A mega campus & Big 10 Football at Ohio State University

I’ve already written about my visit this past summer to Ohio’s capital of Columbus. In previous posts I’ve written about German Village, the Scioto Rover walk and the Short North District.

Not far beyond Short North lies the sprawling campus of Ohio State University, so we had to stop off to see it, even though college was not yet in session.

It was my first visit to this campus that plays host to a whopping 61,300 students.

It is the third largest university campus in the US – following the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida and Texas A&M in College Station, Texas.

I thought I had gone to a pretty big college, with 12,000 undergrads and 20,000 overall, but clearly that was a small village compared to this megalopolis of a school. It probably would have been fun seeing it when classes were in session, but that will be for another time.

My son and I just walked around some of the quads and took a look at some of the (impressive) sports facilities.

The university was founded in 1870, and is well-known for its standing in the Big Ten sports conference – especially for its football team, The Buckeyes – champions of eight national championships along with 41 conference championships, including an impressive 39 Big Ten titles.

The football stadium was locked up when we were there, but we still stopped by to take a look at the biggest rivals of University of Michigan – up the road another three hours.

Since my other son is a track athlete, Ohio State is also famous as the school where four-time 1936 Olympics gold medallist Jesse Owens – the “Buckeye Bullet” – competed before antagonizing Hitler in Berlin.

Interesting to visit this mega campus, which must be even more fun to see when classes are in session.