In the moments following the Michigan football team’s upset of No. 2 Ohio State, an unruly scene broke out on the Ohio Stadium turf. As a gaggle of Wolverines gathered around the ‘O’ logo at midfield to plant a Michigan flag, the Buckeyes were fed up.
With tensions boiling over after the rivalry game, Ohio State players rushed in, trying to prevent the Wolverines from staking their claim to the turf. The flag fell before Michigan senior running back Tavierre Dunlap grabbed it to try planting it again, at which point Buckeyes defensive end Jack Sawyer stepped in. Sawyer ripped the flag off the pole, leading to an extended brawl featuring large portions of both rosters.
The tradition of planting a flag on the opponents’ midfield logo has become a common trend in college football, albeit not a savory one. But with Ohio State’s frustrations high after the loss — its fourth straight to the Wolverines — it devolved into a full-on fight.
“For such a great game, you hate to see stuff like that after the game,” Mullings told FOX’s Jenny Taft on the field moments after the fight. “It’s just bad for the sport, bad for college football. But at the end of the day, some people, they gotta just learn how to lose. You can’t be fighting and stuff just because you lost a game. All that fighting, we had 60 minutes, four quarters to do all that fighting.”
For 60 minutes, that fight was contained within the whistles. But once it got outside of that, it had poor consequences for not only the teams involved in the fight, but all those on the field.
In an attempt to clear the commotion, members of multiple law enforcement agencies began spraying pepper spray. According to a statement posted on X by Ohio State University police, it was sprayed by agencies representing both Michigan and Ohio. Both Michigan and the Buckeyes had players who got sprayed, as did many members of the press and photographers who were surrounding the brawl.
Wolverines senior edge rusher Josaiah Stewart was among the players who got pepper sprayed, saying that his eyes started getting red while he tried to break up the fight. Mullings didn’t get pepper sprayed himself, but he said in his postgame presser that seeing it happen to his teammates “definitely got (him) going.”
The two teams’ coaches took a different approach when discussing the fight, too. Ohio State coach Ryan Day stood by his players’ decision to try to prevent the flag from getting planted.
“I don’t know all the details, but I know these guys were looking to put a flag on our field and we’re not going to let that happen,” Day said.
Michigan coach Sherrone Moore, meanwhile, showed more disdain for the brawl:
“It was emotions on both sides, and our guys, I didn’t see they had the flag,” Moore said. “Guys were waving it around, and their guys charged us, so it was motion on both sides. It can’t happen. Rivalry games get heated, especially this one. It’s the biggest one in the country, so we gotta handle that better.”
Moore was certainly in a better mood than Day, and had fewer frustrations to cloud his judgement. That chipper mood showed throughout his presser, including when he responded to a question about whether there’s a need to “lose gracefully” by simply acknowledging that he didn’t lose.
But at the end of the day, a fight broke out and multiple innocent bystanders were pepper sprayed in an attempt to contain it. Regardless of boiling rivalry tensions or actions from the Wolverines and Buckeyes that can be argued as distasteful, that wasn’t a palatable end to The Game for anyone, and extended a fight meant to be settled on the football field outside of it.
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