327.5 miles.
That's the average distance from The Ohio State University to every other current member of the Big Ten athletic conference. If you get in your car at six in the morning, by lunchtime you will have been able to traverse the metaphysical distance between you, an Ohio State fan, and your understanding of every other school that the Buckeyes play.
This distance includes such far-flung places like Lincoln and Piscataway, of course; without the relatively recent additions of Rutgers, Nebraska, and Maryland, the average interval between Ohio State and every other Big Ten school is even closer, and this makes sense: when the Big Ten Conference was created in 1896 (Ohio State wouldn't join until 1912), the primary means of travel between the five states that comprised this athletic synod of Midwestern luminaries were giant steam locomotives capable of moving up to tens of miles per hour.
Point is, if Purdue wanted to play someone in football in the late 1800's, they'd rather not have to pack lemons for everyone to stave off scurvy on the return trip.
Anyway, that proximity by necessity meant that the various universities in collegiate athletic conferences shared a large measure of cultural identity. As much as we'd like to pretend that Ohio State and Michigan couldn't possibly be any more different, the literal spatial truth is that the two schools are 161 miles apart. Differences exist (of course they do), but they exist because of the shared history between the two rivals, not because they're two distinct species of corn-appreciators from stout, shouty ancestry.
But what about everyone else? There exists among some fans a not-insignificant amount of anxiety about adding two California universities to the Big Ten, in large part because "they don't fit". And I get it! USC and UCLA are about as far outside that circle as you can possibly get. We're hot dogs on a stick, and they're sushi on fine china. Without years of cultural background and familiarity, the addition of these schools feels like a purely mercenary act that ignores what makes the Big Ten the Big Ten (or any conference for that matter).
I also think that it lays bare the anxieties that a lot of people have about how college football in general is changing, and how rapid that change has felt. The idea of USC, Big Ten school, would've been completely laughable to someone who watched the Trojans waltz into Ohio Stadium and stomp the Buckeyes in 2009.
Now that tonal whiplash is felt everywhere, from the existence of NIL, the transfer portal, how we watch games in general, and so on. It's understandable to want to push back on this feeling because in a chaotic and rapidly evolving world, people sometimes want something to be able to hang onto and know that it isn't going to explode into confetti and try and sell them cryptocurrency or whatever.
My response to all of this is twofold.
First, change is inevitable. I wish it wasn't, and as a dad sometimes I really, really, really wish it wasn't, but it is. How we adapt to that change is sometimes less about how much we're able to grasp onto the past as it slides through our fingers, and more about what we decide to find value in for the present and the future.
Which, secondly, is how I frame my love for Ohio State football. C.J. Stroud is from California. Marvin Harrison, Junior is from Philly. Hell, the eternal lich-king J.T. Barrett was a Texas kid. All of them ended up in Columbus and doing amazing things for the Buckeyes, and while I of course still value and appreciate all of the contributions from the native born sons of the Buckeye state, it helps to put in perspective just how national the program has become.
So yeah, UConn to the Big 12 is weird, right now. A nascent rivalry between the Washington Huskies and the Indiana Hoosiers doesn't make a whole lot of sense, yet. Figuring out exactly how much trash talk I can get away with in Autzen Stadium hasn't crossed my radar. But eventually these things will, and the fun that I have experiencing them will be entirely up to me. And who knows? Maybe in ten or twenty years my kid will be waxing poetic about the Ten-Year War between Ryan Day and Lincoln Riley.
That'll be part of our shared history as football fans, and that's something that I can appreciate.
