My Favorite Things: Episode 20, When Winter Came for the Volunteers

by Ramzy Nasrallah February 12, 2025
Ohio State Buckeyes cornerback Jermaine Mathews Jr. (24) hits Tennessee Volunteers wide receiver Bru McCoy (5) during the second half of the College Football Playoff first round game at Ohio Stadium in Columbus on Dec. 22, 2024. Ohio State won 42-17.
© Adam Cairns/Columbus Dispatch / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

You know what kicks ass? Ohio State winning national titles in our lifetimes.

But happiness isn't a natty or bust transaction - even the Lunatic Fringe among us can find joy in the Buckeyes' notable sub-natty achievements. We should savor those, because what's the point of fandom if you refuse to enjoy the finer moments?

Five years ago when we all abruptly found ourselves on lockdown and riddled with existential anxiety, I banged out a series of grateful distractions about our shared and most sacred football memories.

Not just national titles, but the Buckeye moments we have and should always treasure - and specifically - that I personally experienced (love you Chic Harley, but you were either born too soon or I was born too late). This sounds better in Julie Andrews' voice:

large crowds in bleachers and trophies on podiums
thrilling 4th quarters while chewing Imodiums
gridiron titans and late autumn kings
these are a few of My Favorite Things

That series has largely been dormant since we ventured back out into the world. Recent glorious events are an important reminder that we shouldn't wait for a global pandemic to pause and remember the best of times.

Hitching our mental and cardiovascular health to gigantic teenagers wearing our favorite colors and having them steal our hearts instead of breaking them - that's worth replaying, remembering and memorializing. Time to update the pandemic repository.

And what better place to start than...that's right, Nov 30, 2024. Rock bottom. Turns out that's the best place on earth to begin an ascent to immortality, beginning with scaling Rocky Top.

Welcome back to My Favorite Things. Today we're memorializing a moment that never got the long, lingering finish it deserved: Tennessee's loud, cold and unsuccessful invasion of Columbus, Ohio.

RELATED My Favorite Things

Episode 20, When Winter Came for the Volunteers

We shouldn't spend too much time on the beginning, but this episode cannot be properly appreciated without grounding context for what Buckeye fans living, dead and still unborn were enduring when the Tennessee Volunteers came to town back in December of 2024.

A fourth-straight Ohio State loss to a Michigan team cloaked and soaked in mediocrity. Michigan Sucks is always accurate, but the future ReliaQuest Bowl champions came to town without having won a single road game and left with their first and only. Michigan sucked. Michigan sucks. Forever.

Thanksgiving was ruined, Christmas was wrecked, relationships were fragmented and a fractured fanbase was at war with itself. How do you come back from a loss like that with a roster like this? How could you call yourself an Ohio State fan and be okay with the last four Novembers?

Tennessee fans were feeling it. This wouldn't just be a football game. It would be a land grab.

Three awful weeks debating miserable questions, with CFP opponent Tennessee destined to show up like Cotton Bowl Missouri, but with dumber colors and a fight song played on repeat at CIA black ops sites to break suspected terrorists so they tell on themselves.

The Buckeye Nation-State was alarmingly unstable which had our fragile psyche in a dangerous, unhealthy place. Regicide or Dedicated Unseriousness? Those were our choices; either start over or be cool with losing to every type of Michigan team.

A season which began as Natty or Bust had been impaired at the hands of the worst possible antagonist, which had started a quarterback who would not see the field for at least a dozen Ohio high schools. And what was our reward following three weeks in a catatonic state?

The Tennessee Volunteers. And comrades, they were feeling it. They watched the Buckeyes lose to the Wolverines. This wouldn't just be a football game. It would be a land grab.

An incursion was announced and taking place at Ohio's southern border, led by a 20th century ankle-biter peasant program that cannot even cheat or buy players properly. This humiliation would be the fatal kind. Regicide or Dedicated Unseriousness?

UT football choses both. They turn over mediocre governments more often than Italy does.

Say what you will about Michigan, at least those dorks got t-shirts and trophies out of the orgy of NCAA transgressions they racked up spanning two investigations - one still quite active - multiple show-causes and a million slaps on the wrist. Doesn't matter, had a parade.

