crucial part of the story that had yet to be told.
Interestingly, a decade later, Godsil (who still teaches at Madison) would lead the program to its first postseason win.
At a reunion before the 2022 home opener, Whitfield also noted the absence of teammate Matt Applegate, who passed away.
“When we got together, we all wore pins with the No. 75,” Whitfield said. “The Gator, we lost one of our own in him. If he was around, he would’ve been with us. We all had a bond.”
So did the Madison community. It was a team that united the Township.
“The community support for Ram football in the ’90s was incredible,” Schag said. “It was all over the town. We felt like movie stars. The stands were packed and loud every game.
“Ram Pride was real. Not just from the players, the parents, the teachers, the community, it was very special.”
So was this team.
1992 Madison football season
Sept. 4: Madison 59, Shelby 7
Sept. 11: Madison 49, Galion 6
Sept. 18: Madison 34, Mount Vernon 12
Sept. 25: Madison 57, Cleveland John Adams 6
Oct. 2: Madison 64, Chillicothe 19
Oct. 9: Madison 48, Orrville 14
Oct. 16: Madison 29, Lexington 3
Oct. 23: Madison 42, Marion Harding 0
Oct. 30: Madison 24, Mansfield Sr. 14
Nov. 6: Madison 28, Ashland 7
PLAYOFF
Nov. 14: Pickerington 22, Madison 19
Madison finished the regular season 10-0 and won the outright Ohio Heartland Conference championship. The Rams finished No. 4 in the final Division I state poll, according to the Associated Press, and qualified for their second playoff appearance in school history.