Buckeyes Give Middle Finger to High Schools — Games Coming to Fridays

OSU has been dominating the news cycle here in Columbus for the past week — either raising ticket prices, changing Mirror Lake into a $6M mosquito magnet wetland marsh, or almost laying off 18 members of their English department — you’d think they’d lay off any other news that could look bad? Nah.

They’re playing friday games next year! Wooo!

Although there are some caveats, no home games save for one (Potentially once every three years) and the schedule is somewhat strict in regards to when these Friday Night games will occur, specifically in mid-October during fall break.

What about high school and all the kids that depend on people going to their games to further fund their athletic development? An unintended casualty — but OSU at least tried to be respectful.

“We are supportive of it,” Gene Smith, OSU Athletic Director said to The Dispatch. “We battled for a long time to try to be respectful obviously for high school football. But the reality is what we need to do for our television partners and what we need to do for our revenue stream, we needed to consider some different options.”

The OHSAA spokesman Tim Stried is not happy with the decision either, expressing his disappointment that they were never even asked for feedback.

“Every Friday night around Ohio during the regular season there are, on average, 350 high school football games. Not only are those games important for the teams and their fans, for the home teams those ticket proceeds are crucial for their athletic department. So if there are outside influences, such a Big Ten game on television, that cause fans to stay home instead of going out to their local high school game, then our member schools are not going to be very happy about it.”

Michigan and Penn State, reportedly weren’t into the Friday Night games and decided not to compete with their town’s Friday Night Lights.

What do you think? Is this a poor decision on OSU’s part?

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