There was a time during my childhood in Indiana when I had no idea that there was such a thing as Indiana State. I suspected there might be, because I knew there was a Michigan State and a North Carolina State and an Oklahoma State. But I didn’t learn about Indiana State University until I learned Larry Bird’s back story.

Indiana State is a member of the Missouri Valley Conference, which is also home to Illinois State and Missouri State. While all three of these “States” are fine schools, when it comes to athletics and research, they are a step below Indiana University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Missouri.

This sort of thing isn’t unusual. In many states, the school named for the state is the flagship institution in the state university system, while [name of state] State and [name of state] Tech are a tier below. Perhaps they have fewer graduate programs or a smaller undergraduate enrollment or don’t field a Division I-FBS football team.

There are plenty of states where this isn’t the case. Schools such as Michigan State, Iowa State, and Georgia Tech hold their own—athletically and academically—against Michigan, Iowa, and Georgia. (If Iowa State doesn’t win the Cy-Hawk Trophy this weekend, I might remove them from this list.)

Both of these scenarios are common. (Arkansas is a bigger deal than Arkansas State, but Kansas and Kansas State are more or less on the same level, and so on.) Far less common are situations in which [name of state] State University is a bigger deal than [name of state] University or the University of [name of state].

There are three “State” schools that are their states’ lone flagship public universities:

Penn State is Pennsylvania’s leading public research university and athletic superpower in part because the University of Pennsylvania is not a state university. Benjamin Franklin founded Penn in 1740, back when Pennsylvania was still a colony. (One could make the case for Pittsburgh, a highly rated research university with a big-time athletic department, as a second flagship institution.)

Louisiana State University is Louisiana’s flagship state university, but there is no University of Louisiana per se. There is a University of Louisiana system (Grambling, Louisiana-Lafayette, Louisiana-Monroe, Louisiana Tech, McNeese State, University of New Orleans, Nicholls State, Northwestern State, and Southeastern Louisiana), but there is no main campus.

Ohio State is different because there is an Ohio University. And Ohio U. is a state school that has been around since 1804, making it 66 years older than Ohio State.

So why do Ohioans spend their Saturdays in the fall dressed in scarlet and gray?

Why don’t they dress in hunter green and white and cheer for the Bobcats?

The Birth of the Ohio State University

Ohio State—like Michigan State, Penn State, Purdue, Illinois, Iowa State, and many others—is a product of the Morrill Land-Grant Colleges Act of 1862. The Morrill Act gave each state 30,000 acres of federal land for the purpose of establishing colleges that would “teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts” “without excluding other scientific and classical studies.” At the time, there were already two state universities in Ohio: Ohio University and Miami University, which we know today as Miami (OH!).

Ohio legislators disagreed on the character of the state’s new land-grant school. Some wanted the new college to focus exclusively on agriculture and technology. Others wanted to found a comprehensive university that would include classical studies and liberal arts. Initially, those who favored the narrow approach prevailed, and Ohio State began its life as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College. But the school’s board of directors had different ideas, hiring a professor of English and literature and a professor of Greek and Latin. In 1878 the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical College became the Ohio State University.

The new university had a powerful advocate in former president and Ohio governor Rutherford B. Hayes, who used his considerable influence to lobby on behalf of the school. In 1891 Ohio governor James E. Campbell recommended a tax levy for the benefit of the Ohio State University, but not for Ohio U. and Miami, both of which had suffered recent financial difficulties.

Ohio State Gains Its Edge

In 1906 the Ohio State Legislature passed the Eagleson Bill, which said that Ohio State alone among the state’s public universities could offer doctoral degrees and conduct research. If the behavior of the Ohio U. Bobcat during last season’s Ohio State-Ohio U. football game is any indication, the Ohio University community is still bitter about the Eagleson Bill:

The Eagleson Bill singled out Ohio State as the state’s premier research university and was likely responsible for the school’s invitation in 1912 to join the Intercollegiate Conference of Faculty Representatives, known informally as the Big Nine and later (when Michigan rejoined the conference in 1917) as the Big Ten.

Membership in the Big Ten put Ohio State’s football team and athletics program in a class with national powers such as Minnesota and Illinois and Chicago (sounds funny now, doesn’t it?), further setting OSU apart from Ohio’s other state universities.

In 1946 Ohio University would become a founding member of the Mid-American Conference. Miami would join the MAC the following year. Both schools have been there ever since.

Despite being excluded by Ohio legislators a century ago, Ohio and Miami Universities have become highly esteemed institutions that offer a wide array of graduate programs; but both missed the opportunity to become the state’s flagship school. That distinction, thanks to Rutherford B. Hayes, James E. Campbell, and dozens of nameless Ohio legislators, belongs to the Ohio State University.

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Josh Tinley is the author of Kneeling in the End Zone: Spiritual Lessons From the World of Sports. Follow him at twitter.com/joshtinley or send him an e-mail.