House of Sorrow
It’s Sunday afternoon as of this writing, roughly 24 hours after Michigan decided to show some fight for the first time in the 21st century. Maybe the Browns beat the Ravens last night. Maybe they didn’t. Either way, nothing but a Super Bowl victory could remove the black mark on my soul.
I honestly had forgotten what failure felt like. Sure, I remember 2011—when freshman quarterback Braxton Miller missed a wide-open DeVier Posey for what would have been a game-winning touchdown pass. Instead we lost to a 10-win Wolverine team and their Michigan Man coach. “Time is a flat circle,” as the old saying goes.
That was an aberration over an interim coach who got thrown into the fire back when players exchanging memorabilia for tattoos constituted a seismic scandal within the NCAA. Brady Hoke, Michigan’s then-coach, turned out to be a bum best suited for mid-major football. Ohio State hired the Dublin Dad, and the drums of war continued to roll over the hapless Wolverines—until yesterday.
I was told by Michigan fans that Big Ten referee Kevin Schwarzel had been assigned to the game. Schwarzel lives in Athens and grew up as a Buckeye fan. Him being on the field was the fulcrum point of the wide web of conspiracy theories that Michigan fans peddled after J.T. Barrett broke their spines in 2016 when the refs awarded him a proper spot on his fourth-down rush.
Ohio State, as a whole, didn’t get their asses kicked yesterday. An ass-kicking is what the Buckeyes put on the Michigan State Spartans a week prior in Columbus; ass-kickings are over by halftime.
But that game was about as one-sided as a game decided that late in the fourth quarter can be.
The most disappointing aspect, for me, was the offensive and defensive lines getting dominated in the trenches. And hell, you can put that loss on the entire defensive unit from coaches Matt Barnes and Kerry Coombs all the way down.
Michigan didn’t face a third down in the second half, and it ain’t like they were doing anything fancy to avoid that situation, either. Wolverine running back Hassan Haskins ran like he was possessed possessed by the demon spirit of Biakabutuka.
I’ve seen Buckeye fans say, “It’s not a rivalry if both sides don’t win.” That may be true if I cared about about how national media freaks viewed this little thing of ours. I wouldn’t care if we won the next 100, I would still be worked into a blood frenzy demanding Win 101. The Coyote never stopped chasing the Roadrunner despite never catching it, after all.
Michigan winning is never a good thing, as I have been reminded in the past 24 hours when random blue and yellow termites descended into my mentions with half-baked ideas that had been marinating inside their little bug brains since the turn of the century.
The one silver lining is there was an entire generation of Ohio State fans who don’t remember what losing to Michigan actually feels like. That includes our players and coaches. Their utopia is now smashed into a thousand pieces, while finks like that sex pest Dave Portnoy and Clay Travis and his lice-ridden children are celebrating on the ashes.
Welcome to the midwest blood feud, sweet summer of children. Feel free to help yourself to the ashtray of cigarette butts and bathtub gin upstairs while the adults plot our revenge.
“I couldn’t possibly imagine a football game affecting my mental health for 30 minutes, let alone days or weeks,” you might say. Go ahead and take your perfect brain chemistry to California. For the rest of us, superiority over Michigan football was basically the only thing keeping us sane while trying to survive in Alabama’s ugly twin.
Losing to Michigan happens. I guess if you let some stumblebum try to coldcock your ass enough times, they’re bound to connect with at least one haymaker every decade. And I could tolerate winning nine out of every ten. I wouldn’t like it, but I could tolerate it.
But the way we lost to Michigan—getting mauled in the trenches while Ohio State looked stunned to see this kind of ferocity from the other side—isn’t acceptable. This wasn’t a program-ruining defeat, thankfully, but it damn sure better be a wakeup call to Ryan Day, who has suffered three humiliating defeats in the last 11 months, all of which our defense looked like they awoke from a coma and were thrown onto the field 30 minutes before kickoff. Maybe Jim Harbaugh talking in the postgame presser about how Day was some bum standing on third thinking he hit a triple was the wakeup call he needed to realize that our defensive woes won’t be fixed by anyone he currently employs.
At this point, the best we can hope for is Michigan having too much sex this week before getting sucker-punched by Kirk Ferentz in Iowa. Barring that, we may be left cheering for Cincinnati to knock the Wolverines out of the playoffs. Dark times, indeed.
Barring those scenarios, Michigan has a legitimate shot at winning a national title. I take no pleasure in reporting that, but it’s true. Would I favor Georgia over Michigan in the finals? Yes. But I favored Ohio State over Michigan, too, and look how that turned out for me.
We had a chance to break Michigan, perhaps once and for all, and we let them off the hook. Now we look forward to our first nuclear winter in a decade. It’s alright, I suppose. I actually enjoy the taste of canned food while surviving in a concrete bunker originally erected due to the prospect of the Soviet Union dropping a nuclear warhead on us.
The bitter taste of failure is once again fresh on my lips. And so it will remain, for at least 362 more days until we get another shot at those bastards in blue. Fuck them to Hell.
THOSE WMDs. When Denver lost its mind over youth crime… Black restaurant owner dies without being credited for wildly popular “Buffalo” wings… How a crazy plan to rebuild the Waco Compound gave us Alex Jones… Keanu Reeves knows the secrets of the universe… They executed people for South Carolina, and for some it nearly destroyed them.