There's no big city like Columbus

I have lived in California for nearly 19 years, and I lived in Virginia almost that long. I went to high school and college in Virginia, and I raised my family in California.

But I was a kid in Ohio, living there from about age 3 until I was 13.

Ohio is a strange place ... in sort of a wonderful way. When I was in junior high school, we studied the 1960 census and saw that Ohio -- that's right, Ohio -- had more cities with at least 100,000 people than any other state in the country.

I know it sounds hard to believe, but there were nine cities in Ohio with at least 100,000 people, and there weren't that many in California. The difference is that there may still be only nine cities that big in Ohio, and there are probably between 50 and 100 out here. I can drive through more than nine cities with 100,000 or more people in less than an hour.

But this post isn't about California, it's about Ohio, a state where more than 95,000 people attended a spring football scrimmage Saturday.

You can have your Cincinnati Reds, your Cleveland Browns, your Cleveland Cavaliers and your Columbus Blue Jackets. There is nothing bigger in the Buckeye State that Ohio State football, and along with it, the biggest college town in America.

That's right, Columbus is the largest city in the state. It's the state capital. In the most recent census numbers, it's got 1.75 million people in the metropolitan area. But first and foremost, it's a big college town.

OSU is a great public university, but a lot of people know it for football, going back to the legendary Woody Hayes. I remember seeing a survey of adults in Columbus about 20 years or so ago, and I was stunned by the results.

-- Roughly 90 percent of all adults, men and women, said they had attended at least one Ohio State football game.

-- More than 50 percent of all adults, men and women, said OSU football was their No. 1 topic of conversation with their friends, year-round.

We're not talking about Bug Tussle, Oklahoma, or East Snowshoe, Montana. Columbus is a major city with a lot happening, but OSU football still rules the roost.

I have a cousin who's getting ready to retire after a career in the Columbus schools as a teacher and a principal. He was thinking of moving to North Carolina, but it probably won't happen. He can't imagine himself without Buckeye football.

Weird place.

Weird and kind of wonderful.