The end of every Big Ten football season marks the meeting of two teams often hailed as the greatest rivals in sports. As the Ohio State Buckeyes prepare for the arrival of the Michigan Wolverines, the city of Columbus gets ready for a very different guest. Each year on the day of this fabled football game, Columbus police are called into action to break up fights and escort drunks to their holding cells while firemen extinguish couches, dumpsters, and cars. It was originally thought that these were the actions of Ohio State students reacting to the game, but that hypothesis was dismissed when it was discovered that, win or lose, they behave in the same manner. The true conspirators here are not the fans sporting their scarlet and gray.
In my belief that post-secondary students are smarter than these actions imply, I have scoured recent history to find the culprits. I needed to look no further than one year ago to the month. In November 2005, riots swept through France. A key feature of these riots was the burning of cars. Coincidence? Unlikely. While these particular French rioters seemed uninterested in burning garbage, it is common knowledge that dumpster fires are the trademark of hobos. So why do French hobos burn couches? Obviously they dont like to sit down. Ill leave the analysis of that up to your imagination.
The French hobos are drawn to Columbus by the incredible amounts of garbage and general scruffiness of the citys inhabitants. The reason that the hobos overtake the city on the night of the Ohio State vs. Michigan football game is largely due to a misunderstanding. While this is generally the biggest game of the year for the two notable programs, the students are prone to celebrate by finding themselves at the bottom of a few bottles. Several Ohio State students took this celebration a bit too far and were too intoxicated to make it home and passed out in doorways, on porches, in the street - generally wherever they happened to fall down. The hobos saw this as a hobo-convention of sorts and decided they too should partake in the festivities.
The city of Columbus has become wise to the actions of these French hobos and has taken preemptive measures to minimize destruction this Saturday. Dumpsters are to be emptied three times this week in an attempt to have no garbage available to burn. It has been labeled a code violation to have a couch on a porch from which the hobos could seize it and set it aflame. Convenience stores in student neighborhoods have agreed to abstain from selling beer in glass bottles as the shards of broken glass can be used as weapons or to slash tires. This bottle restriction applies only to domestic beers, however, because as Willie J. Young, director of off-campus student services for Ohio State University, put it, Our students drink cheap beer, so the foreign beers are not a problem.1
It is the hope of those of us around the country that the fine students of Ohio State University will be able to restrain themselves from joining in the debauchery of the French hobos. Though it is hard to imagine university students at a school which derives so much prestige from its extreme overemphasis of a definite article participating in such lewd behavior, the French can be very persuasive. My only wish is that after the final whistle blows on another season of Big Ten football, the only thing being fired in Columbus is clad in a sweater vest.
1http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/state/2006/11/05/ddn110506osubee