For Ohio State, a home loss to Michigan on Nov. 30 was a football catastrophe, the Buckeyes’ fourth straight loss to their hated rivals. For a few seconds, the focus was on the Buckeyes’ missed opportunity to secure a spot in the Big Ten championship game. Then the spotlight shifted to center field, where a Michigan player planted the school’s corn and blue flag in the grass. It’s safe to say that Ohio State’s players weren’t happy about being mocked in their own backyard.
A scuffle ensued, with Ohio State players starting a physical altercation and Michigan players responding in kind. The Buckeyes pushed through a thin barrier of police officers to push a mass of Wolverines from the home team’s logo, and several players wrestled each other to the ground. Police officers threatened to use tasers. At least one held the device directly into the abdomen of a Michigan player, but did not activate it. as one officer’s body camera footage now reveals.
The story reached a new level of nonsensical on Wednesday when a lawmaker in the Ohio state government submitted a bill he mentioned the “OHIO Sportsmanship Act.” If passed, the bill would “prohibit the planting of a flagpole and flag in the center of the football field at Ohio Stadium on the day of a college football game and rename it the OHIO Sportsmanship Act.”
That’s right: a bill to specifically ban the planting of a flag on Ohio state field.
All this thanks to the planting of one flag. Or, more fundamentally, this is all because Ohio State lost a home game as a three-touchdown favorite to their bitter rival and couldn’t tolerate the resulting celebration.
Is flag planting such a blight on the state, or even the entire country, that it requires a legislative response? Certainly not. American lawmakers love to take center stage, and college football has long been a favorite topic for political point-scoring, which has little chance of being passed into law – and even less chance of making a difference in everyday life of the citizens of a state.
The state representative who sponsored the bill, Republican Josh Williams, was hoping for media attention. He has succeeded, joining a long tradition of state lawmakers using college football for the same purpose. Seasoned observers will remember the Iowa lawmaker who tried to ban college football games on Friday nights in his statehoping to keep the evening reserved for high school teams playing their own games that evening. Perhaps they will remember the Alabama lawmaker who introduced a resolution urging Auburn University to do so claim seven national championships that the school had not actually won.
Ohio State is by far the most popular sports team in Ohio, dwarfing even the prominence of the NFL teams in Cincinnati and Cleveland. Here, Williams has established himself as the protector of the Buckeye brand. What the team really needed was an downfield passing game that could get behind Michigan’s safety.
Flag planting is common after major football victories. It’s not new. In fact, it’s not even new in the state of Ohiowhere Oklahoma quarterback Baker Mayfield did the same after a win over the Buckeyes in 2017. That planting didn’t cause a national incident, nor was a Taser waved at anyone.
The incensed Ohio State players escalated the situation. Some practically saw it as a matter of religion to stand up for their logo and field. Jack Sawyer, the veteran Buckeye linebacker who has never beaten Michigan, grabbed the flag and threw it to the ground. “They don’t plant the damn flag on our field anymore, man,” he shouted at a support staff member who tried to restrain him. Sawyer’s response spoke to the level of emotion at play in the rivalry, which is a tinderbox even when no flags are planted.
Adding to the focus on flags, Michigan-Ohio State wasn’t the only game that had a postgame fuss that weekend. Players from North Carolina and North Carolina State also participated, with a flag once again at the center of the action. Players from Florida and Florida State did the same, and again, which object was at the heart of the altercation but that waving piece of fabric?
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Some of the most influential media voices in college football may have contributed to the sense that the sport has spiraled out of control. Gus Johnson, the play-by-play broadcaster who called the game for Fox, admonished Michigan for gloating and inflaming the situation. Kirk Herbstreit, ESPN’s top college football analyst and a former Ohio State quarterback (though typically not a homer for his alma mater), called up the sport to “return to civility and fair sportsmanship.” He suggested that a rule (rather than a state law) against flag planting “could be a start.”
A little more sportiness never hurts. But flag planting is far from a crisis, and there are two easy options for a team looking to avoid a major episode of flag planting on its field. One is not to react violently when another team rams a piece of plastic into a turf. (After all, there are few stadiums that still use natural grass. A flagpole will not ruin the artificial grass.)
The other option, of course, is to simply not lose a home game to the kind of team that wants to mark your field as its own. Michigan could have avoided the fight by not planting a flag, but Ohio State could have cut the entire episode short by doing something more fundamental: winning.
“We’re going to win in your house and we’re going to plant the flag,” Michigan quarterback Davis Warren said after the unrest. Then he came up with a solution: “You should have done something about it.”