Help is wanted in the world of Ohio State athletics. Are you a student at Ohio State? Have you ever wanted to play Brutus Buckeye and patrol Ohio Stadium during football contests? Here is your opportunity. The spirit program, an official (if typically unspoken) part of the athletic department, is hosting tryouts right now. An orientation session was yesterday. The next two come in March.
Further, do you want to assist Ohio State football in recruiting? Do you want to be more than "that guy" that does things like hashtagging #BBN or tweeting inspirational Muhammad Ali quotes to blue chip recruits? This is your opportunity. Ohio State football is looking for a recruiting assistant savvy with social media. You can help the football program and do so without being "that guy".
With that in mind, here are some other things happening that you may want to consider.
NIGHT GAMES ON DECK FOR NOVEMBER. In a move that should have been done four years ago, November night games seem to be coming to the Big Ten.
Night games in November is something fans have been wanting for some time. Coaches like Urban Meyer cannot get enough of them. My guess is newcomers like James Franklin and Gary Andersen will feel the same way, given how volatile their respective home atmospheres become underneath stadium lights.
However, the league has held strong to its traditional policy of having as few night games as possible, and having none after October. There had been a movement toward them in recent years with the idea of discussing implementation sometime in the future.
Will 2014 be the year we see Big Ten football kick off under the lights after Nov. 1?
We won't know for sure until ESPN/ABC and BTN announce their prime-time schedules this spring, but there's momentum for more night games and later night games, and talks are underway.
"We're more amendable to that first November Saturday," Ohio State athletic director Gene Smith recently told ESPN.com, "and I think some of us will be willing to look at that second Saturday in November if the contest is right."
I suspect I would detest having a night game every week if it meant being done with post-game interviews and other chores at 1 a.m. every Saturday night or Sunday morning, but the Big Ten needed to have done this years ago.
It is not Ohio State or Michigan that needs night games. It is a program like Wisconsin that stands the most to benefit from night games. I think a lot of what hurt Wisconsin's visibility between 2010 and 2011 is that no one was able to watch them. When the calendar turned to November, Wisconsin football—the same program with players like Montee Ball, J.J. Watt, and Russell Wilson—was confined to a regional 3:30 feed on ABC/ESPN2, a noon kickoff on ESPN or ESPN2, or, worse yet, a noon kickoff on BTN. Montee Ball could have forced his way up the Heisman ballot in 2011 if sportswriters could have watched him on a dedicated primetime feed on ESPN or ESPN2.
While it is easy to dismiss ESPN as pro-SEC, given its relationship with the conference, the network will ultimately know its bottom line. Games like Maryland at Penn State (Nov. 1) or Iowa at Minnesota (Nov. 8) could challenge for a prime time slot against games like Tennessee at South Carolina (Nov. 1) or Georgia at Kentucky (Nov. 8). The latter two games would not win that slot ten times of ten. It is important that the Big Ten at least give itself the opportunity to compete for prime time television slots.
More importantly, night games just create better atmospheres. Even dumpy atmospheres like Ross-Ade Stadium look that much more intimidating underneath stadium lights. Seriously, look. Purdue football seems almost exciting.
Further, night games, at least night games on ESPN's "family of networks", get much better booth crews than games at noon or 3:30. In that previous Purdue example, it actually got Brent Musburger and Kirk Herbstreit to call a home football game for Purdue. Purdue!
While Ohio State would benefit a lot from the possibility of November night games, lower-tier or mid-tier teams benefit even more. Do the right thing, Big Ten.
KAIN COLTER BRINGS SCRUTINY TO HIMSELF. I did not get to catch all the fall-out of Kain Colter's testimony before a National Labor Relations Board hearing in downtown Chicago, but I caught enough of the comments to this one particular statement from Colter.
“I like to think of it like the military/Navy SEALs. They spend months and weeks preparing for operations. It’s the same thing as football. We spend months getting ready for our operations.”
