COLUMBUS — Alabama was not the Germans. The Superdome was not Omaha Beach. A football game was not war. 

Not even close. 

But as Ohio State headed into the final minutes of its playoff showdown against Alabama last season, the Buckeyes had a different sort of victory squarely on their minds. 

D-Day at Normandy. 

Ohio State coach Urban Meyer gave The Blade an inside look at the depths of his appreciation for the U.S. military and the untold ways he uses its culture and past to galvanize the top-ranked Buckeyes. 

This may not seem especially unique in a sport forever cast — often clumsily — in war terms. But with Meyer continuing the legacy of his childhood idol, Woody Hayes, few programs are more influenced by the armed forces than Ohio State, where the biggest wins of its national championship season were inspired by some of the biggest moments in American history. 

Consider Ohio State’s upset victory at Michigan State last November. The Buckeyes that week leaned on the Navy SEAL Team Six’s capture and killing of Osama Bin Laden. 

Players were issued dog tags to be worn during the game and watched clips from Zero Dark Thirty. In the final scene, after a SEAL kills Bin Laden, the team leader asks him, “Do you realize what you just did?” 

In the locker room, coaches asked the players: What are you going to do when the chopper hits the ground?

“When contact is made, you resort back to your training,” Meyer said. “The theme going into the Michigan State game was, we're training, we're training, and then all of the sudden the helicopters start warming up, and we board the choppers ready to go. That was the theme in the locker room there, that was the whole theme afterward, and it carried on throughout the year.”

Including into the first College Football Playoff and Ohio State’s semifinal against heavily favored Alabama. 

Before the Buckeyes departed for New Orleans, players received a postcard featuring a photo of a Higgins boat, the World War II landing craft built in the Big Easy and used by the Allied forces during the invasion of Nazi-occupied Normandy. 

Like the men on those boats, they were instructed to write a note to someone close to them — a reminder of for whom they fought, or, in their case, played. Many wrote to their parents. Linebacker Joshua Perry wrote to Joshua Chambers, the 5-year-old son of Perrysburg native Jeremy Chambers, whose battle with leukemia had touched the team. 

“We told them, ‘These were men just like you. Their mission was a much greater mission, a much more dangerous mission, a much more worthy one, but they were just like you,’” cornerbacks coach Kerry Coombs said. “Before we got on the plane, we collected all the postcards. We were going on a mission too.”

When the plane landed, each player received a clicker. It was a replica of the devices used by Allied troops during nighttime landings on the beaches of Normandy to distinguish friend from enemy. If a soldier clicked and got two clicks back, that’s a friend. 

“If you don’t get a click, click ... that’s it,” Meyer said. “The whole message was that they were going to need each other.”

Whether it was in the team hotel or the French Quarter, players carried their clickers almost everywhere. 

“I still think about that moment,” Meyer said. “Here we are getting ready to play in the Sugar Bowl, and those kids are going, ‘Click, click, click.’ ... It became a feeding frenzy because they love each other so much.”

Meyer knows evoking the military in the same breath as a game may strike some as off-putting. Sensibilities have evolved over the years. The NFL, for instance, has encouraged announcers to banish football-as-war metaphors from their lexicon. A linebacker closing in on the ballcarrier is not on a search-and-destroy mission. Deep passes are not bombs, nor is the line of scrimmage a trench. 

Teams must navigate a fine line to avoid trivializing the horrors of battle, but Meyer said he is very careful not to cross it. His players know the nation’s heroes are not the stars of fall Saturdays but the men and women in far-flung lands who sacrifice their lives for their country. 

“We never try to compare ourselves to them,” tight end Nick Vannett said, “because that’s not right or fair.”

“We're very leery of that and very respectful of that,” Meyer said in an interview in his office this week. “I've asked many friends who are lifers in the military, and I think they would know from Woody Hayes all the way through Jim Tressel to our staff, we are never equating what we do to what they do. We have the utmost respect and honor for what they do. 

“When you have a chance to learn from the very best, it's just an opportunity to learn. We're not trying to mimic. We're trying to learn from the highest-motivated, best-trained humans in the world.”

In that way, the Ohio State program remains a tribute to Hayes, an English and history major at Denison University, lieutenant commander in the Navy during World War II, and legendary coach of the Buckeyes. 

Hayes gave his players a daily history lesson, drawing analogies to great battles and once reportedly naming a series of plays after his military heroes, Army general George Patton and Air Force general Curtis LeMay. “Patton” meant run, “LeMay” was pass. 

Among his closest friends was former President Richard Nixon, who credited Hayes’ endorsement for his victory in Ohio in the 1960 presidential election. Nixon gave the eulogy at Hayes’ funeral in 1987 and famously recounted the first time he met the Buckeyes coach. Nixon wanted to talk about football. Hayes wanted to talk about foreign policy. 

“You know Woody,” Nixon said, “we talked about foreign policy.”

“There are cultures throughout this country that are created by political figures, they're created by teachers, stars sometimes, and there are others by coaches,” Meyer said. “The culture that we all live here at Ohio State — I know I do — is one I followed very closely in the 1970s. [It’s from] a guy named Woody Hayes and his appreciation for the military.”

Today, the culture extends to every corner of the program. 

Ohio State honors the past — a wall inside the practice complex recognizes every former player who served in the military — and gleans its lessons for the future. 

Meyer models his leadership training after the military, including the importance of small-unit cohesion from the Buckeyes’ nine position groups, and often has veterans address the team. The guest list last year included Marcus Luttrell, the SEAL whose surveillance team was ambushed in Afghanistan in 2005 and whose experience was recounted in the movie Lone Survivor. Luttrell told the Buckeyes they would play like they practice, giving the age-old message a new resonance. “It’s the same thing we do in the SEAL teams,” Luttrell later recalled telling the team. “We train like we fight. Every day is as hard and as fast as we can possibly go.”

Front and center in the Buckeyes’ weight room is the oversized message: “Train like an American Soldier.” Next door in the locker room, Meyer recently put up his favorite new quote, from the British writer G.K. Chesterton. 

“The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

In the Sugar Bowl, before Alabama attempted an onside kick in the final minutes, Meyer gathered the kickoff team in a huddle. 

He pulled out his clicker and clicked twice.

“The guys went nuts,” Coombs said.

Like Meyer’s motivational secrets, the rest is history. 

Ohio State recovered, of course, and won 42-35, on its way to the school’s eighth national title days later.

Contact David Briggs at: dbriggs@theblade.com, 419-724-6084 or on Twitter @DBriggsBlade.

First Published October 2, 2015, 4:30 a.m.