“She was the hardest teacher I think I’ve ever had,” Rabinowitz said. “She scared the crap out of me because if you weren’t prepared, she would just rip you — not in a brutal way — but you knew that was the class where you sat up in your chair and you were prepared. You knew by the end of that class how to diagram a sentence. You knew how to become a writer. I became very aware of the details of writing."
There were other influences. Rabinowitz, the son of Bernie Rabinowitz, who still lives in Dayton, and the late Carole Rabinowitz, lived next door to longtime Dayton Daily News sports writer Marc Katz, on the north side of Dayton. He remembers playing poker with Katz and Chick Ludwig, another veteran sports writer from the paper, and Alter boys basketball coach Joe Petrocelli when he was 16.
“I’m sure in some subliminal way that planted a seed,” said Rabinowitz, a 1982 graduate of the Miami Valley School.
That seed grew into a journalism career that has included 15 seasons and counting on the Ohio State football beat. Rabinowitz worked for the Columbus Dispatch for the first 14 of those seasons before taking a buyout in September. He spent 26 years at the newspaper in all, covering the Cleveland Browns and Cincinnati Bengals earlier in his career. He now writes about Ohio State football on Substack.
It’s always a thrill to see the reward for months of work and angst. My books have arrived. The release date is Oct. 21. Founding members of my Substack will get them earlier, signed and mailed by me hopefully sometime next week. Thanks again to everyone who has supported me. pic.twitter.com/EdfAKgDed0
— Bill Rabinowitz 🗞 (@billrabinowitz) October 3, 2025
Rabinowitz’s sports writing legacy also includes four books about the Buckeyes, the latest of which came out Tuesday.
“Buckeye Brotherhood: How Ohio State Navigated a New World to Win a National Championship,” is available on Amazon.com and other online stores and in bookstores.
Unlike other recent national championship seasons — 2002 and 2014 — many experts expected Ohio State to win the title last season, and it did, but not without stumbles along the way.
“When they lost to Michigan, they knew they’d be in the playoff,” Rabinowitz said, but you wondered, ‘What kind of team would show up? Would that loss just fracture them, or would it galvanize them? That was the real question. Nobody knew.
“Then they went out there and just demolished Tennessee. I remember in the press box during the first quarter going, ‘Oh, this is the team that I thought they’d be all year,’ and that’s what they were during the rest of the playoffs, basically.”
When the Buckeyes’ work ended, Rabinowitz’s work began. He had four months to finish the book so it would be printed before the holiday season.
“I don’t recommend it for anyone’s mental or physical health,” he said, “but that’s what had to be done.”
Rabinowitz knew what the work would entail. He also wrote “Buckeye Rebirth: Urban Meyer, an Inspired Team, and a New Era at Ohio State,” in 2013, and “The Chase: How Ohio State Captured the First College Football Playoff,” in 2015.
In 2023, he co-authored “Cardale Jones,” a book about the Ohio State quarterback who led the Buckeyes to a national championship in the 2014 season.
“All four of them have really been accidental,” Rabinowitz said. “I never set out to become an author. I just wanted to be a sports writer. And the first one came about because 2012 was such a unique season. In Urban Meyer’s first season, they couldn’t go to the postseason because they were on probation. It was kind of a weird team. They weren’t all that good, honestly, but they just kept winning, and at one point, Urban Meyer just kind of casually said to nobody in particular, ‘We’ve got to write a book about this.’”
Rabinowitz had already started to think about writing a book but had never written one before and didn’t know how the process worked.
On the other hand, he thought, “I can do it as well as anybody. There’s nobody here that can do it better, I don’t think, and so I did it, and it was, ‘OK, that’s my one and only book.’”
Two years later, Ohio State won the first College Football Playoff national championship with a third-string quarterback.
“It was just a crazy, crazy year,” Rabinowitz said. “If I did one on the 2012 season, how can I not do this one?”
Rabinowitz figured he wouldn’t have to write a book last season after Ohio State’s loss to Michigan.
“Ryan Day, like Urban Meyer, had said at different points, ‘If we don’t win it all, nobody will tell our story.’ And he didn’t say me, but I told him at one point during the playoff, ‘If you guys win it, I will write the book.’ I told him I’d written other ones, or maybe he knew. But, obviously, before I would embark on something like this, I knew I’d get his cooperation.”
Rabinowitz talked to Day numerous times during his research. His first interview was with Day’s wife, Nina, at a coffee shop in Powell soon after the national championship game. It lasted 2½ hours.
Jim Knowles, Ohio State’s defensive coordinator, gave Rabinowitz the longest interview. They spoke for three hours on the phone as Knowles drove to his new job at Penn State.
Rabinowitz spoke to more than 50 people, including all but a couple of the key players.
The interviews covered a wide range of topics beyond the 2024 season.
“I believe this is the best of the three books (about championship seasons),” Rabinowitz wrote on Substack. “No one has revealed Ryan Day’s personal story the way this book does, and there were so many other compelling personalities and stories I was privileged to share. You know what happened last season, but this book tells you how it happened.”
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