'I'm not gonna tell you who I'm mad at, but I'm still mad' - Jim Tressel regrets not bringing future superstar to Ohio State

Jim Tressel won a national championship and brought a lot of elite talent to Columbus during his 10-year run as the head coach of the Ohio State Buckeyes. 

Outside of the way things ended in 2011 with the NCAA violations stemming from the tattoo parlor scandal, it's easy to suggest that Tressel doesn't have many regrets from his time as Ohio State's head coach. 

One regret that Tressel does carry, though, is the fact that he didn't recruit seven-time Pro Bowl linebacker Luke Kuechly. 

Kuechly, who is from Cincinnati, played college football at Boston College before getting selected by the Carolina Panthers in the first round of the 2012 NFL Draft. 

Tressel and former Ohio State wide receivers coach Darrell Hazell, along with former Buckeyes wide receiver Ted Ginn Jr, discussed Kuechly recently during episode 47 of the It's All About the Team podcast. 

(Ginn was teammates with Kuechly in Carolina.) 

"The best player I've ever gone against," said Hazell when Kuechly was mentioned during the conversation. 

"You know what's funny? I was just in Cincinnati for an event and I was talking to some guys from Cincinnati St. Xavier (where Kuechly went to high school)," said Tressel. "And I said to them, every time I drive into the city of Cincinnati, I get this nightmare that we didn't recruit Luke Kuechly. Now, in fairness to our staff, he was like 180 lbs and hadn't grown yet.

"We didn't recruit him. I'm still mad. I'm not gonna tell you who I'm still mad at, because this is a children's show, a G-rated show, but I'm still mad."

Hazell added that when he played against the Panthers in 2017 (when Hazell was an assistant with the Minnesota Vikings) that he swore Kuechly had the Vikings' headset on because he knew every play that Minnesota was going to run. 

"I mean, he was calling the play out and he was beating our guys to the point of attack every single play," said Hazell.