Comparing a children's game to warfare is a sure way to upset the sensibility of Americans, many of whom treat the military as sacrosanct and sui generis. Colter seemed to damn himself in the court of public opinion and brought upon him intense ridicule from college football fans, muddying the message he wanted to send.
Here's the deal. In no way did Colter liken college football to warfare. The key term there is "operations". "Operations" is a rather generic term.
I do not think the issue of "apples and oranges" is so stark that it would automatically invalidate his message. I think there is also a kernel of truth there, though it may not be the best simile. The U.S. military, unlike, say, the Dutch military, is not unionized either. I'm not sure that was the message Colter wanted to send.
Overall, the reaction seemed to be a collective question of where Colter could have gotten such a preposterous idea to liken college football at one of the world's most prestigious universities to the U.S. military.
Well, he got the idea from Northwestern's college football program. Pat Fitzgerald, along with Northwestern's strength and conditioning staff, hosted a group of Navy SEALs at Northwestern's traditional fall camp at Camp Kenosha to train them as if they were Navy SEALs. Military motifs are constant in Northwestern's football program.
I caution against hating Kain Colter for saying what, presumably, every college football player and historian of the game would say. Jingoism and motifs of modern warfare pervade college football in almost every way. It is almost a design feature.
Colter comparing the college football experience to the intense hours of training in order to become a special ops for the U.S. military is not ludicrous. If anything, it may have been of limited value for Colter to make his case for unionization by reference to a profession that is also not unionized and seemingly has no impetus toward that end.
Counterproductive? Possibly. Ludicrous or out of bounds? Not at all.
KAIN COLTER BRINGS SCRUTINY TO NORTHWESTERN TOO. With that said, I think a more interesting development to emerge from the hearing was Kain Colter throwing Northwestern University under the bus a bit. The question-and-answer session between Colter and an attorney representing Northwestern University resembled an interrogation.
Here are some juicy tidbits from the hearing, taken from Teddy Greenstein's Twitter account.
- Colter said he was admitted solely on his football merits. An average student in high school, he would not have been admitted to the university if not for his football talents. In short, Colter implicitly likened Northwestern to a standard "football mill".
- Colter said workouts and meetings were as early as 5:30 a.m. and players were discouraged, if not forbidden, from taking classes before 11 a.m.
- Colter alleged Northwestern did not permit him to take a pre-med track at Northwestern and forced him to take a necessary chemistry class as a condensed six-week course in the summer.
- Colter alleged that Northwestern refused reimbursement for an MRI on a damaged ankle. Northwestern was able to establish reimbursement, though Colter still charged that he was slow-played by the university.
Oof.
It is easy to say that what Colter is alleging of Northwestern is no different than any other university with a major college football program. Northwestern is not being charged of anything particularly nefarious, though it does tarnish Northwestern's otherwise sterling reputation a bit.
Northwestern University would rather be presented as "above" the behavior of their peers. It is not.
SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED HALL. Hat tip to Michael for that pun. Last night's scheduled game between Iowa and Indiana was postponed because of issues of structural damage to Assembly Hall.
A piece of the roof fell off the building.
Assembly Hall is falling apart at the seams, much like Indiana basketball is after its last game in which it was routed by lowly Purdue.
MISCELLANY. Chris Farley doing his Matt Foley sketch three and a half years before it appeared on SNL... RIP, Bob Casale, former guitarist for Ohio's own Devo... Stephen Collier didn't come to Ohio State to sit around... Hot Pockets yanked from shelves everywhere for containing, ahem, "diseased and unsound animals"... Zlatan Ibrahimović is ridiculous... His PSG squad routed Bayer Leverkusen... Barcelona beat Man City... I'm surprised this hasn't happened yet in the context of a MLB baseball brawl. It just takes one guy to fly off the handle with a baseball bat in his grip... Play to the damn whistle, err, "skate to the damn finish line"... Infant gets ankles broke in sick crossover. So wrecked... Kevin Durant's new nickname is kind of idiotic... You can buy wine in cans now... That awkward moment of Coolio wearing an Amani Toomer Michigan jersey...
