Truck Sticked by the Tide
The Buckeyes letting me down was a refreshing change of pace albeit a surprising one.
Hot streaks by definition have to come to an end. It’s only a matter of how it ends, whether some random bad-luck break or you get your brains beat in by an Alabama barbershop quartet quarterback with a baked potato body.
The image that will haunt me will be Tuff Borland, running in his iconic Lego Man style, trying to keep pace with Heisman winner DeVonta Smith. That Buckeye defensive coordinator Kerry Coombs brought a 4-4 scheme to a track race should have resulted in criminal charges by halftime.
There were two other times in my life I have seen Ohio State dominated so thoroughly: By Urban Meyer and the Florida Gators in the 2007 BCS Championship and the 31-0 stomping by Clemson in the 2006.
Like last night’s game, I went into the contest expecting Ohio State to dominate. Unlike the previous cataclysmic losses, however, I did not awake this morning feeling like Nick Saban took a part of my soul.
I’ve become less of a college football fanatic over the years, in large part to getting a front-row seat to the seedy underbelly of the exploitive industry while creating content for the insatiable Buckeye masses. The “troubling times in which we find ourselves” as the corporations like to say has only exacerbated the ennui.
That changed when the head of that smirking elf, Dabo Swinney, appeared on the chopping block. He enraged me to a point usually reserved for Tim “Save the Children” Tebow.
Critics say that Ohio State fans don’t feel joy. That the expectation to win has stripped us of any ability to appreciate what makes college football great. That’s loser talk to me. Just shitty fans of shitty teams trying to rationalize their loyalty.
But they are right in the sense that I’m not sure winning the national championship would have compared to seeing Dumbstruck Dabo and his $1.5 million, sign-stealing defensive coordinator humbled at the hands of the Battling Buckeyes. Maybe that says more about me than I would like to admit. So be it.
My Buckeye fanaticism is already crimped by the Cleveland Browns being legitimately good for the first time in my adult life.
Watching the Browns knock that Findlay fink Ben Roethlisberger out of the playoffs gave me more joy than any Ohio State win of my lifetime. And I don’t say that lightly, especially with Dabo pushing roses in a pine box.
But winning brings boredom. Ohio State’s 2015 team should have been one of the most talented teams in school history. Instead the season felt like getting dragged naked through a parking lot of broken glass, leading the culmination of losing at home to bum-ass Michigan State and a backup quarterback.
By the third quarter, when it became clear that Ryan Day would not ceremoniously execute Kerry Coombs at midfield for a morale boost, I surrendered the only way I know how: Dropping an Uber pin and watching the rest of the game on my phone from her fancy downtown couch.
This kind of loss used to ruin my mood for an entire week. But today? I could merely shrug. Losing to Alabama makes sense. They make Ohio State’s spending on football look thrifty. Their fans flooded the streets of Tuscaloosa in a super-spreader event to celebrate their team winning a title game in which they were favored by 8.5 points.
Ohio State finished No. 2 in the country. And I’m frightfully at peace with that. May God have mercy on my soul.
THOSE WMDs. With big budget and little accountability, Capitol Police face questions after siege… Some thoughts on public spaces with nowhere to sit… The poorest rich kids in the world… The world’s most nutritious foods… Why a sense of humor helps in dark times.