The dusting of snow was starting to thicken on Michigan Stadium’s turf when Jeff Moody had an idea, one that would become more iconic than the game itself.
The Buckeyes were up 24-9 against the Michigan Wolverines after a 50-yard touchdown by Carnell Tate. Fans decked in scarlet and gray pulsed with excitement inside the Big House. After three straight losses, the taste of revenge was palpable.
The Wolverines hadn’t seen the end zone the entire game, so the mid-afternoon snowfall started to accumulate. Moody turned to his coach on the sidelines and asked if he could do something bold. Go for it, he told Moody.
So during a timeout late in the third quarter, Moody ran into the end zone and shuffled over the “M” in Michigan with his feet, leaving a massive “X” in the snow. He marched to the sideline and walked a Script Ohio into the snow in the red zone. He jumped onto the field to dot the “i” in dramatic fashion. Then he ran over the “M” one more time for good measure.
Angry Michigan sideline staffers quickly rushed onto the field to undo his work, but the deed was done. His stunt got picked up by the FOX television broadcast. Buckeye fans in the crowd and across the country went wild at the sight.
“The Michigan staffers threatened to kick me out if I pulled that again,” Moody said. “They were furious, but I didn’t care. I was grinning ear to ear.”
In a moment, Moody became iconic.
But only a few people knew it was Moody who actually pulled it off. Everyone else just saw the cartoony eyes and rugby-striped shirt of Ohio State’s mascot, Brutus Buckeye.
Moody, an Ohio State senior, is one of nine student athletes who are part of a team that takes on the coveted and elusive role of portraying Brutus Buckeye each year. While there is only one “official” Brutus, it’s Moody and his teammates who don Brutus’ 10-pound head every week to represent the university.
Brutus Nation is a small fraternity. For 60 years, more than 50 students – both men and women – put their heart and soul into portraying the beloved university mascot, known for his oversized buckeye nut head and block O hat.
Mascot team members straddle the worlds between being college students and being Brutus. They are athletes, improv experts, court jesters, volunteers and academics. They attend hundreds of events each year. Above all, they are cheerleaders for all things Ohio State.
But that doesn’t mean the Brutus team doesn’t have ambitions of its own.
The world of collegiate mascots is hyper competitive, with each season culminating in the UCA & UDA College Cheerleading and Dance Team National Championship. Heading into this season, Brutus hadn’t won the title since 2019 — and the team was hungry for another win.
While Brutus is instantly recognizable on campus, the students inside the costume are intentionally kept anonymous. Team members can’t reveal their identities until they graduate, and their accomplishments are shrouded in secrecy. It’s not about them. It’s about Brutus.
The Dispatch spent a year following the Brutus Buckeye team and the student athletes, coaches, trainers and allies who make the mascot possible. In an exclusive look behind the curtain, The Dispatch joined the team at tryouts, in Wisconsin for mascot summer camp, on the sidelines from the ‘Shoe to the Big House, in Orlando for the spirit team’s national championships and all of the moments in between.
In line with the team’s tradition, The Dispatch is only naming its most-recent senior class, who graduated from Ohio State on May 10.
From football games to national championships, The Dispatch followed Moody and fellow seniors Caleb Kies, Tyler Wisman and Kurt Steelman, as they and their teammates achieved a landmark season for Brutus.
Making a mascot
Building an elite team starts with tryouts.
Mascot team tryouts take place each year starting mid-spring semester. The team holds a few info sessions and several weeks of pre-tryout “costume sessions,” so interested students can get used to wearing Brutus’ head before their audition.
While the costume sessions aren’t required, they are highly suggested. Most people don’t work out in a 10-pound mascot head with limited eyesight. And Sharp expects people to show up ready to perform at tryouts. The costume sessions are also a chance to learn about Brutus’ character.
“Brutus is the most loving, kind, passionate, energetic person about everything Ohio State there is at this university,” Wisman said. “He’s the ambassador. He’s an athlete in all sports. I mean, people literally expect us to be able to do everything.”
In April 2025, six people show up for tryouts at the Steelwood Training Facility on a drizzly Saturday morning.
Sharp and Assistant Mascot Coach Tim Thiel, a former University of Wisconsin Bucky Badger affectionately known as “the Elder Statesman of Mascots,” are joined by Wisman, Moody and one of the team’s underclassmen.
