How Hawkeyes can be the toast of the nation this weekend: Repel the big, bad Buckeyes

Ohowihateohiostate.

I don’t know where I first read that, but it was long ago and made perfect sense. It still does, though hating any sports team is nothing short of madness. It’s just that the football hugeness and dominance of Ohio State is wearying.

It figures that gray is one of Ohio State’s school colors. Gray is a color that lacks color. Buckeyes football is a colorless mauling machine that plays in a 103,000-seat venue with a colorless name: Ohio Stadium.

They call it the Horseshoe because of its shape. Have you ever seen a charming horseshoe?

The tireless, relentless, merciless way the Buckeyes beat up on everyone in the Big Ten not named “Michigan” is flat-out annoying. Their mascot isn’t named Bucky or Herky or Goldy. It’s Brutus, the name of a Roman senator who helped assassinate Julius Caesar.

Ohio State is 47-7 against Minnesota. It’s 63-18-5 against Wisconsin. It’s 65-12-1 against Northwestern, 80-12-5 against Indiana.

Maryland and Rutgers got into the Big Ten a decade ago and paid for it by being placed in the same division with Ohio State. Maryland is 0-9 against OSU and has lost by an average of 33.1 points. Rutgers is 0-10 and has been outscored by an average of 39.8.

That’s vicious, and it hasn’t mattered who was the Buckeyes’ coach. Urban Meyer was coldhearted. He walked away and young Ryan Day took his place without a pebble of pity for the paupers of the Big Ten.

Iowa has fared as poorly as most against Ohio State. The Buckeyes lead their series, 48-15-3 and have won 14 of the last 16 meetings. The Hawkeyes’ 55-24 shocking outlier of a rout against the then-No. 3 Bucks in 2017 remains lovingly recalled in Iowa and will for decades, but no one brings up OSU’s 83-21 win over the Hawkeyes in 1950.

When they last met, the Buckeyes smoked Iowa, 54-10, two years ago in Columbus. And OSU didn’t even play especially well.

Ohio State has 39 Big Ten titles, eight national championships, seven Heisman Trophy winners. It has spent 105 weeks ranked No. 1 in the nation. It hasn’t been ranked lower than 11th since 2014.

It’s all so boring.

How do Buckeye fans get enthused about battering the Marylands and Minnesotas time after time after time? How do they like considering the 2021, 2022 and 2023 seasons failures though their teams went 11-2, 11-2 and 11-2 because they lost to Michigan each year?

Ohio Stadium isn’t quaint, the school isn’t quaint, and Columbus certainly isn’t quaint. It’s not a college town, not an Ann Arbor or Bloomington or Iowa City. Columbus has 900,000 people. Ohio State has an enrollment of almost 67,000.

Columbus is home to Fortune 500 companies. If the economy of your college town doesn’t revolve around the school and its students, consider entering the transfer portal.

My first memory of Ohio State football is a coach named Woody Hayes, who won 13 Big Ten titles. He famously said only three things can happen when you throw a pass and two of them are bad.

Thankfully, the forward pass became an accepted way of advancing the ball.

Hayes seemed more powerful than the state university, but insanity has brought down many a dictator.

A Clemson player named Charlie Bauman intercepted an Ohio State pass (maybe Hayes’ teams didn’t know how to properly throw the ball) at the 1978 Gator Bowl. Bauman was tackled legally by OSU players after returning the pick. After Bauman got back up, Hayes grabbed him and punched him in the throat.

Hayes was fired the next day. Nonetheless, Ohio Stadium’s address is 411 Woody Hayes Drive.

The Buckeyes were bullies then, are bullies now. They’ve got the money, they’re the only college football program that matters in a state of 11 million people, and they always do whatever it takes to be elite.

Their athletics director, Ross Bjork, said in July that Buckeye football players received “around $20 million” from the school's NIL collectives and brand affiliates over the past year.

Saturday, Iowa is a heavy underdog as it tries to somehow slay the giants in the Horseshoe. If the Hawkeyes succeed, they’ll be the toast of college football and an instant College Football Playoff contender.

If they don’t? Then we’ll all look for fun elsewhere and hope Oregon bops the Buckeyes in Eugene next week.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com