OSU notebook: Gee talks rivalry, playoffs and more

COLUMBUS - Theodore Roosevelt's daughter Alice once described how much her father, Theodore Roosevelt, loved the spotlight this way:

The 26th President of the United State, according to his eldest child, was someone who wanted to be the bride at every wedding, the baby at every christening and the corpse at every funeral.

While Ohio State University president E. Gordon Gee isn't in any hurry to join the third part of that trio, he doesn't have a problem embracing the first two categories.

That much became evident again when Gee addressed the Ohio State-Michigan football rivalry for 20 minutes before coach Jim Tressel's weekly press conference on Monday.

Like most Gee public appearances, it was filled with enough one-liners that if you stacked them end-to-end, they would stretch from Columbus to the outskirts of Bellefontaine.

He called Ohio State-Michigan the greatest rivalry in college sports and noted it was bigger than "the Hatfields and McCoys and Jolie-Aniston."

"I'll tell you the difference between this rivalry and anything I'd ever experienced before. The difference is between an aircraft carrier and a speedboat," he said.

Gee removed his trademark bow tie, which was blue and gold, as part of a charity group's fundraiser in which Ohio State fans could donate clothes in their arch-rival's colors and told  his listeners, "Consider yourself lucky that my trademark is a bow tie and not knickers."

Once he turned serious, he was just as enthusiastic, whether the subject was a college football playoff, the cult of hero worship around college athletes, or the fact that, even as the highest-paid college president in the country, he still makes less than half as much as his football coach.

Even though newly elected president Barack Obama, who has a big fan in Gee, has said he favors a college football playoff, the OSU president remains opposed to that idea.

"Have you ever thought about moving 50,000 to 80,000 Ohio State fans around the country on any given Saturday, when there's no certitude to it?  It would be absolutely crazy. It would be so chaotic that we would not be able to manage it," he said.

He joked that Tressel had a better year last year than he did, when the subject of their salaries was raised, but said, "The arms race has gotten out of control."

Gee said he followed the recruitment of freshman phenom Terrelle Pryor closely, if somewhat uncomfortably. "It gave me heartburn," he said about the extended pursuit of the nation's No. 1-ranked recruit before he chose Ohio State.

It also gave him a reminder of how much attention college athletics draw at places like Ohio State.

"What we have here is the development of a hero complex in America," Gee said. "Our (athletic) budget is about $130 million out of a $4.5 billion budget. So it's a miniscule part of our budget. But, yet, there's not a physics section in the newspaper, there's not a chemistry section. There's a sports section.

"No doubt about it, football dominates. But there are a lot of institutions where it dominates and they're selling an empty vessel behind it. We have a very heavy-duty vessel with a lot of steam and our football team is part of it," he said.