Help us crown Ohio State's greatest villain by voting in the Media region.
Trollapalooza. The Land of Awful Takes. Welcome to the Media region in our Enemy of the State Classic. From full-blown fools to pundits who know damn well what they're doing, but do it anyway, these members of the media have been thorns in the sides of Buckeye fans for ages.
Other open rounds:
No. 1 Mark May vs. No. 8 Matt Hayes
The recently demoted Mark May literally made a career out of being wrong about Ohio State, and given Michigan’s millennial funk, there’s a case May, and not Bo Schembechler, should be the overall No. 1 seed in this spiteful shindig.
After watching his alma mater get butchered like a sacrificial lamb, 72-0, in the Horseshoe, the former Pittsburgh riot-inducer burst back onto the Buckeye conscience by prophesying the University of Miami’s rout of an upstart Ohio State team in the 2003 Fiesta Bowl.
It would be the first of many bizarre (and wrong) anti-Ohio State comments and predictions May would cobble together as he slithered up the ESPN ladder.
Though May suffered the indignity of a demotion and witnessing Ohio State’s eighth championship, the realities of the world have done little in the past to temper his hatred of the world’s greatest university.
Matt Hayes — a staff writer at the AOL-styled house of horrors that is SportingNews.com — didn't always think of Ohio State as No. 1.
On the contrary. Here's Hayes in 2013 deploying a series of one sentence paragraphs in a futile attempt conjure some sort of biblical condemnation around his words:
Go ahead and make fun of the guy who killed trees in Alabama. Or the Tennessee fans who named their kids Peyton.
No one does crazy like Ohio State.
More than 16 months ago, Ohio State welcomed new coach Urban Meyer with open arms, despite the odd and controversial way he walked away from another mega program. Blind loyalty, all right.
Makes you wonder what Meyer will have to do to eventually get run.
The only thing that makes me wonder is why I ever took this man seriously. Don't call him a hatchetman, either, because that'd imply he carried something other than a blunted crayon into battle.
No. 2 Paul Finebaum vs. No. 7 Dennis Dodd
If the SEC was the figurative 900-pound gorilla that controlled college football for a decade, Paul Finebaum is the mealy-mouthed parasite that scraped together a kingdom of like-minded bacteria on its back.
Finebaum can say unprovable things like “there’s ‘a chance’" Braxton Miller transfers to Ohio State’ and have it reported like he’s an actual reporter and not a felony-level trafficker of verbal diarrhea.
Look at his waxy face in this clip. It’s almost as if he’s thinking about all the pain and disdain he's caused, before the balance of his bank account washes it all away.
Give him this much: Finebaum is smart enough to throw some gas on the fire and step back and let idiots duke it out on his airwaves. That way he can overlord above it, pulling the strings like the smirking puppeteer he was destined to play.
Even four years later, Dennis Dodd has not "evolved" from his self-righteousness regarding Tatgate.
Five months after Jim Tressel was named to the CF Hall of Fame, Miami has nominated Ray Lewis. Discuss.
— Dennis Dodd (@dennisdoddcbs) June 2, 2015
Well, for starters, one of those men played ineligible players, yet is still helping mold young peoples' lives despite no longer playing football. The other is an accused murderer whose main job now is delivering such stunning analysis as "People don't realize how huge momentum is. It's Huge!"
Tressel says "price was paid" when he left tOSU. Not even close. tOSU went off probie 25 days ago. via @JonSolomonCBS http://t.co/2f2Hs9pRgs
— Dennis Dodd (@dennisdoddcbs) January 13, 2015
This is just speculation on my part, but Dennis Dodd may not be happy until Jim Tressel is incarcerated in a supermax prison.
Tressel has "enforcement" in his new title. #giggle
— Dennis Dodd (@dennisdoddcbs) February 2, 2012
Tressel's new title at Akron was Vice President of Strategic Engagement. Somehow, this guy is still considered a reporter.
No. 3 George Dohrmann vs. No. 6 Pat Forde
Once upon a time, George Dohrmann deservedly won a Pulitzer for his investigation into systemic academic fraud within the University of Minnesota’s men’s basketball program.
It’s been a long time, however, since 2000.
In the years after, Dohrmann has uncorked a series of investigative howlers into college sports programs. Most notably, in 2011, with his “How Deep it Went” investigation into Jim Tressell’s two-decade rain of terror over Ohio football, which included allegations of — gasp — fixed camp raffles.
