Mark "Bo" Pelini [Author's note: Only dogs are actually named "Bo" and every male from Youngstown not named Urban is named Mark, Jim or Robert by law since 1835] was a fairly popular Buckeye on some fairly unpopular Buckeye teams. Despite playing on some mediocre seven and eight-win squads that featured defenses that would not finish among the top ten of the Tressel era (this is math even you can do; Tressel had ten defenses) Pelini never seemed to quit on any given play. Not in the first quarter; not in the fourth. That overused term "flying around the ball?" That was him.

He wasn't extremely talented from a football standpoint; one of those "slow white guys" Coop famously quipped about when he arrived in Columbus - but Pelini had a Big Ten heart. In his four years at Ohio State he was a three-time selection to the Academic All-Big Ten team and he took home the Bo Rein award as a senior co-captain, which means his teammates voted him as one of their leaders as well as their most inspirational player.