1. Ohio State lost to Clemson in the Fiesta Bowl semifinal of the College Football Playoff last year. It was a rout and a shutout, 31-0, in Clemson’s favor.
2. Ohio State had a starting offensive lineman named Michael Jordan. He is not the guy from the Crying Jordan meme (or many NBA championships and awards).
3. If you have an iPhone and ask personal assistant Siri when Michael Jordan retired, you might get this message, like the one I got when I tried Wednesday morning:
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Michael Jordan, the football player, is still on Ohio State’s roster. He will be a sophomore in the upcoming season and did not retire. So this is either some code or an algorithm gone rogue, or an Apple programmer was having some fun on the job one day and decided to give Siri some new, anti-Ohio State intelligence. Probably the former.
It’s not hard to imagine a Michigan fan at Apple HQ doing this, but it’s even easier to imagine a computer asking, “When did current sports player Michael Jordan last play a game?” and noticing the Ohio State-Clemson result. If you want, you could choose to view this as basketball’s Michael Jordan, who’s got a brand deal with Michigan, playing tricks on UM’s blood rival. Pending further information, you may choose your own truth.
This phenomenon started to make its rounds somewhere on the internet on Tuesday. (Maybe this guy was Patient Zero? It’s hard to tell.) It appears this Ohio State trolling comes in different text forms. For instance, I got “Ohio St. was trounced by Clemson,” but another person got “Ohio St. was subjugated by Clemson.”