Tennessee has more NCAA punishments than accolades. Its most interesting postseason this century involved vacating a bowl win against pre-Cignetti IU. Do you have any goddamn idea how hard it is to face Indiana in a bowl game and fail to secure a clean win? Winning the lottery has better odds. Amazing work, Vols.

But UT got into the CFP and drew The Team Who Lost to Incredibly Shitty Shorthanded Michigan at Home, which filled Tennessee supporters with that special kind of empty bravado one would expect from a garden variety SEC program which regularly celebrates the success of other schools as their own.

That's notorious cuckold Lane Kiffin cheering on SEC foe and his former employer, succinctly capturing the disease that is Conference Pride. This toxic condition fools its sufferers into believing their thimble-sized piss pumps are not inadequate or humiliating because they can simply grab onto their first-cousin's giant hog with both hands and celebrate that miscolored phallus as if it's their own. S-E-C! S-E-C!

It's been said a Mississippi tornado and a Tennessee divorce are similar events in that either way, someone's fixin' to lose a trailer. Kiffin abruptly left Knoxville 15 years ago and the epitaph of his tenure there was an infamous YouTube video, press conference chaos and a mattress fire - which let's face it, that's got big southern tornado slash divorce energy.

The coach of the TaxSlayer Bowl champions had both hands firmly wrapped around Tennessee's playoff aspirations and was publicly cheering on a program he directly competes with for recruits, because Conference Pride is a disease. Speaking of cuckolds -

Somehow it's been eight years since this web site spent an entire college football season actively betting real money every week against all of Clay Travis' published wagering guidance and, unsurprisingly, #gettingrich doing so.

Travis is exempt from Conference Pride ridicule in this case, as the Nashville native/Vandy grad simply cheers for his childhood favorite. It's a good idea to do whatever the opposite of what he's doing is. So, go Bucks? Go Bucks.

It's plausible Tennessee represented the most overconfident visiting fan contingent Central Ohio has ever seen - encompassing the opponents of all Ohio State sports since Ohio was founded. Columbus Crew, the Blue Jackets, Columbus Quest, Columbus Chill, Ohio Glory - name a team the capital city has supported and there's no historical visitor that matched what the third weekend in December brought from the Volunteer State.

And we have seen a lot. We had just never seen anything like this. Honestly, impressive.

UT's militants didn't venture north to be humiliated. They were convinced they would be the humiliators, and like all good fans - felt obligated to be present for what would be history.

Images from campus were showing a heavy dose of that rancid orange. The vibes were not great, as we were still scraping Wolverine guano off the roofs of our mouths while the visitors were, well, they were so excited to be in Columbus they were literally taking their clothes off.

Disrobing in 25° weather was a response to the only hope northern media narrators were clinging to ahead of the game - a belief that colder temperatures would impair the players unaccustomed to just how much more football hurts when the air is so cold your dead ancestors are complaining about it from beyond.

Tennessee players were happy to put the temperature front and center. Cold? This isn't cold!

God's Conference only produces elite athletes in peak condition, aliens conceived in a humid lab designed to win everywhere while being condescending. And here they are, shirtless. This was an unexpected surprise: They looked cold mashed potatoes wearing pants.

GOOD OL' MUFFIN TOP, MUFFIN TOP TENNESSEE fellas, never put shirts on again. Stay sexy 4evr, and chalk one up for famed Tennessee's Biscuits and Gravy-based Strength & Conditioning program.

The Vols took the field for pregame warmups sans shirts on to refute the Big North Narrative about cold weather football being a special kind of hell for anyone unprepared for it. Also, this isn't fat-shaming. The lads solicited a response. Omitting how lumpy this SEC and national title contender was from this chapter of history would be rewriting it.

And we're doing these husky Vols a favor by memorializing their big reveal, for this was UT's final fleeting moment of bravado and pride ahead of what would be a quick and comprehensive humiliation.

The memories of their challenging road to an earned invitation to the CFP's 1st round would be intact for just a few more minutes prior to vaporizing in the cold Ohio chill. The players were ready. The fans were ready. The stadium was...wait, what is this?

