We’ll Talk About This Later: Hilary Swank and Air Bud

Each week, we’ll break down something that happened during the Ohio State game (and occasionally other games) that we’ll be talking about for a while—you know, the silly sideline interactions, the awful announcing and the weird storylines that stick with us for years to come. We’ll also compare each of these happenings to memorable moments in pop culture, because who doesn’t love a good Office reference?

Ohio State rolled Saturday over Toledo, scoring 11 touchdowns during what was, for some odd reason, a night game. Of course, it makes sense that the announcers would be looking for some drama to make things more interesting as the onslaught wore on and they began to dream of their beds.

That might explain why, as Ohio State was up 21-7 at the close of the first quarter, the FOX play-by-play announcer self-proclaimed a touchdown catch by Julian Fleming to be incomplete. Even as the crowd erupted for what was Fleming’s first score of the season after missing the first two games due to injury, and even as the referees themselves declared the catch and touchdown, Tim Brando continued to state how he thought the pass was incomplete.

I don’t envy the role of these announcers (calling play-by-play has to be tough), and it’s not as though this particular situation was an anomaly. It’s easy to get tripped up and announcers say the wrong thing regularly. However, it’s always amusing to be watching from the couch and see the disparities between what’s happening on the field and what’s being said by the announcers — especially when Brando continued to dig in on his position over what was in reality just a few seconds.

In some ways, it’s like that episode of The Office when the staff debates if Hilary Swank is hot or not. Everyone is evaluating the same set of information, but coming to very different conclusions. However, at the end of the day, we don’t let the Kevins of the world decide anything for us and accept that Hilary Swank is, in fact, hot, and the catch was, in fact, a touchdown.

Moving further to the west, I’d be remiss if I didn’t highlight the hero we didn’t know we needed Saturday night—er—Sunday morning. After hours and hours of lightning delays in the Iowa Hawkeyes’ 27-0 win over Nevada, security was all but absent by the fourth quarter, which finally wrapped in the wee hours of Sunday morning—meaning some unexpected fans came to Kinnick Stadium.

We’re only three weeks in, but Iowa’s football season has been bizarre in that time alone. From winning games without scoring touchdowns to evacuating the stadium when the Hawkeyes finally found that spark of offense (or maybe that was actual lightning), why wouldn’t Air Bud show up to carry Iowa all the way through the fourth quarter?

The unnamed pup mentioned above wasn’t the only drama in the dog-eat-dog world of college football this weekend. Last week, Old Dominion’s unofficial mascot, a yellow lab pup named Hudson, was denied field access for ODU’s matchup against Virginia, but fortunately, Champ, Virginia’s official service dog, helped us all recognize that we should all be inclusive, even when it comes to our rivals. We should all try to be more like dogs.