SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- Ohio State coach Jim Tressel didn't know he had a championship-caliber team until Miami's final pass fell incomplete in the Fiesta Bowl's second overtime.

He remembers a moment, though, before the season even began when he felt something special happening. The moment didn't occur in a practice or a scrimmage. It happened during a team meeting before the opening game against Texas Tech in the Pigskin Classic.

Tressel told a crowd of about 500 at a College Football Hall of Fame luncheon Wednesday that he and his players have spent a lot of time since Sept. 11, 2001, talking about today's uncertain times.

"Coming off heels of 9-11, we thought it was important to pull all of the perspective together as to where does football fit in this big picture," he said.

As part of that, last summer he had all the Buckeyes read "Expanding Your Horizons," a book about Ohio State's 1942 national championship team and the lives of the people on it.

"It was really an amazing chronology of what went on there, what was going on in the world," he said.

Tressel was especially intrigued by the story of Charles Csuri, a standout on the 1942 team who was elected captain of the 1943 squad.

But before the season, Csuri joined the military and served in World War II, including volunteering for a dangerous mission. After the war, he continued his education, became an art professor at Ohio State and is credited with developing technology to create computer art.

So Tressel invited Csuri, now a professor emeritus at the school, to speak to the team.

"He talked about the importance of focusing on your role and what does focus really mean. Remember, our guys knew who he was," Tressel said. "They knew the extraordinary things he had done in his life."

Tressel said Csuri only spoke for a few minutes, but his remarks had an immediate effect.

"As I watched our guys listen to him, you could see things were clicking," Tressel said.

"They were beginning to understand that that's a real person they read about, that was a real person who had achieved and excelled beyond any of our comprehension. And that was a person who was giving us tips how we could do it," he said.

Tressel, whose father, Lee Tressel, the former Baldwin-Wallace coach, was inducted into the hall in 1986, said he tries to teach his players that being a standout football player is great, but it is not enough.

He quoted in part from a poem on God's hall of fame.

"For our young people and for ourselves, especially in times of extraordinary happenings that we've had, we need to keep in mind the proper perspective -- where we are in the big picture," he said. "It's far greater to earn our way to God's hall of fame."

Originally published Thursday, March 27, 2003