I have been a child, adolescent and adult in that building, but December 21, 2024 delivered a clear, crispy darkness pierced by lasers, lights and pyrotechnics I had never seen before. I was at the LSU game in 1988. USC in 2009. Notre Dame in 2022. Most of the night games the stadium has hosted.

None of them had this bite. And none had this soundtrack. Is that Hell's Bells? Demonic.

Something about this Ohio Stadium environment was different, especially against the backdrop of the games with postseason-worthy opponents which had preceded it. See if you can solve the puzzle - what changed?

OSU HOME GAMES vs. BOWL TEAMS --> 2024 REGULAR SEASON
OPPONENT KICKOFF TIME WHY WAS THIS THE KICKOFF TIME?
WESTERN MICHIGAN 7:30pm BTN required to show every B1G team once. sorry Fox
MARSHALL Noon B1G NOON KICKOFF FROM FOX
IOWA 3:30pm CBS got their hands on this one, sorry Fox
NEBRASKA Noon B1G NOON KICKOFF FROM FOX
INDIANA Noon B1G NOON KICKOFF FROM FOX
MICHIGAN Noon Tradition, but also B1G NOON KICKOFF FROM FOX

That's right. The Buckeyes finally got a game time that didn't conflict with brunch mimosas.

Ohio State opened with Akron at 3:30pm because CBS picked it up. It played in East Lansing at night because the Buckeyes had to appear on Peacock at least once, similar to how Western Michigan was under the lights on BTN. NBC grabbed the Oregon game and put it at 5pm local time, so a twilight kick.

As for the rest of the schedule, Fox contorted itself to put the Buckeyes in their super lame noon showcase as a futile attempt to manufacture enthusiasm for early games. Purdue and Northwestern were both at noon too, but frankly shitty teams deserve shitty times.

Noon became such a thing that Ohio State playing early every week became a national story. The Washington Post interviewed me, a guy who writes about bourbon and saxophones, for theirs. By the time Tennessee came to town, Buckeye fans were barely aware that football was allowed after 4pm.

This was no B1G Noon. This looked an awful lot like a big, scary trap for a bunch of lumpy guys drunk on conference pride who foolishly believed they could replicate what Michigan has infrequently been able to pull off post-leather helmets without actually being Michigan.

The Buckeyes got the ball first and abruptly remembered they had This Guy. We had been worried.

And we're off. The stadium sounds when JJ scored were informative - while a sizable orange militia had braved the elements to contribute generously to Central Ohio's game day economy, there was still a large contingent of in-state partisans brave enough to pause their suffering to take in one last serving of local football.

Tennessee went 3-and-out on its opening drive. Ohio State's first play of its second drive was a short, conservative and very easy pass to Jeremiah Smith for 18 yards. It was so basic and easy, hell they could run that two dozen times a game if they chose to.

That realization produced this sentiment from the national sports media and let's be honest with ourselves - all of us too. We were wide awake at 2:57am for three straight weeks thinking about this after the Michigan game.

It never had to be this way. But now that it was this way - time for the home team to behave like a well-oiled vengeful zombie with a thirst for humiliating 20th century peasant programs too incompetent to even cheat properly. Tennessee, we're incredibly not-sorry.

Brilliant UT quarterback Nicholaus "Nico" Iamaleava would have the ball time and again, but he couldn't get into any sort of rhythm running the Vols' offense because of an Ohio State defense that was playing at a gear it had not yet shown during the season.

They were hitting Tennessee players so hard they were leaving the game, and a few of them didn't come back. Clean hits. Vicious hits. The kind of violence which echoes in organs you cannot quite identify, like oh shit I think my spleen is shouting at me?

You know what a spleen does, reader? It filters blood and protects your body. It has a function, but not like your heart, lungs or anus in that it runs on silent. When it shouts at you, that means something bad has happened and it's partially your fault (e.g. participating in collisions in sub-zero temperatures).

We digress. Vols were in every kind of pain humans can experience. Take care of your spleens, readers. When the Buckeyes got the ball, that unit exerted its own version of efficient brutality.

