OSU has thrived on huge fan base

The Buckeyes are one of the most loved and hated teams in the country.

MCCLATCHY-TRIBUNE

COLUMBUS — For some college football fans, Columbus will always represent a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Just like the Bronx will be for baseball fans, Boston for pro basketball fans and Dallas for pro football fans. With success comes a myriad of feelings from others — enmity is just one of them.

Kirk Herbstreit, a former Ohio State quarterback and current ESPN analyst, experiences it on an amplified basis simply because of the reach he has nationwide. Many view him as an ambassador for the Buckeyes and the Big Ten.

“What’s ironic to me is that when I travel around the nation, that because people have such a bad taste in their mouth for the Big Ten, I think they feel that the Big Ten is an overhyped conference and they feel Ohio State is an overhyped team,” he said.

Many of those thoughts probably could be attributed to the blowout loss to Florida in the BCS National Championship Game last January, but Buckeyes football existed long before then.

The reality, however, is that OSU and its fans are ubiquitous. With the university having one of the largest alumni associations in the country, it’s rare to go to a Buckeyes road game and not find a sizable mass of bodies decked in scarlet and gray. Such was the case this season in Seattle when Ohio State took on the University of Washington, and the local media noticed.

“More than Notre Dame, more than Michigan, Alabama, USC or Texas, Ohio State is the Yankees of college football,” Seattle Post-Intelligencer columnist Art Thiel wrote. “Because nothing says more eloquently that an American sports enterprise has reached the pinnacle than by being out of control and over the top.”

For Thiel, the fact that OSU’s athletic department turns a profit, primarily because of football, and supports all 36 of the school’s varsity sports, represents a great sin.

Even former Ohio State President Karen Holbrook got into the mix when she likened the school’s student body to being out of control and condoning a culture of drunken orgies and riots complete with car flipping.

Such statements and perceptions trickle down, and with the Buckeyes being viewed as a team that doesn’t belong in the national championship game in New Orleans on Monday, it might be worse this year.

Coach Jim Tressel said the Buckeyes will have to go a long way before they reach the level of dislike that teams such as the New York Yankees enjoy. In fact, he doesn’t sense that particular emotion at all from different areas of the country.

You’ll forgive his players if they disagree. Defensive back Malcolm Jenkins said the acidic attitudes are obvious.

“You take it in and take it for what it is worth. There really is nothing because everything is controlled by us so we just take it as fuel, and it’s pretty much us against the world so that’s how we take it,” he said. “We are going to believe in ourselves and continue to look at each other for support and just try and get this thing going.”

Wide receiver and Canton native Brian Hartline had his views, too.

“If people do dislike us, and I don’t know if that’s the whole truth, if they do, the biggest thing is because we win ... people that aren’t your level, all they try to do is bring you down to their level,” he said. “If you’re up higher, you have to watch out for those guys below you who want to knock you down. I guess that’s what they’re doing, but in general I think we have a big enough family that we’re happy.”

They’re happy and those throughout the nation appear to be happy to mock Ohio State.

“The gigantism — at 52,000 students, the nation’s largest single-campus university — allows it to self-impose the word ‘The’ in front of the name Ohio State University. You know, sort of like how the announcer in New York describes a victory as ‘Thaaaaaa ... Yankees win!”’ Thiel wrote in the same column.

Some might wonder where the animosity originates. Returning President E. Gordon Gee, who hasn’t been known for his prowess in dealing with the athletic department in the past at OSU, might have hit upon the answers.

“In many ways, I think we have the most incredible national fan base of any institution in the country. Notre Dame, Michigan, Ohio State and USC have these kinds of national auras around them,” he said in a published report. “So I think you’re going to get a lot of people who feel distinctly about the institutions. But hate would not be the word I would use. Admiration. Fear. Jealousy. Envy. Try those words.”