Remembering Ohio State Football great Bill Willis on Juneteenth

Today is a day that is set aside to reflect on the advancement of our society and culture pertaining to individuals within the black community. The calamity placed on our fellow man by individuals in the past is a tragedy that has stuck with our nation for decades. Unfortunately, the same hatred and inhumane thinking that led to slavery permeated society as a whole and included athletics and the higher education systems. Although the Ohio State football program doesn’t have the sin-stained hands that some of the other institutions around our country possess, our Buckeyes are not blameless.

I want to make it perfectly clear that I am not condoning in any way, shape, or form how black people were treated in our nation or on college campuses not so long ago. That being said, as we reflect on the advancement of society and our country on this national holiday of Juneteenth, I thought it would be good to remember the man who Ohio State football honors for being the player who officially broke not only the color barrier at Ohio State but in the NFL as well.

Bill Willis was a star athlete at Columbus East High School in 1940. If it would have been 2023 instead of 1940, he would have been considered a 5-star can’t-miss prospect. But alas, it wasn’t 2023, it was 1940 and the issue was that Willis was black.

This prohibited the majority of college football coaches, all of which were white, from even entertaining the thought of bringing one of the nation’s top high school stars onto their campus, let alone making him the centerpiece of their recruiting class and building a team around his talents.

Thankfully Ohio State had a head coach who wasn’t concerned about skin color. Paul Brown was a trailblazer himself, having played many black athletes at his high school program in Massillon, Ohio before being hired by Ohio State to transform the Buckeye football team. Brown saw Willis’ talent, not his skin color, and he knew he could win with him.

Willis wasn’t going to be the first black man to play at Ohio State, however. Frederick Patterson was the first in 1891 and Julius Tyler followed suit in 1896. However, segregation became a hot-button topic in the early to mid-1900s, and the opportunities for young black men to play college sports at predominately white institutions, especially in the South, became obsolete. That’s why Willis’ addition to the 1941 Ohio State football squad was so important.

Willis wore the number 99 jersey and as a sophomore in 1942, helped lead the Ohio State football program to their first-ever National Championship under the leadership of Coach Brown. Willis once told the Columbus Dispatch later in his life about Brown, “Paul made a difference. There were only two or three other blacks in the whole league at the time, but I hardly noticed. Paul treated me the same as everyone else, and by the time I left, there were several blacks on the roster.”

After graduation, it only made sense that Willis would further his football career as a professional. He was indeed one of the best in the country at his craft. But the All-American Football Conference was much like the rest of the nation, and segregation was still being practiced.

So, Willis went and played professionally in Canada. That was until Coach Brown took over the professional franchise in Cleveland, Ohio. One of his first calls was to Willis. He knew he had broken the color barrier at Ohio State a few years before, and he would ask him to do the same thing for the AAFC.

Willis once again accepted the request of Brown, and he became the catalyst for Cleveland winning four consecutive championships before the Browns, who were named after their championship-winning head coach, moved to the NFL.

In their first season in the new league, Cleveland won a fifth consecutive championship as Willis was the first black man in the league. Willis retired in 1954 and was inducted into both the College and NFL Hall of Fames in the 1970s. Ohio State rightly retired his #99 jersey.

Today, Ohio State honors Willis and his great achievements both on and off the field by awarding a black athlete on the team with the number 0, or as they call it, the Block-O jersey, which is inspired by Willis and for what he stood for – toughness, accountability, and the highest of character.

The coaching staff looks for these qualities in a young man before considering him as the recipient of the Block-O jersey. Past honorees were Kamryn Babb in 2022, Thayer Mumford in 2021, and Jonathon Cooper in 2020.