Ohio State Football: Teams Buckeyes have never beaten
By Ryan Stano
![The Ohio State Football program has only played South Carolina twice before. [Corey Perrine/Florida Times-Union]](https://images2.minutemediacdn.com/image/upload/c_fill,w_1080,ar_16:9,f_auto,q_auto,g_auto/shape%2Fcover%2Fsport%2F6e38ede976ee6223196812a7577a14794b3af2b2df0d5c6abbda5169715603f3.jpg "The Ohio State Football program has only played South Carolina twice before. [Corey Perrine/Florida Times-Union]")
6. South Carolina
The Ohio State football team has only played South Carolina twice before. Both of them were in back-to-back years in 2001 and 2002 in the Outback Bowl. The Gamecocks won both games, facing off against different Buckeye head coaches as they did.
The first time these two teams played, John Cooper was leading the Buckeyes. It would ultimately be the last game he coached at Ohio State. Lou Holtz and the Gamecocks throttled the Buckeyes 24-7 in yet another game that wasn’t even close. That’s a bit of a theme with these Cooper teams, isn’t it?
Cooper was fired after the game and Jim Tressel was given the job. Tressel would coach the 2001 Buckeyes to a 7-4 record in his first year on the job. He played South Carolina much closer in the 2002 Outback Bowl, falling to the Gamecocks 31-28.
That game helped springboard the Buckeyes to a historic season in 2002. Tressel and the Ohio State football team went undefeated and beat Miami in the BCS National Championship Game to win the Buckeyes’ first national title since the 1960s.
South Carolina is another team that is a candidate to be scheduled for a home-and-home in the future. They aren’t on the docket right now, but we’ll see how the conference realignment stuff affects future scheduling between the Big Ten and the SEC.
We now look at the final team that the Ohio State football team has never beaten.