It's generally not healthy, being perpetually pissed off.
I'm not a doctor, but it's easy to see how the strain that endemic anger puts on the average human body and mind can lead to a kind of internal rot; a constant gnawing around the edges of your soul that expresses itself as indigestion and farts. And, eventually, getting kicked out of Denny's on a Saturday morning because the indignities just kept piling up and somebody (in this case a clumsy teenaged waiter who dropped two thirds of a Grand Slam into your lap) had to pay.
It's no way to live, and not something to aspire to.
Unless...
Well, okay. Here's an approximation of a conversation I've had about fifty times since the Buckeyes backed into the College Football Playoff:
RANDOM ACQUAINTENCE/FAMILY MEMBER/COWORKER: I think we've got a great shot now.
ME: Why.
RANDOM ACQUAINTENCE/FAMILY MEMBER/COWORKER: I bet Ryan Day has them super pissed off.
ME: Really? Because "anger" doesn't really seem to be his bag, I'm not sure if-
RANDOM ACQUAINTENCE/FAMILY MEMBER/COWORKER: You don't want to play an angry Ohio State team!
How true that statement actually is might be up for debate, but there's a hell of a lot of at least circumstantial evidence that suggests it's at least a little accurate. To the point where if the whole of Ohio State football was anthropomorphized into a singular human being, that person would be taking a lot of court-mandated classes at a local learning annex. But since that's not actually a thing it behooves us to look at the evidence for how, exactly, being internally lit with an incandescent rage has benefitted the Buckeyes over the years.
| YEAR | OPPONENT | REASON FOR BEING UPSET | RESULT |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2022 | Utah | Loss to Michigan in previous game; desire to prove they didn't suck | Goofy win |
| 2021 | Clemson | Dabo purposefully creating bulletin board material; vengeance for garbage officiating year prior | Blowout victory |
| 2018 | Michigan | Inexplicable loss to Purdue a few weeks before | Angrily pounding the Wolverines into mush |
| 2014 | Wisconsin, Alabama, Oregon | Rage against an unfeeling universe for taking away two starting quarterbacks in the span of a few months | National Championship |
| 2012 | Michigan | Inability to participate in postseason play because some guy lied about knowing that some other guys sold their own shoes | Brady Hoke coaching the Wolverines for two more seasons |
And that's just in the last decade! There's been a lot made about Ohio State flourishing as an underdog, but I think there's more to it than that. There's something that comes with fostering a massive chip on your shoulder that helps otherwise rudderless teams find a way to absolutely kick ass.
Allow me to take a quick detour. A few years ago, I read what remains one of my favorite thinkpieces about Midwestern culture: this article by Paul Kix about how the repressed nature of our social interactions belies a surprising depth that people not from the region have trouble discerning (and mistake for folksy dipshittery).
...the idiosyncrasies of a steadfast populace [may] appear banal and maybe even bovine to the uninitiated, but in truth constitute the most sincere, malicious, enriching, and suffocating set of behaviors found in the English-speaking world.
I love the article in part because it's several hundred words of extremely rare Midwestern chest-thumping, but also because it goes a long way towards expressing an idea about anger that I've always had trouble conceptualizing. The caveat here is that Kix is mainly talking about the upper Midwest. Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, and so on; Ohio, as a weird pastiche of Midwestern, Northeastern, and Southern sensibilities, is much more grudging about being grudgingly nice than its neighbors.
Deeply-held feelings will be implied but not said, but the temperature at which social niceties fall apart is much higher in Ohio than in the rest of the Midwest. Still, you gotta be nice, so in the Buckeye state football becomes the main outlet with which to express latent rage.
As previously stated, being mad all the time isn't great for the body or soul. You've got to have at least some justification for feeling that way, and some kind of (positive, productive, not-evil) goal that anger will eventually lead to. Should, in other words, the 2022 Ohio State football team hold a grudge against Michigan/the rest of the college football world/the universe/themselves going into the College Football Playoff, as a means to win said playoff?
Let's find out!
I took a Grudge Grading test from the New York Times on behalf of Ohio State football and everyone in the entire state of Ohio, and after answering questions like "Did they know they were upsetting, hurting or being unfair to you?" (DEFNITE YES), "What is the 'Grrrr!' factor of this grudge?" (EXTREMELY HIGH), and "Would this grudge be canceled out if the grudgee apologized?" (ABSOLUTELY NOT).
Which of course makes sense: football is serious business. But if we're being honest with ourselves, all of this really isn't about Ohio State football, or Ohio society, or whatever.
It's about Ryan Day.
I'll break kayfabe here to remind you, gentle reader, that everything that you've just read is extremely tongue-in-cheek.
If you're using anger as a primary means of motivation in life and not the love of family or a new puppy or the smell of freshly baked bread or whatever, please re-examine how you're managing to get the dishes done on a regular basis.
Which is to say that Ryan Day doesn't have to be a horrible raging asshole to win football games, but sometimes I think that after a loss there's the idea that maybe, actually, he does. Losing is bad, but losing and not being sufficiently angry about it is even worse.
That says a lot more about us than it does about him. Because I don't think that Day is an angry guy, and I'm kind of proud that he isn't. We've seen how his positive influence in the lives of others has made a genuine difference, and not just on the football field. Everything we've seen from him suggests that he's a good person who cares about his players as human beings.
It's stupid and reductive to think that if he's not grinding his teeth into dust or kicking players in practice he's not doing his job, especially given that he wins literally 90% of the time.
Still, it's incredibly hard to shake that gnawing feeling that Ohio State needs an edge that they've lost in recent years. In a few short weeks the Buckeyes, coming off a second consecutive loss against Michigan, will be playing as a decided underdog against the defending national champions. There might be other ways to achieve the desired result, but Howard Beale's "not gonna take it anymore" first required being "mad as hell".
Given past results, it's easy to see how playing with a grudge might benefit the Buckeyes in Atlanta.
