but beating the team
that you hate the most? That lasts
the rest of your life
It’s also college football in a nutshell, and it’s worth keeping in mind as we enter Rivalry Week: In the end, what makes this sport so deliriously wonderful is this sort of irrational emotion, this primal and eternal bile. We have become accustomed, already, just in the second year of the 12-team Playoff, to gauging every week’s results by how they affect the ever-shifting CFP bracket picture, and we’re fully primed to do that again this week.
But the thing about those games is that, in the long term, what they mean for Playoff positioning will be the least interesting thing about them. What matters is beating those other guys’ brains in. What matters is getting to talk trash all year.
This would seem like an obvious thing to say — college football is about tradition and rivalries — but it is one that, because of college football’s wild changes over the past few years, needs to be repeated and, perhaps more than anything else, cherished.
But beating the team you hate the most? That lasts the rest of your life.
From the New York Time article, College Football Playoff bids are great. Making your rival miserable is still better by Will Leitch.
Of last year, Mr. Leitch wrote:
Maybe Ohio State beat Tennessee, Oregon, Texas and Notre Dame to win the national title last year. But it didn’t beat Michigan, which means a huge chunk of its glorious season was a complete and total failure. That is hilarious. It is also kind of wonderful — and one of the best reasons to love this deranged sport.
I was born and raised in a Michigan family.
My first big sports hero I remember was Michigan basketball start, Cazzie Russel.
And the first big sports memory was that Saturday after Thanksgiving in 1969 when Michigan beat an Ohio State team that hadn’t lost in 2 years.
I like to say that when I was a kid I was told that Woody Hayes was under my bed if I got out, he would grab me and take me off to Ohio.
Reading biographies as a kid I had to wrestle with the fact that General Grant, Thomas Edison, the Wright Brothers and James Thurber all were born in Ohio.
It didn’t make any sense.
Until I figured it out that none of them achieved much success until they LEFT Ohio.
Mr. Leitch quotes William Hazlitt called “On the Pleasure of Hating.”
Mr. Hazlitt once wrote, back in 1826:
Nature seems made of antipathies.
Without something to hate, we should lose the very spring of thought and action.
Pure good soon grows insipid, wants variety and spirit.
Pain is a bittersweet, which never surfeits.
Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust:
Hatred alone is immortal.
With that in mind, I am thankful this Thanksgiving for something so worthy of my hate.
I live in a seaside resort community that oddly enough has a large Ohio contingent.
Up the coast a bit in Charleston, SC, then even have a MEME of GBTO or Go Back to Ohio.
Its kind of goofy but when the concept arose back in the late 1970’s that timeshare vacations were invented, the fellers in charge took a map and estimated the furthest a father might drive their family and their research led them to focus their marketing efforts on the state of Ohio.
And it worked!
But as one local blogger put it … Tourism is the bread and butter of the lcoal economy, but Ohio’s arrival seems like adding five extra sticks of butter. Sure, we’re richer for it, but at what cost?
Anyway, what this means it that this is a great place to wear an M coaches cap.
And when I say coaches cap, I mean what is now called the ‘SKINNY M’ coaches cap.
It is great fun to walk the beaches and parks and hear from all sides folks yell out GO BLUE.
Especially … ESPECIALLY when there some of those OH IO people around.
You know them.
The group that needs two people to spell O H I O.
BTW, having worked in the world on Online News for 20 years, I was always happy to report that any story on Ohio State Football had twice as many reads as any other sports story.
There was the Ohio State Fan … and the person who read the story to them.
But I digress.
And down here.
They see me.
They see my cap.
My T shirt.
My sweat shirt.
My swim trunks.
They see the M.
And I see them.
And all I have to do is smile.
And they know it.
No Haiku For You 