TFW Your Team Is Underwritten by Creeps

Photo of the south stands at Ohio Stadium, featuring Les Wexner's name on the banner to the left and Anduril's name and logo on the jumbotron.

I'm a Buckeye. I'll always be a Buckeye. My parents went to Ohio State. I went to Ohio State. Some of my earliest sports memories are of sitting by the kerosene heater in the family room watching Ohio State football with Mike Tomczak at quarterback and Earle Bruce pacing the sideline in a fedora. I can no more avoid being a Buckeye than I can avoid being bald with hazel eyes. Which is to say: I am bona fide.

And so it pains me to say, although I must, because someone has to: Ohio State's association with Les Wexner and Anduril is gross. It's not like you can't see it. It's unavoidable when looking toward the student section in the south stands. Every time there is a field goal or an extra point down there, there's Wexner on the banner with the other high rollers, and there's Anduril on the jumbotron.

All game long, it's being reminded of this guy, Leslie Wexner, longtime pal with noted sex trafficker and child abuser Jeffrey Epstein:

And this guy, Anduril founder Palmer Luckey:

There's plenty of unseemliness in college football to go around these days, and if the sport has ever been a model of propriety, I don't think it's been during my lifetime. I'm certainly not saying Ohio State stands alone in the sleaze. But, hoo boy, the egregiousness is super-sized with these two.

Wexner's timeline with Epstein is, to be intergalactically generous, not great, not great at all, in fact. My hot Wexner take is that there will be endless disgusting revelations about him after he's gone, and that there will need to be a truth and reconciliation-type commission under which all of the people and institutions who drank from the Wexner money hose – Ohio State very much included – will need to come clean if they want to clear their names. If there's any justice in this fallen world of ours, his name will eventually be ripped from every building it grossly adorns.

And then there's Luckey: weirdo tech bro, brother-in-law of Matt Gaetz, antigovernment zealot getting fat off of government contracts. Anduril is supposedly building a 5-million-square-foot drone manufacturing facility near Columbus. We'll see about that. Let's just say that, given Luckey's full-throated defense of, and intimate proximity to, the nihilistic decadence (or is it decadent nihilism?) of Trump II, I will not be at all surprised if Luckey and Anduril self-immolate in a supernova of hubris and corruption, and Ohio State quietly removes the Anduril name under cover of darkness.

Anduril's sponsorship deal with Ohio State comes at a time when the school isn't exactly covering itself in glory in its accommodation of the Trump administration's authoritarian meddling in higher education. The school is acting like this is the end of history, that this current version of America is the last one there will ever be.

I think that's a miscalculation. I think there is an American future that isn't defined by lawlessness, boundless corruption, historical amnesia and man babies building monuments to their fragile egos. I think a lot of folks are going to regret how they conducted themselves during Trump II. I think there are some sponsorship and naming-rights deals that aren't worth the cost, that some checks shouldn't be cashed because they can't be cashed without sacrificing your integrity.

Silly me, I know, looking for integrity in big-time college athletics. Silly me, wondering if Ohio State being 10-0 again and chasing another national championship is worth forever associating the school with such obvious scoundrels. Silly me, wanting something more from my alma mater.

I'll keep watching and rooting because I'm a Buckeye, because it hasn't always been this way, and I believe it can be something better. But I won't begrudge anyone who feels otherwise.