Welcome to the Skull Session.
For the Brotherhood. For Ohio State. For the state of Ohio.
FOR OHIO pic.twitter.com/GYyLbn49Io
— Eleven Warriors (@11W) September 11, 2025
Have a good Friday.
“LEGENDS NEVER DIE.” It’s true. Brutus. Rufus. All of it.
This week, NBC4’s Jerod Smalley traveled to Pomeroy, Ohio, to interview Brandon Hanning, the man who plotted for over a year to take down Brutus before Ohio State and Ohio faced off in 2010.
“I had just seen the Oregon Duck videos where he was bullying other mascots,” Hanning said. “And I thought it would be awesome… for our mascot to beat up their mascot.”
Hanning and one other student tried out to become Rufus. He won the job. While being Rufus “got annoying quickly,” Hanning said one thing motivated him when times were tough.
“The whole goal of being able to fight Brutus in a year was still in my head, so I just decided to put up with it for the entire time so that I could beat up Brutus,” he told Smalley. “I wanted to do something crazy.”
For reasons he did not disclose, Hanning dropped out of Ohio University before fall 2010, seemingly ending his plot to tackle Brutus. However, weeks before the matchup between the Buckeyes and Bobcats, Hanning received a call from Ohio’s athletic staff.
“They called me up, asked if I wanted to be the mascot, and I was like, ‘Yeah, of course. I’ll do it.’ I went and did one more game, because I knew the Ohio State game was coming next. And so I just told them that, ‘Yeah, I’d go be the mascot’ and did not tell them anything about the fact that I wasn’t enrolled.”
The hours leading up to the game, Hanning didn’t have “a formal plan of attack,” as Smalley described it. But when Ohio State took the field with Brutus leading the charge, Hanning sprinted into action.
“This is the perfect time to do this,” Hanning said.
Hanning delivered a blow to Brutus — really Sean Stazen — but suffered some consequences, as his mascot head fell onto the turf. As Hanning scrambled to put the mascot head back in place, Stazen continued his pregame routine, running into the end zone. Little did he know Hanning had continued his pursuit.
“I just jumped on top of him and started swinging,” Hanning told Smalley, reminding me of Danny DeVito’s/Frank Reynolds’ “So anyway, I started blasting” line from Always Sunny.
Footage of the moment shows Hanning completing a WWE takedown before delivering a few roundhouse punches. Thanks to the padding in the Brutus costume head, the punches did no damage, Stazen told Smalley.
“We both stand up, dust ourselves off, and that was it,” Stazen said.
In the following weeks, everyone from enterprise reporters to lawyers reached out to Hanning and Stazen about the viral moment. Both of them denied the requests.
To this day, Hanning said he doesn’t regret his actions, while Stazen said he has no hard feelings.
“It’s still just a hilarious story when it happened, and here we were 15 years later still talking about it,” Stazen said.
That’s what Hanning wanted all along — a moment to live in infamy.
“Legends never die,” he said. “Mission accomplished.”
“I KNEW I HAD MADE IT.” In the Sept. 8 release of The Ohio State Alumni Magazine, 1997 and 1999 Ohio State graduate Chris Garner wrote an article titled, The Buckeye who became a college football referee.
The article, written in the first person, is one of the best I’ve read in some time — in fact, it’s so good that it makes me want to root for an SEC official!
When I attended Ohio State in the 1990s, it was a memorable era for the football team. Eddie George, Orlando Pace, Andy Katzenmoyer and other Buckeye greats dominated at Ohio Stadium, and their success made me want to join them on the field somehow, someday. With one caveat: Instead of wearing scarlet and gray, I wanted to wear black and white.
Garner wrote that his dream to become a college football official began after he started coaching, which awakened his passion for the sport. While at Ohio State, Garner helped coach high school football in Utica, Ohio, which allowed him to “teach young men football skills and watch them become better each day.” When he graduated from college, Garner wanted to remain close to the game without having to leave work at 2:30 p.m. for daily practices.
This dream would require plenty of hard work and patience to achieve. But I drew inspiration from my grandfather, Charles Oriti, who was born in 1921, right before the Great Depression hit in 1929. He enlisted in the military during World War II, where he served as a pilot. After the war, he went to Ohio State and earned his diploma, which he displayed prominently in his home office. Every time I went to my grandparents’ house, I looked at that diploma, just to make sure it was still there. Even as a young child, I understood the significance of that piece of paper. It was evidence of the determined, hardworking spirit that he embodied. Today, we call it grit.
It also made one thing extremely clear to me: I wanted one of those diplomas for myself. Up to that point, no one else in our family had earned a college degree. Because of him, I was determined to be the second. He passed on his grit to me.
…
In 1999, I graduated from the Fisher College of Business and accepted a job in sales for a large corporate insurance firm in Columbus. To keep my football dreams alive, I took an officiating class in Newark, Ohio, which led to four years of officiating at the high school level. From there, I moved up the ranks: breaking into college football with the Division III Ohio Athletic Conference in 2003, making the leap to Division I with the Mid-American Conference in 2009, then finally fulfilling my Big Ten dream in 2014.
