Shit Talk: Tradition as Big as The Game Itself

In light of Chris Perry’s vitriolic blather, and amid a whole symphony of chin music from other Michigan football alumni, including the sartorially-refined Dhani Jones, I feel compelled to comment on this underappreciated art. (It's the compulsion afterall, or the inability to deny it, that keeps the shit storm going.)

While shit talk isn’t the engine that fuels the hate in a rivalry, per se, it is, like a mushroom cloud, the visible and destructive manifestation of the white-hot hate that exists in rivalries as a phenomenon and this rivalry in particular.

What’s noteworthy about this year isn’t just that there is shit talk, so much as its elevated level of voracity. As a rule, facts and reasoned logic are not present in good shit talk; which makes this year exemplary of excellent shit talk. And this is justified by the on-field quality of both teams. So it is another, more startling trend that sets 2006 apart: in bucking the traditional flow of this 102 year old rivalry, most of the smack is coming from Michigan, whose classy fans are better known for sipping chardonnay and whispering than chugging beer and belching.

The Michigan gravitas (what some might call 'swagger') being pumped through the system of tubes we call the Internet is something we really haven’t seen before in this rivalry. Traditionally, ignition of the rhetorical inferno was left to the flamboyant Buckeye, whether that was Woody Hayes, David Boston or Maurice “Thug Life” Clarett. (Ken Yon Rambo had a good name for the task but never uttered a peep, while Andy Katzenmoyer was literally too dumb to talk.)

Some of these firebrands’ opening salvos are now classics. And as Switter's said yesterday, you can trace it back to the coaches. It wasn’t so much what Woody said, as what Woody wouldn’t say. By refusing to refer to the state or school of Michigan by name, he coined the classic trash talk term ‘that school up North,' and the seeds of hatred were sewn.

So far Michigan’s offensive language has not lived up to the standard established by the Ohio State cannon, but maybe we're seeing that scale start to tip thanks to the Chris Perrys of the world. And as they say, the shit rolls downhill, so maybe it’s about time.