The intensity of OSU fans fuels animosity elsewhere. Is it also the source of Ohio hate?
The Ohio State Buckeyes are a few days away from Monday's College Football Playoff national championship game against Notre Dame, but they're far from No. 1 in the nation's hearts.
Data compiled before the start of last weekend's semifinal games by BetOnline, a sports betting site, found Notre Dame's #GoIrish hashtag was used most often on X by fans in 40 states. Penn State (#WeAre) and Texas (#HookEm) were favored in five and four states, respectively.
Ohio State's #GoBucks was most popular in one state only: Ohio.
With an intense fan base, an all-time winning percentage that tops all other Division I schools and an exaggerated pronunciation of the definite article the Ohio State University has long had its share of eye-rolling anti-fans. But it seems Ohio, the state, is catching up when it comes to derision from the rest of the country:
- "Ohio" has become an adjective among Generation Alpha, those born in 2010 and after, to describe something weird or creepy. It's the latest evolution of a long-running meme that pairs photos or videos of bizarre occurrences with the caption, "Only in Ohio."
- Reddit, Facebook and other social media sites are flush with pages and threads devoted to Ohio-bashing. They cite everything from native serial killers to Cincinnati chili to the recent Ohio Supreme Court decisions allowing bones in boneless chicken.
- Ohioans can be among Ohio's biggest critics. Even cleveland.com once ran a story titled, "12 things to hate about living in Ohio" that mentioned weather, potholes and the "O-H! I-O!" thing. (To be fair, its best-things-about-Ohio story included 20 entries.)
Why does everyone laugh at, criticize and ridicule us? We could end the discussion right now with a simple, "They hate us 'cuz the ain't us" (it's objectively partly true), but let's go deeper than that.
Let's start off with jealousy
Chris Knoester, an OSU sociology professor who studies the intersection of sports and society, said people's intense feelings for the places they're from, the groups they join and the teams they follow lead to similarly intense feelings about groups to which they don't belong.
Sociologists call these associations "in-groups" and "out-groups." Think of Ohio or Ohio State and the Buckeyes as our in-groups. The more intense our feelings and displays of those feelings are — O-H! — the more we become other people's out-groups.
"There's also a dynamic on the other side: people wanting to take Ohio or Ohio State down a peg," he said.
Knoester was inside AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, to see both dynamics at play when OSU met the University of Texas in the Jan. 10 playoff semifinal. Both states and both schools have ingrained traditions and passionate fans.
Sports Illustrated found a common thread running through Notre Dame and Penn State, the other final-four teams, as well. Its writers created a cheeky points system for determining the most and least likeable among the schools, which it called "a quartet of programs with massive tradition, huge fan bases and no shortage of arrogance."
Among the plusses for OSU: having LeBron James as a fan and winning the national women's hockey title. Among its minuses: the brawl after November's loss to Michigan. Ohio State ended up last. Notre Dame, whose fan base transcends geography, ended up on top based partly on Touchdown Jesus and the movie, "Rudy."
Does Ohio hate go beyond Ohio State?
In its early days of statehood, Ohio was seen by the rest of the country as wilderness and Ohioans were viewed as backwoods dwellers, said Kevin Kern, an associate professor of history at the University of Akron and co-author of "Ohio: A History of the Buckeye State."
When Ohioan William Henry Harrison ran for president in 1840, he turned opponents' derision as a log cabin-dwelling, hard cider-drinking frontier-dweller into an asset. (Harrison actually was born in Virginia, his grandfather signed the Declaration of Independence and he lived in a mansion near Cincinnati.) Supporters wore necklaces made of buckeyes and started referring to Ohio as the Buckeye State.
After a long stretch of political and economic influence — Cincinnati and Cleveland ranked among the biggest cities in the country, and seven more Ohioans were elected president from 1868 to 1920 — Ohio once again slipped into a state of ridicule.
Kern covers it all in his Ohio history class: the decline of industry, the Cuyahoga River catching fire, declining populations in most of its big cities.
"The last few weeks, it gets pretty depressing," he said. "It's the Rust Belt and flyover country and unemployment and that kind of stuff."
The historian said he wonders, too, whether Ohio's politics play a part in negative attitudes toward our state. When we were a swing state that sucked up most of the attention from pundits and presidential candidates, others likely resented us for it. As Ohio moved rightward in a bitterly divided country, we're an in-group and an out-group for roughly equal numbers.
How did Ohio become a meme?
Back on the internet, Chloe Barnes, the "TikTok Explainer," took a stab at the "Only in Ohio" meme back in 2022. She explained that it started with a photo of a bus stop in Chicago that went viral in 2016. The message about a route change on Ohio Avenue announced, "Ohio will be eliminated."
The memes on Reddit and Instagram started with an "Ohio vs. the world" theme that portrayed the state as "this ominous superpower that's trying to take over the world ... and basically just one of the creepiest places you could go to," she said.
According to Barnes, Ohio crime records are more public than those of most other states, which added fuel to the "Only in Ohio" meme that came soon afterward.
"It's kind of like why we see so much crazy news come out of Florida — because you can find it," she said in a video about the topic. "Believe me, crazy s*** happens all over the place, but you don't find out about that.
"So, on that side, the news in Ohio does a lot of heavy lifting for us, because you see much more 'crazy' happen. It gives the internet something to latch onto and be like, 'Hah! Only in Ohio…'"
Hate and ridicule aren't only for Ohio
Zippia, a job-search site, declared Illinois as the nation's most-hated state in 2022. In a report that sought to "turn hate into a science," researchers used census data on rising or declining populations, Gallup polling data on the number of people who call their own state the "worst possible" place to live and Instagram data on the states hated in other states.
Ohio was the 12th most-hated state on Zippia's list, below our neighbors in West Virginia (No. 4) and Kentucky (No. 9). Michigan was the seventh most-hated state in the country, based in part on the 9% of its own residents who declared it the worst place in the country and residents of one other unidentified state — we could make a good guess — who said they hate it more than any other.
Is it really Ohio against the world?
In Tennessee, Oregon and Texas, the states whose major universities were defeated by the Buckeyes on their way to Monday's national title game, Ohio State fans will gather at sports bars to watch their team play Notre Dame.
They'll gather in Indiana, Illinois, Iowa and other states where Big Ten rivals hold sway. According to the Ohio State Alumni Association, they'll watch at a Buffalo Wild Wings in Detroit, 40 miles east of Ann Arbor.
Fans across the country will wear scarlet and gray. Half will shout, "OH!" and the rest will shout back an "IO!" And others will roll their eyes.
Somewhere in the stands and maybe later on the field, people will wave a banner that also hangs in sports bars across Columbus. OSU quarterback Will Howard and defensive end Jack Sawyer held one up on the field in Dallas after the Buckeyes' semifinal win over Texas on Jan. 10.
It says, "Ohio Against the World." The words have rarely felt so literal and so untrue.