The End Zone: Ohio State

9/10/2009

If you enjoy a good tsunami bearing down on a coastal village, if you smile and wave as another motorists' car chokes to a stop and then catches on fire along the roadside, or if you think it might be entertaining to force fans of Placido Domingo to listen to Snoop Dogg, then this just might be the game for you.

Ohio State vs. USC — It's the Schadenfreude Bowl.

That's not the newest dish at Fritz & Alfredo's on Summit Street. The Germans came up with the word to describe how one person takes pleasure in another person's pain. Schadenfreude. It is joy hatched from another's misery.

Given the Buckeyes' recent struggles against the nation's other elite programs, the legions of Schadenfreudians out there who double as chronic Ohio State haters are a fat and happy bunch. And they are slobbering for more, jabbing their Terrelle Pryor voodoo dolls with needles that look like grandma's hat pins, anticipating another highly public shelling of the Buckeyes.

Based on Ohio State's thin win over Navy the Schadenfreudians have gathered, hoping to reprise the sinking of college football's Lusitania. Ohio State's best chance of derailing this perverse tragedy rests in another German word — wunderkind. That's the miracle child Pryor, who can send the Schadenfreudians limping off, looking for a celebrity divorce to applaud.