By SCHUYLER DIXON
The Associated Press
FRISCO, Texas — Ohio running back A.J. Ouellette doesn’t think of Frank Solich as the oldest head coach in FBS. He sees him as the guy who stuck around a smaller program long enough to run it for going on 15 years.
Ouellette gave Solich and the Bobcats a little something to build on in his final game.
The senior had his fourth straight 100-yard game with 164 yards rushing, quarterback Nathan Rourke accounted for all three touchdowns and Ohio rolled to a 27-0 victory over San Diego State in the drizzly Frisco Bowl on Wednesday.
Ohio (9-4) finished with six wins in seven games and won a second straight bowl game under Solich, who became the oldest head coach in FBS at 74 before bowl season when 79-year-old Bill Snyder retired at Kansas State.
“To have him a little older than most coaches, young coaches are at a school a couple of years and they leave,” said Ouellette, who finished among Ohio’s career rushing leaders with 3,784 yards. “Him being there 14 years, we’ve just been lucky that he stayed around.”
Solich spent 19 years on Tom Osborne’s staff at Nebraska before replacing the coach at his alma mater in 1998.
After six years in charge of the Cornhuskers, Solich was forced out following a 9-3 season, a year after a 7-7 record that ended a streak of 40 straight winning seasons. A year later, he took the Ohio job and has taken the Bobcats to 10 bowls in 14 seasons.
“I feel like I still have a lot of energy,” Solich said. “I still feel like I communicate well with players and coaches. I’m not feeling like the oldest coach, at least not tonight.”
San Diego State was shut out in a bowl for the first time since its first postseason appearance — a 53-0 loss to Hardin-Simmons in the 1948 Harbor Bowl at long-since-demolished Balboa Stadium in San Diego.
The Aztecs had 44 of their 287 yards on one run by Juwan Washington while losing a fourth straight game in a season for the first time in eight years under coach Rocky Long. The fourth-best run defense in FBS gave up a season-high 215 yards rushing to Ohio.
San Diego State’s first meeting with Ohio was its first loss in 15 games against Mid-American Conference teams. The 27-point margin ended a streak of 10 straight games decided by single digits for the Aztecs, which the school said was the longest such streak since at least 1980.
“I think you have to look at everything you do, from the top on down,” Long said. “We can delve into this as deep as you want. And we’re evaluating everything in our program. And it might be nothing but we don’t have one big-time player. That might be the difference.”