And so it went. The Buckeye offense would beat the shit out of the Volunteer defense, score, and then kick the ball back to Tennessee as the rulebook requires. Then the Buckeye defense would beat the shit out of the Volunteer offense and receive the ball upon forcing 4th down.

Punting on 4th down is a mini-forfeit. It's not so much required by the rulebook as it is risk aversion, so giving the ball back to the team that - oops - can't stop marching downfield whenever it has the ball is basically stacking mini-forfeits to make one big hilarious chonkified mega-forfeit. Tennessee began quitting in the 1st half.

In this football game it was apparent early that the team in all-red uniforms (the Fightin' Ketchups, as one idiot in 11W Slack who shall remain anonymous once called them) was intent on humiliating the team in all-white stormtrooper costumes.

You know what stormtroopers do? They lose. Pick any Star War and watch it if you can't remember.

Hindsight is 20/20, but why would you ever place yourself within 50 feet of Sonny Styles? Dumb.

Ohio State was treating Tennessee with extreme rudeness, as if it didn't give a damn for the whole state. This cruelty was especially pronounced on nearly every play of the 1st half, which - sigh - made it very difficult for Buckeye fans to poison themselves with negativity, a hardwired gene-level trait we've carried since we first slithered out of the water millions of years ago.

From my Tennessee game preview on this web site:

If the home team is able to get everyone wearing scarlet to shout WHERE THE HELL WAS THAT AGAINST MICHIGAN in unison, that means the Buckeyes are actively ending the Volunteers' season.

No other details necessary. If Ohio State fans are mad at how well the team is playing, that means Ohio State is winning. Anger. Impotent frustration. This is how Buckeye fans express joy.

I was wrong. I stayed mad at how well Ohio State was playing for almost 90 seconds before becoming irrevocably consumed by mirth. Sure, the sentiment crossed my mind - how did they overthink Michigan again, so badly? - but instead of being forced to chew on that misery for 10 months, we now had fresh, palatable memories.

University of Michigan alumna Nicole Auerbach, reinforce what everyone watching was thinking:

That's right, Nicole. And if you listen to the home crowd was watching the game, you can understand why they were unable to marinate in their sadness for any sustainable period of time.

It's because the Buckeyes could not stop exerting their superiority on the team which had taken the field during warmups half-naked and lubed up like snickering chucklefucks behaving with all of the seriousness of contestants on Pillsbury mascot tryout reality show instead of a gladiators in a single-elimination football tournament.

You already saw the touchdown earlier, but you'll watch it again. Volume all the way up:

There's no joy to ears like ours like the reaction of our tribe following a touchdown of consequence.

Will Howard, whose name is only now appearing 2,000 words into this memorialization had familiarized Ohio State fans with his unique but predictable brand of game participation. We knew that Bad Will would make an appearance, but Good Will would come in and overwhelm him from sticking around too long.

That progression happened all the way up until the Michigan disaster, where - author speculation incoming - Concussed Will made his unfortunate debut and actively contributed to Ohio State's game plan devolving into a fatal series of mini-forfeits.

Three weeks later, there was only one Will.

That's Good Will, who - spoiler - ended the QB battle with Bad and Concussed and took command of the offense for the balance of the postseason. It was 21-0 Buckeyes very quickly and with time still left in the 3rd quarter, Ohio State's lead was 35-10.

After the game, Good Will - just Will going forward - provided an elegant epitaph for the one-sided battle which began with roaring bravado and concluded with a whimper:

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

A post shared by Will Howard (@willhoward)

 

Five paragraphs earlier in this episode:

There's no joy to ears like ours like the reaction of our tribe following a touchdown of consequence.

Historically, an accurate statement. But Ohio Stadium was dedicated in 1922, and in the 102 seasons which have followed, there was one auditory hallmark of the college football experience which the Horseshoe had never hosted or heard.

It made its Ohio Stadium debut after the Buckeyes scored their third touchdown during the 1st half. It then began to spread and gain volume. By the time the home team went up 25 points, you could hear it on television, volume up:

It Just Meant More™. A thorough, comprehensive and overwhelming reveal of the juggernaut the Buckeyes had been incubating for the majority of the schedule in preparation for a postseason which they intended to enter on a high note.

