“I’d rather shower at Penn State than cheer for the Wolverines.”
Please read again.
“I’d rather shower at Penn State than cheer for the Wolverines.”
Take as much time as you need to digest that until it settles rather uneasy in your stomach before I continue.
These are the words appearing on an Ohio State-themed T-shirt in a picture that has gone viral over the past two days.
By now there should be an uncomfortable slosh of a thing called disgust circulating in your stomach.
As expected, this shirt is not officially licensed OSU gear (if it were, someone would be out of a job) and has fortunately not been seen for sale anywhere. Its origin is unknown.
OSU students, student-athletes, alumni and others have been tweeting against wearing the tasteless shirt.
But someone still thought this shirt would be funny, and people would want to wear it.
I get it, some of the funniest jokes and stories I’ve read are funny and clever because they are inappropriate and unexpected. I’ve seen several kids walking around campus wearing shirts that read, “Cool story babe. Now go make me a sandwich.” I would never wear a shirt like that because I don’t actually believe that. Plus it takes more toolishness than I possess to actually wear it, but c’mon, you can admit it is a little bit funny (commence the hate emails).
Jokes about sexual abuse however are almost always going to start crossing the line.
A shirt joking about a nationally known case of a grown man using his power to sexually abuse multiple children? Yeah, that probably just crossed about 100 different lines.
It’s no wonder that since this image has blown up, no one has stepped up to claim responsibility for it. The classless individual probably realized his defense of why he did it wouldn’t quite suffice (I mean come on bro, it’s just a shirt, but you get the joke right? Right?!).
And not to be outdone there are very similar shirts from Iowa and LSU also out there. So if you want to take solace in the fact that there are at least two other idiot college football fans out there, then go for it.
The lesson to be learned from this viral shirt? There are always going to be some fans out there that will go way too far and give a fan base a bad name. This shirt does not represent the OSU community, but unfortunately much of America’s sports fans that see this shirt will link the two.
Now every Buckeye fan across the country has to prove they’d rather not shower at Penn State than cheer for the Wolverines … that they’re better than the act of a single person.
Kind of sucks, huh?
Maybe now you understand just a tiny sliver of what the Penn State community has gone through. You think they want to keep being the center of every bad joke?