2021 Minnesota Game Poster No. 1: Ohio State

Click to enlarge.

Since 2013, the Ohio State blog Eleven Warriors has had a running tradition during football season: For every game, graphic designer Walt Keys makes a game poster in his distinct style, featuring Brutus Buckeye in a scenario relevant to that week's opponent.

OSU meets Clemson? Keys recreates a Calvin and Hobbes strip. The Buckeyes travel to Texas for a matchup with TCU? Brutus rides into the sunset with a Horned Frog on a spit. Chase Young, "The Predator," is back for the Penn State game? A dreadlocked Brutus stands partially out of frame, pointing three lasers at the forehead of the Nittany Lion statue. Keys' posters — like the blog, as well as most Ohio State fans on the internet — can take an arrogant tone but are routinely clever and look universally cool.

This March, I was killing time on my computer and started an art project for this year's Floyd of Rosedale game. Its original purpose was to share among a handful of friends, but a couple hours into working on the project, I decided I was putting in too much effort for an audience so small. Partially with Keys in mind, I was going to share my Floyd piece on my blog. And if I was doing the Iowa game, well, then surely I had to do every other game on the Gophers' schedule. Since then, I have been working on-and-off on posters for every game this season. As I write this, 11 of 12 are done (pending any last-second edits right before posting). If Minnesota plays another game or two this season, maybe I'll throw together a 13th or 14th. I'll post them here every week with a few thoughts on my process, as well as on Twitter.

Keeping with what I made for the Iowa game (which you'll see in November), each poster has a video game tie-in as its theme. Some are references you'll get immediately; others I made to pay tribute to my favorite games. (For the record: I haven't played every game parodied in the series.) Some follow traditional "poster" structure, with game numbers, years, and opponents spelled out; others don't have all those details, as I felt preserving the aesthetic of the game was more important. Most are in pixel art, but I feel especially proud of those forthcoming that required a different method. While I made these with the purpose of public dissemination, I tried to design them for myself first, so if you don't enjoy them, that's fine. But I hope you do.

Fittingly, the first poster in this series is for the Gophers' game against Ohio State. It features Goldy standing in for Sonic the Hedgehog, facing down a Brutus-faced flying machine that is piloted by Ryan Day and swinging a buckeye leaf-stickered wrecking ball, all in front of the skylines of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. The Sonic-versus-Robotnik comparison felt apt, considering Minnesota's long odds Thursday: the scrawny but fearless Gopher versus mechanized death.

In the clouds, you'll see the Gophers' three longest-running traveling trophies — the Little Brown Jug, the Floyd of Rosedale, and Paul Bunyan's Axe — as well as a block M. Keeping with the Twin Cities theme, I changed the trees in the background to pines and the rocks along the falls to limestone. I'd like to claim it's Minnehaha Falls or St. Anthony Falls, but neither looks like this, and I'm already bending geography by putting the State Capitol right next to Downtown Minneapolis.

Come back for next week's poster, made for the Gophers' game against the Miami RedHawks.