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For Ohio State, a home loss to Michigan on 30 November was a football catastrophe, the Buckeyes’ fourth loss in a row against their hated rivals. For a few seconds, the focus was on the Buckeyes’ lost opportunity to secure a spot in the Big Ten championship game. Then, the spotlight shifted to midfield, where a Michigan player planted the school’s maize and blue flag into the turf. It’s safe to say the Ohio State players were unhappy at being mocked in their own backyard.
A fracas ensued, with Ohio State players initiating a physical altercation and Michigan players responding in kind. The Buckeyes pushed through a thin barrier of police officers to shove a mass of Wolverines off the home team’s logo, and several players wrestled each other to the ground. Police officers threatened the use of tasers. At least one held the device directly into a Michigan player’s belly but did not activate it, as an officer’s body camera footage now reveals.
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The story reached a fresh level of inane on Wednesday when a legislator in Ohio’s state government introduced a bill he named the “O.H.I.O. Sportsmanship Act.” If passed, the bill would “prohibit planting a flagpole and flag in the center of the Ohio Stadium football field on the day of a college football game and to name this act the O.H.I.O. Sportsmanship Act.”
That’s right: a bill to ban planting a flag on Ohio State’s field, specifically.
All of this because of one flag planting. Or, more fundamentally, all of this because Ohio State lost a home game as a three-touchdown favorite to their bitter rival and could not tolerate the resulting celebration.
Is flag-planting such a state, or even nationwide, scourge that it demands a legislative response? Certainly not. American lawmakers love to grandstand, and college football is a long-favored subject for political point-scoring that has little chance of materializing into law – and even less chance of making a difference in the day-to-day lives of a state’s citizens.
The state representative who sponsored the bill, Republican Josh Williams, was hoping for media attention. He has succeeded, joining a long tradition of state legislators tapping college football for the same end. Seasoned observers will recall the Iowa legislator who sought to ban Friday night college football games in his state, hoping to keep the night reserved for high school teams that play their own games that night. Maybe they will remember the Alabama lawmaker who introduced a resolution urging Auburn University to claim seven national championships that the school had not actually won.
Ohio State are by far the most popular sports team in Ohio, even dwarfing the notoriety of the NFL teams in Cincinnati and Cleveland. Here, Williams has cast himself as the protector of the Buckeye brand. What the team really needed was a downfield passing game that could get behind Michigan’s safeties.
Flag-planting is common after big football wins. It is not new. In fact, it is not even new at Ohio State, where Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield did the same thing following a victory over the Buckeyes in 2017. That planting did not cause a national incident or for a taser to be brandished at anyone.
Ohio State’s incensed players escalated the situation. Some saw it practically as a matter of religion to stand up for their logo and field. Jack Sawyer, the veteran Buckeye linebacker who has never beaten Michigan, got ahold of the flag and threw it on the ground. “They’re not fucking planting the flag on our field again, bro,” he yelled at a support staffer who sought to restrain him. Sawyer’s response spoke to the level of emotion at play in the rivalry, which is a tinderbox even when no flags are planted.
Adding to the attention on flags, Michigan-Ohio State was not the only game to have a postgame brouhaha that weekend. North Carolina and North Carolina State players got into it as well, with a flag at the center of the action again. Florida and Florida State players did the same, and once again, which object was at the heart of the altercation but that waving piece of fabric?
Some of college football’s most influential media voices may have contributed to a sense that the sport is out of control. Gus Johnson, the play-by-play broadcaster who called the game for Fox, admonished Michigan for gloating and sparking the situation. Kirk Herbstreit, the top college football analyst at ESPN and a former Ohio State quarterback (though typically no homer for his alma mater), called for the sport to “return to civility and just sportsmanship.” He suggested that a rule (rather than a state law) against flag-planting could “be a start.”
A little more sportsmanship never hurts anyone. But flag-planting is far from a crisis, and two easy options exist for a team that would like to avoid a major flag-planting episode on its field. One is to not react violently when another team jams a piece of plastic into some turf. (After all, few stadiums even use natural grass anymore. A flag stick will not ruin artificial turf.)
The other option, of course, is simply not to lose a home game to the kind of team that would like to mark your field as its own. Michigan could have avoided the fight by not planting a flag, but Ohio State could have cut off the whole episode at its knees by doing something more fundamental: winning.
“We’re going to win in your house and we’re gonna plant the flag,” Michigan’s quarterback, Davis Warren, said after the upset. Then he offered a solution: “You should’ve done something about it.”