Enlarge By J. Pat Carter, AP Florida coach Urban Meyer, left, and Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops pose with the Bowl Championship Series trophy after a news conference in Hollywood, Fla., on Dec. 10. Meyer and Stoops are both from Ohio, separated at birth by less than four years and no more than 60 miles. WINNING IN MIAMI WINNING IN MIAMI Coach factory: Ohio makes, football takes MIAMI GARDENS, Fla.  Separated at birth by less than four years and no more than 60 miles of Ohio's most hardscrabble terrain, Oklahoma's Bob Stoops and Florida's Urban Meyer have much more in common than the BCS national championship football game they will coach here Thursday evening. What they share is not theirs to share alone, however. It also belongs to Don Shula, Paul Brown, Chuck Noll, Woody Hayes, Bo Schembechler and Ara Parseghian, among many others. Stoops and Meyer are simply the latest in a long line of one of the state of Ohio's greatest exports: football coaches. "I don't think it's just coincidence that there's a strong Ohio tie," Meyer said Monday at Dolphin Stadium. "With all due respect to the other states — I don't really know them as well as I know Ohio — I know Ohio football is very, very important. It's kind of insanity. … Growing up in Ohio, Fridays were high school football, Saturdays were Ohio State and Sundays were the Browns and Bengals and really nothing else. In the offseason, you played basketball and baseball to stay in shape for football. Did that have an impact on my life? Absolutely. And I'm sure it did Coach Stoops." Stoops, 48, grew up in Youngstown in northeastern Ohio, an hour's drive south of Ashtabula, the Lake Erie community that is Meyer's hometown. "If you look on a map," said Meyer, 44, "(you can see) how close those two cities are." The two were even closer in the summer, when Stoops and his family vacationed at a resort on Lake Erie that was 1½ miles from Meyer's house. Both men played football in high school, then college (Stoops at Iowa, Meyer at Cincinnati), then went into coaching. Except for one season as an assistant at Kent State in 1988, Stoops never came back to Ohio. Meyer almost didn't leave. After wearing number 45 in high school because it was two-time Heisman Trophy winner Archie Griffin's number at Ohio State, Meyer became a graduate assistant in Columbus in 1986. The first time he touched an Ohio State jersey, he choked up. "I had tears in my eyes," Meyer told author Buddy Martin in the new book, Urban's Way. "I remember grabbing a scarlet and gray jersey and going, 'Wow!' I mean, 'Wow! I'm here.' Every kid growing up in Ohio wants to do that." Meyer is such a fan of the late Woody Hayes that he has a sketched portrait of the Ohio State coach hanging in his home in Gainesville, Fla., Martin writes. Hayes lives on at Oklahoma, too. James Patton coaches the Sooners offensive line and happens to come from the northwestern Ohio town of Lafayette. He played at Miami (Ohio), the proving ground of so many legends, Hayes included, that it rightly earned the nickname "The Cradle of Coaches." In last month's Big 12 championship game, with temperatures in the low 30s and the wind chill in the low 20s, Patton channeled his inner Hayes by wearing no jacket, just shirt sleeves. His linemen followed his lead. "Woody Hayes didn't want to act like the cold bothered him and didn't want his players to act cold," Patton said Monday. "In Ohio, you're playing in cold weather at the end of the season. You've got to run the football; you've got to be physical. I kind of have a little bit of that." Of course he does. He's from Ohio. While the state ranks seventh in the nation in population, it is third in the number of high school football players, The Wall Street Journal recently reported. And while less than 4% of the U.S. population lives in Ohio, 15% of college football's major-conference head coaches were born there, the most from any state, according to the Journal. These also happen to be some of the nation's most successful coaches: 14 of the last 18 teams to make it to the national championship game had head coaches with Ohio connections. These, of course, are not the best of times for Ohio. The recession has hit hard. Yet the state is still in the business of pumping out coaches, and a glance at the sidelines Thursday will show it is doing very well indeed. Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more