Global Dispatch: How Ohio State’s 2025 Football Schedule Became the World’s Most Watched Proxy War

Ohio State’s 2025 Slate: The World Watches a Midwestern Cult Rehearse for War
By Jacques Debris, Senior Correspondent, Dave’s Locker International Desk

COLUMBUS, OHIO—While the rest of the planet negotiates cease-fires, supply chains, and the slow-motion collapse of the biosphere, the Ohio State Buckeyes have unveiled their 2025 football schedule, a document that, to the uninitiated, looks like a regional skirmish between land-grant universities. To the global intelligence community, however, it’s a masterclass in soft-power projection with a side of deep-fried cheese curds.

Let’s zoom out, shall we? In 2025, Taiwan’s semiconductor fabs will be humming at 2-nanometer tolerances, the EU will be debating whether to sanction clouds for excessive carbon emissions, and somewhere in the Horn of Africa, a warlord will trade crypto for drought-resistant sorghum. Meanwhile, 102,780 Ohioans—many wearing identical scarlet windbreakers—will gather in a stadium the size of Liechtenstein to watch 19-year-olds concuss one another for the glory of a school they’ll still be paying off in 2047.

The schedule itself is a geopolitical haiku:

Aug 30 vs. Akron
Sep 6 vs. Western Kentucky
Sep 13 at Oregon
Sep 20 vs. Iowa State
Sep 27 at Nebraska
Oct 4 vs. Wisconsin
Oct 11 vs. Penn State
Oct 25 at Purdue
Nov 1 vs. Michigan State
Nov 8 at Northwestern
Nov 15 vs. Indiana
Nov 22 at Michigan

Translated from athletic-ese, Ohio State will spend September touring the Pacific Rim (Oregon), reminding Nike’s home state that the Midwest still owns its supply chain of 5-star linebackers. By October, they’ll pivot to the Heartland, a region whose existential dread is only slightly less palpable than its humidity. November, naturally, ends with a pilgrimage to Ann Arbor, a rivalry so vicious that U.N. peacekeepers keep a standby observation post in Toledo, just in case.

For our international readers wondering why this matters beyond ESPN highlights: college football is America’s last reliable export that doesn’t require an export license. Broadcast rights for the Big Ten—now stretching from Piscataway to Pasadena—are beamed into 192 countries, delighting insomniac Australians and confused Croatian insomniacs alike. The 2025 schedule is engineered for maximum Nielsen ingestion; every kickoff is timed to avoid clashing with the Premier League, the Champions League, and the inevitable Chinese soap opera where a billionaire’s mistress fakes her own death to join a K-pop band.

Financially, the Buckeyes are less a team than a sovereign wealth fund wearing cleats. Ticket revenue alone could float the GDP of Fiji, and that’s before you factor in merchandising: last year, OSU sold enough “Script Ohio” neckties in Dubai to outfit every oil minister at COP29. Meanwhile, the players themselves—technically unpaid—generate more NIL (Name, Image, Likeness) income than the annual budget of UNESCO. One five-star recruit recently inked a deal with a Japanese toilet conglomerate; his signature bidet retails for ¥78,000 and plays the fight song when you flush.

Of course, no global analysis is complete without climate anxiety. The 2025 schedule is already hedging against the Anthropocene: Purdue’s Ross-Ade Stadium is slated for a retractable roof to keep the field below 110°F, while Nebraska’s athletic department has trademarked the phrase “Carbon-Neutral Cornhusking” to offset the 400 diesel buses bringing alumni from Omaha. The university’s official position is that tailgating emissions will be neutralized by planting a grove of Buckeye trees in Rwanda, which sounds noble until you learn the saplings are genetically modified to grow scarlet leaves year-round—an aesthetic choice, not a botanical one.

There’s also the small matter of labor. With international student enrollment plummeting (thanks, visa algorithms), Ohio State has begun scouting offensive linemen in the Pacific Islands, promising full scholarships and complimentary thermal parkas. The first Fijian guard, all 6’7″ and 340 tropical pounds of him, arrived in January and immediately asked if the snow was “some kind of white volcanic ash.” He’s since been adopted by a sorority that insists he learn the choreography to “Hang On Sloopy,” the state’s unofficial anthem and a song that sounds suspiciously like a Soviet marching tune played backward.

Satellite imagery confirms that the stadium’s “dotting of the i” during Script Ohio is visible from the International Space Station, prompting a stern letter from Roscosmos accusing the U.S. of “militarizing marching bands.” The State Department responded by sending the Kremlin a commemorative Brutus Buckeye plushie, which now sits on Sergey Lavrov’s desk like a furry, smirking Trojan horse.

In the end, the 2025 schedule isn’t just a list of games; it’s a ledger of late-stage capitalism, climate adaptation, and the human need to ritualize violence without actually calling it war. When the final whistle blows in Ann Arbor, the scoreboard will reset, the drones will fly back to their charging stations, and somewhere in Brussels a bureaucrat will file the whole spectacle under “cultural diplomacy, non-lethal.”

Which, frankly, is more than we can say for the rest of 2025.