Dominik Stecuła is an assistant professor of communication and political science at The Ohio State University.

The Ohio State home opener against Ball State wasn’t much of a contest. More than 101,120 people still showed up to the game, making The Shoe the population of Ohio’s seventh-largest city.

Many thousands more watched at tailgates, bars, and in homes with friends and family.

Among all those people, quite a few would have a hard time agreeing on much of anything politically, but the Buckeye identity was bringing us all together for a shared ritual.

Public universities have become a subject of considerable partisan conflict, and Ohio is hardly an exception.

Does football make people less polarized?

In August 2025, I helped field a representative survey of 300 Ohio adults covering many issues, including university governance.

Support for eliminating diversity, equity and inclusion offices stood at 11% among Democrats, yet was popular with a strong majority of Republicans (65%). But the partisan divide was almost entirely absent when we asked respondents how they felt about Ohio State.

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About 70% of both groups had a favorable view of the university. Broad majorities of both also said that they felt proud when Ohio State did well. A large partisan disagreement about university policy, in other words, did not translate into a comparable gap in feelings toward OSU.

Of course, a favorable opinion of Ohio State is not a measure of football or broader college sports fandom.

OSU is an economic engine of the state, contributing $19 billion annually to its economy.

It does so through teaching, research, health care and public service work across all 88 counties of our state, and someone can value that work without ever watching a game.

These survey results also cannot tell us whether football makes people less polarized.

What they do suggest, however, is that even a university caught up in partisan conflict can remain a point of attachment for people on both sides of that conflict. Football is one very visible way in which Ohioans express that attachment.

Talking about Saturday's game

This is relevant to a problem I study: Americans increasingly dislike, distrust and sometimes even hate people from the other political party.

Social scientists call this affective polarization. Disagreement about policy is part of democratic politics, but assuming the worst about people because of their party makes it difficult to do much of anything together. We know someone is a Republican or a Democrat and think that tells us a great deal about who they are as a person.

In my research, I have tried to find ways to alleviate this problem.

With my co-author, Matthew Levendusky, we brought people together and had them discuss politics in person. We found that brief, civil conversations reduced partisan animosity.

It worked because our participants came away with a better understanding of the other side and recognized that “the other side” is not all that different from themselves at all. They found more common ground and felt that their own views had been heard and respected. They continued to disagree about politics, but the conversations helped them feel differently about the people with whom they disagreed.

The difficulty, however, is getting people to have those conversations in the first place.

Volunteering to discuss politics with a stranger is not everybody’s idea of a good time. But I increasingly think that sports is our opportunity to bring people together and explore shared bonds and experiences.

Talking with your co-worker about politics might sound like torture, but talking about Saturday’s game is a different proposition.

So is a neighbor inviting you over to watch the next one. These are ordinary reasons to spend time with people, and they give you a chance to learn something about them before a political disagreement comes up. That seems particularly useful when the alternative is avoiding someone whose politics you already know you dislike.

There is some evidence that sports fans are receptive to this kind of contact.

A 2025 national survey by More in Common found that 68% of the most passionate fans were interested in talking across political lines, compared with 46% of nonfans.

When asked about working toward a community goal with people who held different political views, the figures were 82% and 65%, respectively. We cannot tell from this survey whether sports made fans more open to others, or whether people who were already more open were more likely to become fans. But the interest was there.

A legendary Liverpool soccer manager once said: “Some people believe football is a matter of life and death, I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

I’m not saying Buckeye football is life or death. But in a world where Ohioans disagree about many things, including about what happens at a university, and where distrust in higher education continues to climb, over 100,000 of them from across the political aisle turned up to support the Buckeyes.

I’m not saying this will eliminate polarization and make us all agree on things, but we can use this to learn to disagree better and just learn more about our fellow fans.

So next time you’re at the game, tailgate or the bar, talk to the person next to you. There is a decent chance they voted differently than you did, but they’re wearing the same colors you are.

Dominik Stecuła is an assistant professor of communication and political science at The Ohio State University, where he studies topics like political polarization and misinformation.

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This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio State football fans hold key to curing political divide | Opinion