The Richard Strauss tale lingered in an odd corner of American sports for almost eight years. In Columbus, everyone was familiar with the name. Outside, most people didn’t. Wrestlers carried the weight of the lawsuits, then divers, then fencers, then tennis players, and the public mostly kept scrolling. There’s a feeling now that something has shifted. Thirty former Ohio State football players, more than a dozen of them onetime NFL men, have signed on to the federal class action against the university. The scandal that universities tried to treat as a closed chapter is opening again, louder this time, with names attached.
Al Washington is sixty-seven. He played for Woody Hayes, made the 1980 Rose Bowl team, went on to the Jets, and now runs a private insurance company in Columbus. The detail that struck me, reading his account, was small: he tried to watch the HBO documentary last year and couldn’t finish it. A man who built a career around composure, sitting in front of a screen, walking away from a film about his own past. That’s the kind of moment that doesn’t fit cleanly into a press release.
The legal mechanics here matter more than they seem. Ohio State has settled with 317 survivors so far, paying out something north of $61 million, and the school has never disputed that Strauss did what’s alleged. Its defense, throughout, has rested on statute-of-limitations arguments and questions about which administrators knew what. That worked, more or less, when the plaintiffs were wrestlers and non-revenue athletes the public couldn’t easily name. It’s going to work less well now. A federal judge ruled in late April that survivors can pursue damages for lost earnings and physical injuries, expanding what’s on the table. The football plaintiffs arrive into a courtroom that’s already moving in their direction.
Universities have spent years quietly assuming that male sexual abuse cases follow a predictable arc: a few public claims, settlements behind sealed agreements, a slow fade. The Ohio State trajectory suggests that arc is breaking. Penn State went through something similar with Sandusky. Michigan State with Nassar. The pattern keeps repeating, and the institutions keep believing, somehow, that their own case will be smaller. Seldom is it.
Rocky Ratliff, the attorney handling the new plaintiffs, said something interesting this week. He noted that many of these men came forward because they watched how the school was treating current athletes, and decided silence wasn’t useful anymore. That’s a generational handoff most lawyers wouldn’t bother to articulate. It reframes the lawsuit as something less about Strauss, who died in 2005 and never faced any of his accusers, and more about institutional habit. About what schools do when an inconvenient story walks through the door.
The extent to which this expands is still unknown. Three of the thirty have agreed to be named publicly. The other twenty-seven are watching. Hundreds of claims remain unresolved. Other big-football schools, presumably, are watching too, recalculating what their own exposure might look like if a similar set of names from a signature program decided to talk. The scope of university liability isn’t what it was a month ago. Whether anyone in administrative offices wants to admit that yet is a different question.
