Inside Slant

BEST TRADITIONS

•Dotting the i—it's the highest honor to be chosen as the dot—when the Ohio State band spells out OHIO before each home game. Sure, it sounds foolish, but you have to be there. Sensational.

•At Clemson the players enter the end of the stadium and rub Frank Howard's Rock (a sacred, basketball-sized boulder named for the former coach) for good luck, the cannon fires, Tiger Rag plays, and the players stampede down the carpeted hill, about five abreast, into Death Valley. Chills to the bone.

•Army, Navy, and Air Force. When the cadets or midshipmen march before a game on a splendid fall afternoon, it takes a cold, cold heart not to respond with a catch in the throat.

•Ole Miss players "walking through the Grove" on their way from the dorms to the locker room on game days while band members beat out a cadence on the drums.

•The ringing of the cowbells at Mississippi State when the visiting team has the ball. The bells were outlawed by an SEC edict half a dozen years ago, but Bulldog fans keep smuggling them in. Distractingly wonderful.

•Minnesota and Iowa play each year for possession of the Floyd of Rosedale Trophy. Floyd is a bronze pig.

•What better tradition can there be than to sell out the stadium, which is what Nebraska has done at Memorial Stadium an NCAA-record 149 times since 1962.

WHERE THE NOOSE MEETS THE NECK

•Missouri's Woody Widenhofer. No. 1 candidate for a necktie party. In two years Woody is 4-18 and has no excuse: Mizzou is the only major school in the state. Home attendance in 1979 averaged 69,867; last year it was 39,067.