Carson Palmer hates Ohio State too

Did you hear what Carson Palmer said last week about Ohio State? I caught a little bit of it on SportsCenter, and Mike Pidanick emailed me a link to text of the highlights. Great stuff, even if Palmer presented it in the context of USC arrogance and Big Ten bashing.

When Mike and I were in Fremont, Ohio, college football fans split their allegiances between Ohio State and Michigan. The town was roughly the same distance from both Ann Arbor and Columbus, and while many Fremont athletes like Bob Brudzinski had gone on to star for the Buckeyes, there was no shortage of former Little Giants who played for Michigan – Rob Lytle and Charles Woodson were the most prominent.

During our stint in Ohio, the Buckeyes under John Cooper were routinely losing to Michigan and falling in at least one big game per year. So Buckeyes fans’ arrogance was under wraps. Hell, when I was in the Horseshoe press box for the Badgers’ big comeback win over Ohio State in 1999 – Brooks Bollinger’s coming out party, where I sat about 5 feet from a hobbled Barry Alvarez (glass separating us, of course) – the guys I sat by were pretty low key … until they found out I was a UW alum, at which point they stopped talking to me.

Ohio State has been much better under Jim Tressel, which has brought out their fans’ hubris. Several guys I worked with in my construction publishing days were really good guys, until they started talking Buckeyes, at which point they became unbearable. At the tail end of the Badgers’ disappointing 2006 basketball season, we beat OSU at the Kohl Center while I was at a trade show, and these guys reacted as if they’d lost to Bowling Green.

So thank you, Carson, for calling out Ohio State fans as being the oftentimes unbearable, arrogant blowhards that they are.