If you don’t live in Michigan or Ohio, you may not completely appreciate the significance of Abdul El-Sayed’s most recent college football gaffe. Chances are, though, even if you are just a casual college football fan you do. You don’t have to live in Michigan or Ohio to know that the football rivalry between the University of Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State Buckeyes is one of the most storied in all of sports.
If you’re lucky, you may live in a part of America where football fans and non-football fans alike get so caught up in a college football team (I’m looking at you, Chris Queen and Sarah Anderson) that it becomes more than football, more than sports – it’s the culture. And that’s a good thing.
These college football programs and their rivalries add so much flavor to the quality of life throughout America in places like Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Alabama, Texas, and my own home state of Western Pennsylvania. Yes, I did that on purpose. Hail to Pitt. Beat Penn State.
Outside of Pitt, the Michigan Wolverines were my favorite college team back when Bo Schembechler helmed the program. I just liked everything about that program, and I loved it when they beat Ohio State. I still love Big 10 football and usually find myself looking for an Iowa Hawkeyes game if Pitt’s not playing.
One of the attractions of a rivalry in any sport is that it brings out raw emotions to their fullest. The game matters so much to both sides that you are sure to see coaches doing everything humanly possible to win. You’ll see players doing everything they can to win, even if it means playing with broken bones and serious injuries. You’ll see fans on the edge of their seats before the game even starts, along with the heated trash talk well before kickoff. That continues, of course, long after the final whistle, and it takes on a new dimension depending on who won the game.
There is something that’s just so American about all of it. Everything rides on an outcome. It’s win or lose. It’s about hard work, merit, luck, and the collective energy of a fan base to try to will their team to victory from their own seats. It’s just a beautiful thing.
If you’re fortunate enough to live in Michigan or Ohio when these two programs meet on the gridiron, you know exactly what I mean. That is unless you’re Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed, the Democrat candidate for Senate in Michigan.
In an interview on MS NOW, a network that likely has no one on staff or in its audience who’s even heard of the Michigan-Ohio State football rivalry, El-Sayed decided to virtue signal about college football.
“I’ll tell you what I’m excited about. It’s about the football season. And you mentioned Ohio for some reason in this interview. I can’t wait to beat Ohio. And let’s just remember, JD Vance, Ohio JD Vance, Peter Thiel JD Vance, is coming to Michigan next week.”
"It's about to be football season...I can't wait to beat Ohio."
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 28, 2026
- Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayedpic.twitter.com/L5aptnKMPy
On the surface, some may not fully appreciate what a gaffe this is. Even if you hate Ohio State, which the majority of Michigan voters do, you have to know the difference between Ohio State and Ohio University, which also maintains a respectable Division I football program. That school’s Bobcat football program is well known throughout college football, though hardly to the extent Ohio State’s program is.
The point is, in no way would any real football fan use “Ohio” alone to describe the Ohio State football team. El-Sayed’s gaffe achieved just the opposite of what he was hoping to achieve in that cable news interview.
He wanted people to think he’s a man’s man who once played nose tackle on his high school football team (I’m starting to wonder now just what kind of player he was), and that he’s all about manliness and weightlifting today. But as I recently noted, in the realm of manliness, he tends to come off more of a Taylor Swift fan than a Michigan Wolverines fan.
At what point did our politics turn into this? pic.twitter.com/COn8FlRgEW
— Jay’V (@JayVTheGreat) August 9, 2026
With the left, nothing is ever real. They lie and try to deceive, even when there’s not much to gain by it. It’s just in their DNA. They obey the impulse to be dishonest at every turn. El-Sayed is demonstrating that he fits right in with the Democrat party and the left.
He’s part of a movement that doesn’t even know what a woman is, that considers masculinity toxic, that wants to let men play in women’s sports on a basis of women’s rights, that at the end of the day it hates everything about American football.
In my time as a Michigan fan as a kid, I learned the words to the Michigan fight song, Onward Michigan, which goes like this:
Hail! Hail! to Michigan,
The champions of the West!
Onward, Michigan!
Hail to the Victors Valient!
I doubt El-Sayed could recite the first line, even though he’s grown up in Michigan. It’s at the point where if he decides to go to that Michigan-Ohio State football game this season, which is on Thanksgiving weekend after the election, someone may need to tell him that he’s rooting for the team in those distinctive blue and maize uniforms, and not the team in the red and silver.
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