Cincinnati

The City of Cincinnati is part of a network of cities laid out along the big rivers of the Midwest and South in the early parts of the 19th century.  Louisville and St. Louis are also in this group.  These days, when the East Coast struggles to distinguish the various parts of Middle America from one another, these cities tend to get lumped in with the rest of their states in the national mind.  But the river folk who established these cities were often of very different mettle than the Baptists, Methodists, and Calvinists living on farms and in villages throughout Ohio, Kentucky, and Missouri.  The river folk created their own society -- very different from that of both your typical small town, and your big cities of the East Coast.  They were a raffish, shiny, braggadocious sort of people -- tough, and shrewd, and very good at making money and playing games.  Pete Rose, who grew up in Cincinnati (where he attended Western Hill High School) is a good representative of this type.

These cities had their own universities -- separate from the lordly and vast institutions that took the names of their states, and created the big conferences that came to dominate college football.  But those universities were historically excluded from the inner sanctums of the game.  Instead, they wandered like nomads from conference to conference, mostly playing against their own kind.

For example, since World War II the University of Cincinnati has competed in the Mid-American Conference, the Missouri Valley Conference, Conference-USA, the Big East, and it now plays in the American Athletic Conference.  It also spent much of this time -- including every season from 1970 to 1995 -- as an independent.  That's a tough way to build a football program, and so Cincinnati has always been on the outskirts of Big-Time Football.

But things have trended upward in recent years.  The never-ending demand for football on TV has made it easier for schools like Cincinnati to make money and grow their fanbase.  As of 1996, the Bearcats had only ever appeared in three bowl games -- the last of which had been in 1951.  Since then, Cincinnati has gone to 15 bowl games -- including the 2009 Orange Bowl and the 2010 Sugar Bowl.  In fall of 2009, UC went undefeated in the regular season, dominating the Big East Conference and getting all the way up to number 5 in the AP Poll.   Before the Sugar Bowl, however, Coach Brian Kelly announced he was leaving for Notre Dame, and the Bearcats haven't reached that same level since.  They have remained very competitive, though, and last week they beat UCLA.  So it will be interesting to see how they do against OSU.