It’s a slightly different year than usual. Only one spot is open on next year’s team, so a lot of hopefuls who didn’t feel ready to audition dropped out at the last minute. Those who kept their tryout spot are confident about their odds.
Outside the facility, a tall brunette in a red sweatsuit runs through his prepared routine for tryouts. He spins through the misty parking lot as if it were a stage, dancing and hitting Brutus’ signature moves to a gameday soundtrack.
This is the third time he’s tried out for the team. He walks over to the door and patiently waits outside of the facility with a guitar case in hand for his audition time. His girlfriend hypes him up for a final time.
“You got this,” she said. “You are Brutus. You are Brutus.”
Brutus wasn’t much more than a brown papier-mâché dome with legs when he first ran into Ohio Stadium on Oct. 30, 1965. How did he transform from a little-known nut to an iconic college mascot?
For most of its history, the Brutus team didn’t have a formal structure around it. In fact, there wasn’t much of a team to speak of.
Brutus was originally adopted by Ohio Staters, Incorporated, a student service organization, that put up the initial $50 to craft the mascot. Soon enough, Brutus was passed over to Block O, Ohio State’s student section. Students interested in being Brutus had to write an essay and perform a skit in front of a panel of Block O members.
Ohio State’s cheerleading team took over Brutus’ care in 1975, and a separate mascot tryout was held in 1981. Forty-five students showed up that first year in hopes of being OSU’s mascot.
Still, there wasn’t much structure for the Brutus team until the mid-2000s.
“We didn’t really have a dedicated coach to the mascot team at the time,” said Ray Sharp, Ohio State’s head mascot coach. “It was the spirit program director and then you had a couple of assistant coaches. When it’s compared to how we operate now, there was no infrastructure.”
Sharp joined the Brutus team in 2010 as a sophomore engineering student. By then, there were a handful of students on the team, sharing the responsibilities between football games and other events. Brutus was getting more popular and the event requests were pouring in. But Sharp said it was up to him and his teammates to coordinate their appearances.
Without a full-time coach, the team leaned on local Brutus alumni to help out.
After Sharp graduated in 2013, the spirit director at the time asked if he would step into a volunteer role managing the mascot team. He would mostly be helping out with scheduling and raising the caliber of the team.
Though college mascots had been around for more than a century, very few had dedicated athletic programs for their mascot. Sharp said there were only two other programs in the Big Ten that had someone dedicated to mascots when he was in school. Mascots were mostly considered goofy sideline acts and campus characters. But student athletes? That wasn’t how they were perceived.
Sharp had a vision for Brutus.
The Brutus team had started competing in the UCA & UDA College Cheerleading and Dance Team National Championship when he was a student. There was definitely an interest in taking the team to the next level.
“If we’re going to do this, let’s do it,” Sharp said.
It was a lot of trial and error, he said. But the team kept growing. There were four people portraying Brutus when Sharp was a student.
That quickly grew to five. Then six. Then eight.
There are currently nine Bruti (plural for Brutus) on the team. The number might seem like a lot, Sharp said, but it’s a practical decision.
Brutus gets 800 appearance requests a year between athletic and non-athletic events. That’s about two to three a day, on top of supporting the largest athletic department in the conference.
He attends every home and away football game, as well as games for men’s and women’s basketball, volleyball, baseball, lacrosse and more. He gets invited to campus and community events. He does commercial shoots and brand deals. And hundreds of people a year want Brutus to attend their weddings, birthdays, bar mitzvahs and graduation parties.
That load is simply too much for one student to shoulder, Sharp said.
“I can’t go to them and just say, ‘Hey, if you’re going to go do this, drop everything and do Brutus 24/7,’ right? Not realistic,” he said. “But we wanted to make sure we maintain the fact that Brutus was a student. We do feel as though having a student kind of ties in that connection to Ohio State because they’re here, because they are going through the realities of a student and they have that pride within them. We want them to stay students.”
Once a student earns a spot, they remain on the Brutus team until graduation. Team members are also awarded a scholarship to use toward their tuition, funded through external donations.
In 2022, after nearly a decade as a part-time coach, Sharp left his career in IT to come on full time as Ohio State’s head mascot coach and spirit team coordinator. Melissa McGhee, Ohio State’s dance team coach and director of student-athlete development, shared Sharp’s vision for an elite mascot program.
