"Why I Root For Michigan: Confessions of a Buckeye"

I bleed scarlet and grey along with my parents, friends, and the majority of my town. I hate the maize and blue: Desmond Howard, “Hail to the Victors,” Charles Woodson, Bo Schembechler, Tom Brady, everybody. I think Ann Arbor is a tramp and those winged helmets look ridiculous.

When I was a kid, my father would tell me legends of Buckeye lineage. In detail, he described how Woody Hayes pushed his car 20 miles to avoid
purchasing gasoline from the “State Up North.” I later heard Dan Patrick’s analysis on the radio, continuing the anecdote into the Jim Tressel Era. Woody pushed his car through the state, but Jim Tressel managed to find a 4-star offensive line recruit in Kalamazoo, whose family possessed a gas station and a love for the Buckeyes. Tressel not only acquired the necessary fuel to motor himself back to Columbus, but got the kid to commit to The Ohio State University.

I frequent the Columbus sports bar scene most Saturdays in the fall. The common denominator among all of the Buckeye fans I encounter in each of these establishments seems to be an overwhelming disgust with anything that has to do with the maize and blue. They heckle and jeckle as the scores flash on the television screen during the Buckeye game. “Michigan defeats Minnesota 28-14.” Boos erupt. I never understood why people root against Michigan. I hate the Michigan Wolverines as passionately as any member of Buckeye Nation, yet I pull for them every week.

For one thing, it is bad sportsmanship. You root for your team to beat the other team, but you should never go so far as to actually plot against your rivals. For another, Michigan plays in the Big Ten. Ohio State plays in the Big Ten. Every time the Wolverines pick up a non-conference win, it makes the conference look good. When the Big Ten Conference looks good, so does its frontrunner Ohio State.

A friend of mine once said, in so few words and with profanity, that he “hopes [Michigan] loses every game, by a [ridiculous] score and would be willing to trade in an OSU season, have the Bucks go 1-10, just so (Lloyd) Carr and the [Wolverines] would go 0-11.” That’s bad.

OSU fans, would you rather beat a team ranked among the top programs in the country, or a team whom everybody and their mother took to the woodshed? And if The Blue were actually to fandangle their season into an 0-10 atrocity before facing the Buckeyes, what fun would it be to whip a team who lost to the likes of Northwestern, Illinois and Indiana?
The OSU-Texas games in the 2005 and 2006 season reached apocalyptic levels building up to the game, as much or more than the annual run-in with Big Blue. The levels of the two programs colliding make the games fun. Texas = storied. Michigan = legendary. Ohio State beats them both and the Buckeyes become the Team on Top. Should the Bucks kick tail and the Wolverines get their tails kicked every season, the rivalry would lose the luster of two top programs facing each other. The game would mean less. It would be like sending the varsity Gahanna Lincoln Lions to play the Middle School South Lions and calling it a rivalry because they live in the same town. It’d be a joke.

Buckeye fans: root for the Wolverines, until the last game of the season rolls around.