42,614 ORDERS OF NACHOS
Nachos are really the quintessential sports food, and yet Ohio State patrons only saw fit to down less than 45,000 orders of this treat.
Quick story: last season, my wife and I scored insanely great seats to the Oregon State game. We ordered nachos, and then it rained. The nachos got wet. I ate those nachos, because I'd be damned if I was going to allow Mother Nature to deny me the rite of passage that is horking down several thousand calories worth of chips, salsa, jalapenos, and extremely processed cheese in less than five minutes at a sporting event while also trying to avoid spilling any on the people around you. I managed the former, failed at the latter, and did not tell the lady in front of me that she now had a huge glob of nacho cheese on her jacket collar.
In hindsight I perhaps should've felt bad about this, but eating those nachos was God's work and I will not apologize for following a divine plan. I also tried to scoop some of it up with a chip, and it sort of worked.
The point here is that had other Buckeye fans shown the dedication that I did, we'd have bought a hell of a lot more than 42,614 orders of nachos.
Which brings us to the eight tons of nacho cheese.
Set aside your initial disgust, work out the math, and you'll find that gives us right around a mere 0.35 ounces of nacho cheese per ticket holder. To put that in perspective, half a slice of Kraft American Cheese is 0.4 ounces, meaning that your average Wisconsinite wakes up every morning putting more cheese in their coffee than your typical Buckeye fan consumed on a weekly basis watching football, a sport created for the expressed purpose of giving people a reason to eat cheese.
This is simply not acceptable. As a lactose-intolerant American, I still managed to do my part while attending contests against Oregon State and Rutgers this past season, inhaling cheese-dipped nachos and pretzels with abandon. I'm bothered that if compared with other Big Ten teams, eight tons of nacho cheese consumption would put us squarely in the middle of the pack, not at the top.
Solutions? Well, nacho cheese needs to be on everything, immediately. All Ohio Stadium concession food, from the Short North Bagel sandwiches to the shaved ice to the Skyward Grille gyros to the strawberry smoothies need to be slathered in a thick glaze of nacho cheese. Nacho cheese will now be added automatically to all orders, only to be removed upon repeated, angry insistence from the patron.
Together, we can make Ohio Stadium the most nacho cheese-friendly stadium on the planet, but it will require us to ignore the naysayers who insist on telling us that eight tons is somehow enough, and to challenge both ourselves and our intestines.