Dohrmann's investigation was questionable at the time, but history has proven it downright laughable since. He then went onto lead off-base, cart-before-the-horse investigations into UCLA men’s basketball and Oklahoma State football.
Oh, and he still owes Ramzy a shot of Patron.
Pat Forde, Yahoo's in-house hot take kibitzer, once wrote this about Urban Meyer after Meyer's 2010 exit from Florida:
If those things are true, and Meyer is ready to enter a rewarding new phase of life as a paternal bleacher creature, watching his three kids play sports, so be it.
[...]
But if Meyer suddenly shows up in Denver to coach Tebow, he's a con man of the highest order. If he changes his mind and comes back to Florida before it hires someone else, he's a diva even Favre would disdain. If he takes another job a year from now, his family will know once and for all where it ranks in his personal hierarchy of needs.
And this about Gordon Gee in 2013:
The Dispatch said the board directed Gee to "scale back on his public speeches," and also suggested a "coach" be hired to help Gee do his job. The very premise of coaching being needed for a 69-year-old man making nearly $2 million – the highest income of any university president, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education – underscores some of what ails American higher education.
Whatever it takes to prop up a bumbling, offensive, revenue magnet.
But someone clearly tipped off the Associated Press to those December comments, which were acquired through a public-records request. Someone at Ohio State must have wanted to see those comments made public, and to see Gee further unmasked as the laughingstock leader he was becoming.
For something else that's bumbling and offensive, here's the cover of Pat Forde's book about noted good human/restaurant sex-haver Rick Pitino.
And yes, he's still bad today:
And the Big 12 gets busted out. I completely disagree w the committee on including Ohio State over Baylor. But it's done now.
— Pat Forde (@YahooForde) December 7, 2014
No. 4 Mike Bianchi vs. No. 5 Clay Travis
Mike Bianchi is an OrlandoSentinel.com uber-troll whose only nationally noteworthy columns are a product of saying bad things about Urban Meyer.
In fact, if bashing Urban Meyer were a street drug, Bianchi would be living out of the back of a Papa John’s dumpster after his drug use alienated him from all his family and friends.
Here is Bianchi bashing Urban Meyer TWO WEEKS AGO:
Kudos to new Florida State University president John Thrasher for meeting with the football team a few days ago and essentially telling the players that enough is enough and to stop being knuckleheads.
Thrasher is no dummy. He knows that the Jameis Winston sexual-assault saga coupled with the recent arrests of two players — Dalvin Cook and De'Andre Johnson — on charges of hitting women are making parents very nervous about sending their daughters to Tallahassee.
[…]
Memo to Jimbo: Please don't allow your legacy to disintegrate into that of former Florida coach Urban Meyer — a coach who won national championships on the field but lost a ton of respect by the way his players behaved off it.
Yes, Kudos to the president of the university that’s seen 20 sexual assault allegations against its football team in six years, for finally explaining to his team of “knuckleheads” that sexual assault, is in fact, bad. Kudos to that man.
No kudos, however, to the whiny hot take artist who used a university’s heinous handling of sexual assault to take a potshot at a coach who he holds a vendetta against.
FoxSports.com’s Clay Travis is that one creepy uncle, if that one creepy uncle was a caricature of a creepy uncle who was obscenely overpaid to dispense convoluted hot takes on the internet.
What can be said about a sewer creature like Travis hasn't already been said? He’s a smarmy, misogynistic teenager trapped in an adult’s body. There is nothing original about him, and yet, the non-lawyering lawyer has ascended to become one of the greatest organs in the SEC propaganda death machine.
Seriously, let's recount a few of his greatest hits:
The Big Ten is officially eliminated from placing a team in the playoff. It is September 6th.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravisBGID) September 7, 2014
You've got one more day, @ClayTravisBGID. pic.twitter.com/hpEhsZnDyN
— Drew Franklin (@DrewFranklinKSR) January 30, 2015
Oklahoma football: David Boren calls Clay Travis column 'sheer and utter nonsense' http://t.co/3WFKyG071u
— Jason Kersey (@jasonkersey) March 11, 2015
Perhaps equally remarkable, there are people that still believe we dwell in a meritocracy.
