What the scoreboard said didn’t matter. When Oberlin quarterback Drew Nye tucked the ball and ran for a 10-yard touchdown with one second left back in November, the crowd roared, the players celebrated, the announcer bellowed his excitement.

The reaction made it seem like a championship-winning score. It wasn’t. It was the culmination of a 9-play, 59-yard drive and the last score of a 42-13 loss to No. 25-ranked Wabash on Nov. 8.

“It felt like we won the game,” said senior Oberlin linebacker Hunter Green, who this season became the second all-time leading tackler in school history. “The crowd was jumping up and down. The sideline was running up and down.”

When you’re playing or rooting for the Yeomen, you take your chances to celebrate when they come.

Oberlin isn’t and never will be Ohio State, the powerhouse program two hours away that has won three national titles this century, including last season’s, to go with 42 Big Ten titles. For one thing, Oberlin (student population 3,000) plays in Division III, Ohio State in FBS. At one point in November, ESPN’s Bill Connolly had Oberlin ranked last among the nation’s college football program’s at 766 while Ohio State sat at No. 1. (Mount Union, which has won 13 D-III titles and is an hour and a half from Oberlin, was ranked 298th in the same poll).

FBS teams can have 105 players, including a maximum of 85 scholarship players. Oberlin had less than 40 this past season, zero on scholarship, and that number later dropped below 30 because of injuries. Many players had to play both offense and defense. Oberlin was 0-10 this season (0-8 in the North Coast Athletic Conference) and has won three games total in the post-COVID era. In 2025, the Yeomen had losses of 88-6, 75-0 and 63-0.

Yet, Oberlin and Ohio State are historically linked. On Oct. 8, 1921, Oberlin defeated Ohio State 7-6 on the game’s only touchdown by William E. Parkhill. It was the last time the Buckeyes have lost to an in-state school. Oberlin has another historical claim to fame. It was the first coaching stop of the legendary John Heisman in 1892. He also coached the Yeomen in 1894.

As for 2025, the Buckeyes’ season is still going, with a game against Miami on Wednesday in the CFP quarterfinals. The Yeomen, meanwhile, are recruiting and looking ahead to a 2026 season that hopefully will improve upon 2025.

The man leading the effort is third-year head coach John Pont. He has a 2-28 record, but Pont comes from strong coaching stock. His grandfather, also named John Pont, led Indiana to the Big Ten championship and Rose Bowl in the 1967 season and was named national coach of the year.

It was one of only two times that Indiana has reached the Rose Bowl. The other time? Thursday when the Hoosiers play in the CFP quarterfinals against Alabama.

The current John Pont has coached at all levels — FBS, FCS, D-II and D-III. He was offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at the University of Chicago from 2017-2020, and in 2018 the Maroons set a school record with 365 points and quarterback Jeffrey Jackson set the school record for completion percentage (64.5 percent).

Pont is only three years removed from being in the big time. Prior to taking the Oberlin job, he was offensive analyst and football athletic performance assistant at Indiana in 2021 and 2022. Does he miss the Big Ten?

“I don’t,” Pont said. “I loved being at Indiana to follow in my grandfather’s footsteps, to see his picture all over those facilities, to work for amazing coaches. But I would not trade anything for being where I am.”

Having experienced both D-III and FBS, Pont says “size and speed” is the only difference between those levels.

“Other than that, you’re still molding and shaping the lives of young people,” he said. “That part of it doesn’t change, and it’s the guiding force behind why I do what I do. My experience at all these different places just helped me to learn my coaching style and who I am as a coach and our core values have been built over years of coaching at all these different spots.”

That sense of bond building is what instantly struck lineman Judah Moenoa, an offensive/defensive lineman from Las Vegas, when he visited the school as a recruit. His guides were two of the team’s leaders, linebacker Green and lineman Michael Mathis.

“When I came, I just felt instantaneous family,” Moenoa said. “(Coach Pont) welcomed me with open arms and I felt like I was laughing and joking around with my brother and my cousins. So, I just felt like an instant connection with him, with these two and a lot of other team members that I met. It felt like a family atmosphere.”

That family ethos was on display when the team rallied around assistant coach and chief of staff Roseanna Smith after she was diagnosed with breast cancer early in 2025.

“They checked on me all the time,” Smith said. “One of our guys who graduated last year came to one of my chemotherapy visits. Coach Pont took me to the biopsy to find out if I did have cancer and was at my first meeting with my oncologist.”

Pont says “it wasn’t even a question” how the team would help Smith.

“The guys stepped up. ‘Hey, let’s shave our heads when Coach Rose’s hair started falling out,'” Pont said. “In our family, truly nobody fights alone. So when Coach Ro had to fight, we were there with her.”

Smith, who has been at Oberlin five years, finished six chemotherapy treatments and had successful surgery in July, and the outlook is “optimistic,” she said.

Family is the foundation, but can it translate to victories on the field? Like the other 240 schools in D-III, Oberlin is not allowed to give scholarships. Recruiting can be a challenge. Players have to be strong in the classroom — the average team GPA this season was 3.52 — as well as on the football field. And Pont and athletic director Natalie Winkelfoos always talk about finding “the right 38” — but they definitely want a bigger roster than that.

“The fit is so much more important than just having the number. I’d rather have the right 38 than than 100 kids and 62 of them are not great fits for who we are and what we believe,” he said.

Pont, his staff and Winkelfoos believe in the fight and the grit — Pont uses Dr. Angela Duckworth’s definition of grit as “perseverance and passion towards a long-term goal.” Oberlin will need that to turn their passion and core values into victories.

Miguel Garcia and Natalie Winkelfoos celebrate a score. (Courtesy of Oberlin College / Amanda Phillips)

Oberlin players did take note of their ranking by ESPN.

“Obviously it’s not awesome, but I think that with the consistency and the passion with this team, I think it only pushed us in the right direction,” Mathis said. “It’s only going to keep motivating us.”

In the meantime, even amid all the defeats, Pont and his players found reason to celebrate this past season.

Moenoa acknowledged it was a “tough season,” but added that “we went out there fighting and just having a blast, honestly.”

If anyone knows success, it’s Winkelfoos. She’s a member of three Hall of Fames, has been named AD of the year and D-III administrator of the year and owns the record for 3-point field goal percentage from her time playing basketball at Baldwin Wallace University, which she helped lead to the NCAA Tournament three times. She also helped raise $30 million for Oberlin’s athletics complex and wellness center.

Winkelfoos, who has been the school’s athletic director since 2012, believes there are brighter days ahead for the football team.

“It’s a team that fights above their weight class. I think about what defines this team and it’s one word for me — persistence,” she said. “They don’t just show up, they are working hard. They’re pushing boundaries, not just even programmatically on the field. Oberlin is a high academic institution. The rigor is hard. Everything that they’re doing is hard, but you would never know it because of the amount of joy that they’re showing up with.

“There’s never any hanging of the heads. I’m so proud of these scars that we’ve gotten to earn this year. Scars can be beautiful, right? Success belongs with the people that persist. That’s Oberlin College football.”