Ohio State hasn't had a losing season since 1988 and has won at least 10 games 22 times in their last 30 seasons. Along the way, the Buckeyes have won two national championships.
You might think those conditions would make Ohio State fans perfectly content... if you knew nothing about the human brain, and particularly if you nothing about the human brain on the intoxicating drug known as college football. If you did, you'd know that it's made them insane.
Wake Forest fans know they're probably never going to see their team win a national championship. They may not be okay with it, but they've accepted it. Ohio State fans have seen 30 straight Buckeye teams that are good enough to at least compete for the national championship, but only two of them win it.
As a fan myself, I get it. I've personally seen the same affliction in Oklahoma fans, and noticed a similar ailment affecting the Florida fan base.
But if I had to put up with the Ohio State fan base 365 days a year, I'd probably react like Kirk Herbstreit did in this interview with the Toledo Blade. Asked about the job security of a coach with a 45-6 record, Herbstreit let fly:
"The 15 percenters, they get mad at anything," he said. "That percent is going to be mad at something always. (Day) could win the Michigan game, go to the playoff and lose, and they’ll be mad about that. That group is just a bunch of jackasses who kind of embarrass all of us as Ohio State fans. So I don’t really care, honestly, what that group thinks. But the people who matter, the logical people who actually have a brain and understand the sport, they love what Ryan Day has done. The fact that this is even a topic is almost comical."
Having watched their team go 15-1 against Michigan from 2004-19, any Buckeye fan over 35 was raised to believe a win on the last Saturday of November was their birthright. Losing two straight seemed truly unfathomable, until it happened. (Ohio State went 22-2 with a Rose Bowl victory elsewhere in 2021-22.)
Herbstreit isn't just ESPN's lead college football analyst. He's a former Buckeye quarterback who happens to be the son of a former Buckeye quarterback and assistant coach. Which means he's had to hear from Ohio State fans 365 days a year for the last 25 years, many of whom have convinced themselves that he hates the Buckeyes.
That portion of the fan base will no doubt use the above quotes as evidence that their theory is correct, but Herbstreit is, clearly, long past caring. Here was his quote to the Columbus Dispatch in 2011:
“Eighty to ninety percent of the Ohio State fans are great. It’s the vocal minority that make it rough. They probably represent only 5 to 10 percent of the fan base, but they are relentless.”
A dozen years later, it seems the lunatic fringe of Buckeye nation has grown.
Ohio State visits Ann Arbor on Nov. 25 in the most anticipated edition of The Game since the last one.