Ohio State has officially become Center U

You see the arguments among fans and even players about which school is DBU or WRU. Countless time is spent making claims about a favorite team while debunking claims from a not-so-favorite team. But after Ohio State’s Seth McLaughlin was named the school’s fourth winner of the Rimington Award (the most by any school in the award’s 25-year history), there is one thing that any fan will have a hard time disputing: Ohio State is now officially Center U.

To understand why Ohio State is Center U, you have to look beyond just the four Rimington winners of LeCharles Bentley (2001), Pat Elflein (2016), Billy Price (2017), and McLaughlin. It requires looking back at the last nearly 60 years of Ohio State football. You have to go all the way back to the mid-1960s to see where the school’s legacy of great centers begins. Since that time, Ohio State has had ten centers named First-team All-American. TEN.

It began with Ray Pryor in 1966. He was followed a few years later by Tom DeLeone (1971) and Steve Myers (1974), but they would not have another until Jeff Uhlenhake in 1988. Then came Bentley, Nick Mangold (2005), Mike Brewster (2010), Elflein, Price, and now McLaughlin, who was named a Walter Camp All-American on Thursday. In my opinion, they should have 11. Corey Linsley was first-team All-Big Ten in 2013, but how he was not named an All-American is still beyond me.

Since center isn’t exactly a glamour position, you won’t see rival fans on message boards or social media arguing endlessly over which school deserves to be Center U. Those discussions are pointless anyway, because there is only one program that can make a legitimate claim to being college football’s Center U.

That claim belongs to the Ohio State Buckeyes, as it rightfully should.