Hawai'i Twitter Reax: Aloha 'Oe

By Johnny Ginter on September 13, 2015 at 8:30 am
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A few years ago I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks in Hawaii for a wedding. My family rented a house in a bay near Honolulu, and I spent the end of the summer living like the king of all bums; up at the crack of 11, eating fish tacos on the beach next to an ancient volcanic mountain range, and passing out on a beach chair after watching watching crabs fight each other.

It's intoxicating. I've lived in Ohio for almost my entire life, and here you get geographically predisposed toward grinding your teeth at every seasonal transition, toward narrowing your eyes angrily at the start of every local news weather forecast. I've long believed that geography has an acute impact on culture; Ohioans reflect a fertile, gentle, but meteorologically unpredictable environment by tilling the land and their problems until they submit, and Hawaiians reflect a dramatic, lush, but meteorologically steady environment by learning the value of time and holding on tight to what matters.

Or maybe I'm just pulling all of that out of my butt! I'm no sociologist, I just think the contrast between an Ohio football team that playing at home with everything to lose versus an Hawaii football team playing thousands of miles from home with nothing to lose is pretty interesting.

This week's Twitter roundup reflects this. Nervousness, frustration, disappointment in a 38 point shutout win... that's all pretty Ohioan as hell, and it kind of makes me smile. Same as it ever was. Plus dogs.

See, this is what I'm talking about. Just stay loose, man! You're Cardale Jones! I'm not sure that I have a whole lot of experience with an uptight/nervous Cardale and I'm not sure that I want to see much more of that in the future.

Ahhh, much better. Zeke's dog, Ace, is a pretty adorable dog (and a really clever bit of self-promotion). Dogs > abs. BUT BARELY.

Anyway, Ohio State was back at home, and that meant some familiar routines and a nice return to the 'Shoe. I'm sure that it was comforting for Ohio State players, coming off a short week and a very tough road game, to get back to what they know in Columbus.

Former players seemed happy with it, too! Mostly!

Again, it's weird to try and process how a player could be disappointed with a 38 point win. That's a really unique thing that comes along with only the absolute highest of expectations. It's also something that Ohio State fans became really familiar with during the Jim Tressel era; the feeling that yeah, you just beat the crap out of a team, but the expectations that you set for the team, knowing its capabilities, weren't even remotely reached.

I hope that looking back on this game, Cardale isn't so hard on himself. Sure, he only passed for 111 yards, but he was 12-18 and took care of the ball. If that's the floor, the ceiling of his ability is still looking pretty good.

Plus, there were still a lot of positives to take from this game. The defense looked fantastic and aggressive while pitching a shutout.

And Braxton Miller threw this block and got a nice shoutout from a legend.

AND Stephen Collier got to be out on the field for a little bit!

So was it an ideal game? Nah. But Ohio State got to play an interesting opponent with some icy uniforms, the defense looked great, and the nation's longest winning streak struck on during a weekend when a lot of the rest of the Top 25 looked positively garbage-esque. The rest of September is going to be a slow, slow grind, but for my part I'm going to enjoy watching an Ohio State team do the Ohio thing to do and smash their heads into their team kinks until they've all been worked out for Big Ten season.

And any day that ends with a picture like this probably isn't a bad one.

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