Garner wrote that a job promotion forced him to move from Columbus to Jackson, Mississippi. The Big Ten’s officials coordinator, Bill Carollo, wasn’t comfortable with him “being so far outside the conference’s traditional footprint,” Garner wrote, but Carollo recommended to then-SEC officials coordinator Steve Shaw that he hire Garner.
Support like Carollo’s has been the backbone of Garner’s career as an official. In the article, he also thanked Ohio State, his grandfather and his mother for their “unwavering belief” in him. “Without them, I would never have put on my black and white to officiate a game in Ohio Stadium,” he wrote.
As an Ohio State alum, I’m not allowed to work any of my alma mater’s games to avoid any questions of bias. However, I did get the chance to officiate the April 2003 spring game after the Buckeyes won the national championship over Miami.
As I walked down the ramp from the locker room to the field, I soaked it all in: the marching band playing “Buckeye Battle Cry,” the near-capacity crowd settling in their seats. Waves of scarlet and gray uniforms swirled around me as I worked on the sideline. In the middle of this coming home, I knew I had made it.
10/10 article.
No notes.
HITTING A HIGH NOTE. You may have seen videos on Saturday of Kent Broussard, the 66-year-old sousaphone player in the LSU marching band. This week, several news outlets shared his story, which I find inspirational.
Brousard played the sousaphone in high school and at Southeastern Louisiana University until he graduated, but that was back in 1980. As Broussard neared retirement in 2023 — his final position was the secretary and treasurer at Sazerac Company, which makes a delicious rye whiskey — Broussard pondered over what he wanted to do next.
“As you get older, you contemplate where your life is going to head in retirement,” Broussard told The AP’s Sara Cline this week. “I think back now how fast life has gone by… and thinking about something that I always wanted to do, but just didn’t get a chance to do it.”
LSU band member Kent Broussard shows it's never too late to make your dreams come true pic.twitter.com/nEcenBaAZb
— ESPN College Football (@ESPNCFB) September 7, 2025
Broussard decided he wanted to try out for the LSU marching band, “a cornerstone of the school’s history and culture that Broussard had long revered.” So Broussard began training, running with a weighted vest and marching through his neighborhood while hauling a 30-pound sousaphone.
His work paid off.
Broussard is now the marching band’s oldest member ever.
Last weekend, Broussard marched down Victory Hill when LSU’s coaches, players, band and cheerleaders passed droves of fans to Tiger Stadium.
“Walking down the hill — it was something I’ve always seen and it was a great feeling to be a part of it,” Broussard said.
When LSU showed Broussard on the Jumbotron on Saturday, Tigers fans roared with excitement. All Broussard could do was smile.
“People retire,” he said. “Dreams don’t.”
THE CALEB DOWNS BOWL. Last month, Chipotle announced a partnership with Ohio State, Florida and Georgia, with Caleb Downs as one of the featured players set to promote the fast-casual chain.
This week, Chipotle released the Caleb Downs Bowl, which includes white rice, half carne asada, half chicken, black beans, fajita veggies, queso blanco and lettuce. The bowl is available as a digital menu item on the Chipotle app and chipotle.com.
Image via Chipotle
A unanimous All-American in 2024, Downs returned to Ohio State this season as the favorite to win the Jim Thorpe Award and a frontrunner to win the Bednarik Award. In the Buckeyes’ wins over Texas and Grambling State, Downs collected a combined seven tackles, one tackle for loss and one interception in 98 snaps.
During his Wednesday press conference, Ryan Day shared what stood out to him about Downs’ interception, which came in the second quarter against the Tigers, and how Downs’ leadership has impacted Buckeyes like Sonny Styles, Jaylen McClain, Davison Igbinosun, Jermaine Mathews Jr. and Lorenzo Styles Jr.
“After the play, we talked. He verbalized everything that went on in that play. He was anticipating everything about it. That’s who he is,” Day said. “His approach rubs off on others. Sonny is that way, and you see Jaylen McClain, and you see Davison and you see Jermaine. You see all these guys, Lorenzo, coming in early to get extra film work and put the work in with Tim (Walton) and Matt (Guerrieri).
“That’s what winning football is. If we can continue to build that as our routine, and that can be who we are, it’ll give us a chance to reach our goals. But like I said before, it’s great when your best players are your hardest workers — and they’re the most professional, (which is) probably the best way to put it when it comes to Caleb.”
DAILY DUBCAST. The final Eleven Dubcast of the week welcomes back Dan Hope to preview Saturday's Ohio State game against the Ohio Bobcats and ponder if the Buckeyes will get an opponent that shows up looking closer to the talent of Texas or Grambling State.
SONG OF THE DAY. “Boom Boom” - John Lee Hooker.
CUT TO THE CHASE. How to use 8 arms? Octopuses tend to explore with their front limbs… The question all colleges should ask themselves about AI… Josh Allen’s unique Bills hats to benefit Buffalo children’s hospital this season… Is Ghosting inevitable?
