Sight Seen: Ohio State Fans in the Dumps

By Trashtalk Superstar

Although this blog is about basketball, and we rarely deviate from that format, sometimes other sports (or sports related) items demand our attention. #1 Ohio State's "humiliating" gridiron upset by supposedly "lowly" Illinois didn't elicit commentary from Drive and Dish's editorial staff. But something I encountered the day after OSU's loss did.

Falling into the "you can't make this stuff up" category, the above picture is of an Ohio State hat that I found after somebody threw it away at a Chicago area health club last night - one day after #1 OSU fell (at home, no less) to unranked and unheralded Illinois. Maybe you had to be there, but when I saw the discarded red hat with the gray "O" staring at me, I couldn't help but laugh. Since it was late and I was the only person in the gym, there was nobody there with whom I could share the moment. So I took pictures and posted them here.

Unfortunately, when I found the hat, it wasn't positioned quite as perfectly as it is in the pictures. So - admittedly - I had to do some digging in the garbage to better position the hat for the sake of photographic artistry. And, while today's round of tetanus shots and vaccinations were no picnic, I got some good shots of the discarded OSU hat that I now share with the world. It'll all be worth it if even one starving child is able to forget that he's too hungry to sleep tonight ... because he got a chuckle, or two, from the Ohio State fans' collective disgust.

EDIT: (4:50pm, 11/13/07)

When I referred to OSU's "humiliating" loss to "lowly" Illinois, I used quotation marks around "humiliating" and "lowly" to imply -- subtly -- that I disagreed with the conventional wisdom (i.e. national media coverage) about this Illinois team. I probably should have been more clear.

For the record, I thought that the Illini were underrated and under appreciated going into Saturday's game. And considering the fact that Illinois gave then #1 Ohio State all it could handle the week before they were to play Michigan last year, I thought that this year's talented but young Illinois team had a decent chance of pulling the upset in Columbus. Illinois is an exciting, legitimately good football team (although they're somewhat inconsistent-- due to their overall youth). But they don't get much respect from the national media.

And after listening to ESPN and Sporting News radio for about three hours Saturday night as I drove back to Chicago from Indianapolis, I had a fairly clear picture of how many in the national media (and an awful lot of college football fans--particularly those South of the Mason Dixon line) viewed the Illinois win: the Big Ten sucks and a fraudulent Ohio State team got "exposed" and "embarrassed" by hapless Illi-freakin'-nois and their equally hapless coach, the "Zooker" (how could Ohio State lose to the "Zooker," for God's sake?).

Hence my tongue-in-cheek reference to OSU being "humiliated" by "lowly" Illinois.

To be fair, Mark May and Lou Holtz (lisp and all) did give the Illini some love on ESPN. But the guys on ESPN radio (Freddie Coleman excluded) sure didn't do the same.

So, although my use of "lowly" to describe the Illini was intended as sarcasm, my use of "unheralded" is spot on. Illinois is unheralded because they don't get much respect nationally ... yet.