Today, Ohio State has one of the largest mascot teams in the Big Ten, with nine student athletes and two coaches. (The University Minnesota currently boasts the largest team for Goldy Gopher with nearly a dozen students.)
‘A big game of charades’
Brutus tryouts are a five-part process.
Sharp, Thiel and the mascot team members are seated on the far end of a dance studio inside the Steelwood Training Facility. One by one, each of the prospects walk out in Brutus’ head and full costume to perform for the judges.
First, the Bruti hopefuls go through several stations to show off their physical skills. Sharp asks the auditionee to demonstrate feature awareness (“Show me where Brutus’ eyes are”) and emotions (“Show me a nervous Brutus, an angry Brutus, an excited Brutus.”)
Sharp said this is important because Brutus’ head is significantly larger than a human head, so his facial features are also farther apart. Trying to cover your eyes, he said, would be like covering Brutus’ mouth. Brutus’ expression also doesn’t change. He’s eternally smiling, but he still needs to express a range of emotion simply but effectively, Sharp said.
Then each person shows off Brutus’ signature moves: the Hulk Hogan, a lunging power stance named for the famed professional wrestler; smacking the ground and banging on the mascot head; and doing a headstand while spelling out O-H-I-O with their legs.
Sharp gives a couple of prospects feedback on their moves before continuing. Coachability is important to Sharp and Thiel, who know they’ll be spending the summer getting new team members integrated before the school year starts. But it’s also about consistency.
Thiel said people expect the same Brutus regardless of who is inside the suit. Whether it’s the first time or the hundredth time someone is meeting Brutus, those interactions should be technically identical, he said.
A huge part of being a successful mascot is improv. One of the cardinal rules of mascoting is that mascots never talk, so mastering the art of miming is key.
“It’s a big game of charades,” Sharp said.
To test their creative chops, Sharp and the current team members run each person through some imaginary scenarios to see how well they act as Brutus in different situations.
“Good morning, Brutus, today you’re a superhero on a mission!” Moody tells one of the hopefuls, running through a prepared script.
“Your superhero suit is ready. Let’s start by putting it on,” he continues, pausing between each phrase to see how they respond. “Great job, Brutus! Now let’s fly over the city and look for trouble. Oh no! You see a building on fire. Quick, use your super strength to rescue the people inside.”
Brutus prospects also have to show off how they use props. Moody runs them through a game called “Prop Potato” to test their ability to make props and skits that fit Brutus’ character. He hands them a prop, like a tennis racket or a broom, and asks them to turn it into as many other items as possible in 30 seconds.
Auditionees are also expected to perform a four-minute skit to music — their choice of “Hang On Sloopy,” “Danger Zone” or “Danza Kuduro” — using a handful of props. Imagine it’s a timeout and you have a crowd of fans in front of you, Moody said. It’s your job to entertain them with a quick skit.
Dance skills come next. Sharp and Thiel play 10-second clips from songs one might hear during a time out or skit on game day. Everything from “Buckeye Battle Cry” and “Not Like Us” to “A Whole New World” and “Man, I Feel Like a Woman” are on the table.
Finally, Brutus has the opportunity to show off an X-factor.
X-factors range for the auditioners. The brunette from the parking lot strums “Carmen Ohio” on the guitar while wearing Brutus’ receiver gloves. Another prospect, a member of the cheer team, knows how to lift cheerleaders into the air. Two of them can do backflips with the head on. Wisman said he heard one of them practiced for tryouts by duct-taping bath towels to a snowboarding helmet to mimic the shape and weight of Brutus’ head.
Four hours later, tryouts are over and it’s time for Sharp and Thiel to make their final decision.
Even though they originally planned to pick only one new team member, they just couldn’t decide between the two front runners, so instead they brought on both.
The 2025-2026 Brutus team was set, with four seniors, three other returning members and two newcomers. It’s a good mix for a jammed-packed season, Sharp said.
Now, the real work can start.
Higher education reporter Sheridan Hendrix can be reached at shendrix@dispatch.com and on Signal at @sheridan.120. You can follow her on Instagram at @sheridanwrites.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: What does it take to be Brutus? Inside the world of Ohio State’s iconic mascot
Reporting by Sheridan Hendrix, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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