Instead, they came into the evening following three weeks on a cold slab, rock bottom. That weaponized what was already engineered to play 16 games, and we now know about the value a players-only meeting had in the aftermath of that loss toward what ended up being a national title run like nothing the sport has ever seen.

Natty or Bust became the tagline for this season, but before Denzel Burke provided that edit, Ryan Day had spoken openly (and scriptedly) about how the Buckeyes needed to Leave No Doubt. A reaction, no doubt, to how Ohio State had allowed games to flip on one or two moments.

Day hasn't yet been around the program for a decade, but for those of us who grew up with it - doubt has been an IED of sorts from opposing fans. Sometimes when Ohio State wins, they're the Luckeyes - like during the first national title run I was alive to enjoy.

Other times, there's diminished resentment - like of course the Buckeyes won, they pAiD $20 MiLlioN for their roster, why wouldn't they win? Doubt was absent on Dec 21, 2024. This beating was so thorough, the only sentiment from beyond our trench was awe.

VOLdemort, buddy, we'll be asking ourselves that question forever. We've been asking that question about other Michigan losses in other years as well. The difference this time is that I do not care anymore, because that loss birthed something that may have still transpired, but definitely not like this.

And I feel privileged to have been able to witness that run exactly like this. It was inconceivable until it actually happened, and that all started with the Tennessee game.

After the Buckeyes beat the Miami Hurricanes to win the 2002 BCS title, I remember seeing some Texas fans online discussing with deep admiration how cohesive and unified Ohio State was, and how the Longhorns - then suffering a title drought about as long as the Buckeyes' had been - needed to be more like them to break through.

Can't remember any sentiment like that since. Not until Tennessee visited Columbus.

Bama's freshman receiver is other-worldly, which would be impressive except that Jeremiah is from a galaxy far, far away (a reference to the movie series where the stormtroopers in all-white always lose, everything comes full circle here).

Oh, and that environment which electrified and elevated the Buckeyes' home field advantage?

It turns out Ohio Stadium isn't just a bunch of old wealthy people in the best seats shouting at anyone who stands up during the game (it's that too, let's be honest). But gaslighting is effective only if the masses begin to believe the lie, and Big Noon is gaseous flatulence.

Nobody outside of the board room nerds running the numbers on Fox's deal model with the conference believes for a split second that kegs and eggs is more captivating for audiences or imposing for visitors than Bangers After Dark.

Once it was all over, the Tennessee Takeover could only sit back and appreciate the ambush it had unwillingly participated in. The Vols definitely won the buildup and every bit of the pregame - right up to the moment the shirts came off, anyway.

No Luckeyes, but the CFP referee shenanigans which have given Buckeye fans night terrors after aiding in tipping games against Clemson and Georgia away from them were still intact and aiding the Volunteers.

In both of those CFP losses, the Buckeyes left doubt. This time, they left no such thing.

Ohio State had strategy, execution, alignment and energy from start to finish. Succeed, repeat. Slip up, correct. The vibes were off in the pregame. They were immaculate from kickoff and in every moment that followed.

Thirty-one seniors were recognized prior to the Michigan game, believing they would be playing their final game in Ohio Stadium. Winning would have sent them to Indianapolis, and then Pasadena - assuming the Buckeyes' Oregon game plan for the conference title game would have resembled something we would see on New Year's Day.

But they lost, which didn't affect their postseason inclusion, just their playoff journey - extending it by one extra game which afforded them the opportunity not just to pursue one of their three season goals, but redo their final games at home.

When the first playoff game in Ohio Stadium history concluded - three weeks after one of the worst losses in program history - no flags were planted at midfield. No melees were initiated and broken up. Only one element from the Michigan game was carried over and repeated for the Tennessee game.

And that was the tears. Several players and fans of the home team were visibly in tears.

It wouldn't be the last time during this postseason Emeka Egbuka would walk off the field while crying. But that's a story for a different episode of My Favorite Things. Go Bucks.

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