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In 1968, when Jim Tressel was a sophomore at Berea High School, his team scrimmaged powerful Elyria. It's unclear whether the Ohio State football coach faced Les Miles, the LSU coach and an Elyria graduate, that day.

"I threw like five interceptions," Tressel said. "I hope he didn't have any of them."

Two future Division I-A coaches on the same Ohio high school field isn't as improbable as one might think. Tressel and Miles, who will match up against each other in the BCS championship game on Jan. 7, are two of 18 current top-level head coaches who were either born or raised in Ohio. That number includes three (Tressel, Florida coach Urban Meyer and Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops) who hold national championships.

That Ohio has produced 15 percent of the head coaches in college football's highest division has caused some of the men on that list, as well as others around the state, to reflect on reasons that so many could come from one state. Could it simply be the high population? The large number of colleges? The level of high school football?

There doesn't seem to be anything in the water. But still, something must account for Ohio's rate of churning out champions and others holding jobs at college football's highly competitive level.

"It's the region we come from," said Bob Cistolo, the athletic director at Berea High School who spent 30 years coaching in the district. "People know what they want and work hard to get it."

Starting early

When Brady Hoke was a third-grader in Kettering, he played his first year of tackle football. An older brother, John, had been participating on the full-contact level for two years before reaching junior high.

Hoke, the Ball State coach and a 1977 Fairmont East graduate, said beginning full-padded football at such an age was a relative rarity for children of the time. That could be one reason such football minds have come from the state. They just started early.

"We've been better at Ball State, and a lot of that is because of young men taken out of Ohio," said Hoke, whose brother became the defensive backs coach for the Houston Texans. "The passion they have for the game, team chemistry, that has something to do with Midwestern values and moral character you develop there. The game is just taught well."

Some of the game's earliest history comes from this state. Northeast Ohio, including Massillon and Canton, remains a nationally respected spot for high school football. The first game played by the organization that would eventually become the NFL was between teams from Dayton and Columbus.

The state also produced some of the game's great teachers, Tressel points out.

"Paul Brown, who I think is one of the giants of the game of football and one of the giants of making Ohio State what it is today," Tressel mentioned. "He was one of the first coaches that had a playbook and studied film and did all those things. I just think the lineage of people who have been around the game (has been strong)."

Many credit their high school coaches. In the mid-1960s, Tom O'Brien played for legendary coach Tom Ballaban at St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati. Now the coach at North Carolina State, O'Brien said it was Ballaban's enthusiasm connected with the prominence of the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry and the large number of colleges playing football in the state (39 total) that helped him gain interest in becoming a coach.

"You can barely throw a rock," O'Brien said, "and not hit a college football stadium."

A big number

Mark Snyder sat in his Marshall University office and listened to the names of Ohio-bred coaches. The Stoops brothers, Bob and Mike (Arizona), are from Youngstown Cardinal Mooney High School. So is Bo Pelini, the LSU defensive coordinator who was hired this month to coach Nebraska.

Missouri coach Gary Pinkel was raised in Akron, and Joe Tiller (Purdue), Jim Harbaugh (Stanford) and Tom Amstutz (Toledo) are all from Toledo. Meyer (Ashtabula) and Miami University coach Shane Montgomery (Newark Catholic) came from smaller high schools, as did Illinois coach Ron Zook (Loudonville).

Snyder is on the list as an Ironton graduate whose father and grandfather used to alternate taking him to Ohio State and Marshall games on Saturdays.

"When you really think about it," Snyder said, "it's pretty incredible."

All the more incredible, those interviewed said, because of the relatively small number of jobs available. There are 119 schools in Division I-A, which might seem like a large number. But consider all of the coaches who dream of holding one of those precious few jobs and how often they are taken in seemingly clandestine or secretive ways.

Recently, some schools — most notably Arkansas hiring Bobby Petrino away from the Atlanta Falcons and Alabama taking Nick Saban from the Miami Dolphins — have drawn criticism for the way they hired coaches.

"I think that Bobby Petrino's latest act is just another idea of what is wrong with the profession," Ohio State president Gordon Gee said. "Here we do this: We tell our players that they live by a certain sets of rules and regulations, yet we don't ... I think we need to recalibrate that."

Several coaches reiterated the need for traditional Midwestern values to succeed in the profession, which demands organizing more than 100 players, dozens of support staff members and dealing with different personalities. In fact, they said, the next batch of major-college football coaches already could be playing on high school fields throughout Ohio.

"My high school experience was as influential as anything for getting me into coaching," O'Brien said. "I guess I didn't realize so many others from Ohio felt the same."

Contact this reporter at (937) 225-7389 or knagel@DaytonDailyNews.com.