Roy Hall: Making It Possible for Somebody Else to Score

Ohio State’s offense didn’t score a touchdown against Iowa on Oct. 18, 2003.

Normally, that would be a problem when you’re playing the No. 9 team in the country. But the eighth-ranked Buckeyes found other ways to score and beat Iowa 19-10 in The Shoe.

The defending national champions were coming off their first loss in 20 games, a 17-10 defeat at Wisconsin. Another loss would have turned one bad Saturday into something much more concerning.

Fortunately, Mike Nugent had a pretty good right leg.

Nugent kicked a career-long 53-yard field goal to give Ohio State a 3-0 lead. Side Note: The next season, on September 11, 2004, Nugent topped his personal best with a 55-yard game-ending field goal to bail out the Buckeyes against the Marshall Thundering Herd.

Sorry for the interruption. Back to the story…

Less than a minute after Nugent’s 53-yarder, Michael Jenkins returned an Iowa punt 54 yards for a touchdown and Ohio State led 10-0 without its offense doing much of anything.

Then came the play many Buckeye fans probably remember because Donte Whitner ended up with the football.

But Whitner didn’t make the play happen.

Roy Hall did.

Iowa was backed up deep in its own territory, down only 10-3 midway through the third quarter, when Hall ran up the middle and blocked the Hawkeyes' punt near the goal line. The football bounced into the end zone, where freshman Donte Whitner recovered it for his first Ohio State touchdown.

Buckeyes 17, Iowa 3.

Whitner got the touchdown, but Hall made it possible.

That’s football, but it’s also life. Sometimes the guy holding the football when the play ends gets remembered longer than the guy who created the opportunity.

Hall was a redshirt freshman wide receiver at the time. The blocked punt was the first of his Ohio State career and came during a game when special teams accounted for 17 of the Buckeyes’ 19 points. Iowa later scored on a fake field goal, while Ohio State added a fourth-quarter safety after a shotgun snap sailed out of the end zone. Neither offense scored a touchdown all afternoon.

Hall would spend four seasons contributing at Ohio State, although he was often surrounded by receivers whose names Buckeye fans remember more easily. Santonio Holmes, Ted Ginn Jr. and Anthony Gonzalez were among them.

At 6-foot-3 and around 240 pounds, Hall gave Ohio State something different. He was a big, physical receiver who played in 37 games during his first three seasons and entered his senior year fighting for a larger role in another talented receiving room at Wide Receiver U. An ankle injury limited that final season, but Hall remained involved and helped mentor younger receivers Brian Hartline, Brian Robiskie and Ray Small.

The Indianapolis Colts eventually selected Hall in the fifth round of the 2007 NFL Draft, but his most important work came after football.

Hall and former Ohio State teammate Antonio Smith co-founded the DRIVEN Foundation in 2008. The organization has helped thousands of Ohio families via food distributions, youth programs, and community outreach. By 2017, Ohio State reported that DRIVEN had already distributed approximately 500,000 pounds of food to more than 4,200 families.

There’s a massive Scarletude lesson in Roy Hall’s story. Or, maybe there’s a massive Roy Hall influence in Scarletude’s mission.

His memorable play against Iowa wasn’t about getting credit. He didn’t recover the football. His name didn’t go into the box score with credit for the touchdown.

He just did the work that allowed somebody else to get the credit.

Years later, he built an organization around helping other people get where they needed to go, which is what this site is all about…finding the human story hiding inside the football story.

Sometimes it’s the guy carrying the ball. Sometimes it’s the guy everybody remembers.

And sometimes it’s Roy Hall getting his hand on the ball and making it possible for somebody else to score.