Few players ever get a chance to play for two powerhouses in their college career. Caleb Downs was among the fortunate ones, who not only featured under Nick Saban in his final year at Tuscaloosa but also won a national championship with Ohio State. That makes the former Buckeye a perfect person to compare the cultures in Tuscaloosa and Columbus, and he has a favorite.

During his appearance on the June 2 episode of the St. Brown podcast, Downs played a rapid-fire game with the hosts, who prompted a question that everyone has wondered about. “Better football culture. Alabama or Ohio State?”

“Football culture. I’ll go Ohio State, actually. I mean, like, football culture. You know what I mean? Like the pedigree, like everything, just the whole football, you know, talking about like high school, Ohio State’s too. Ohio State has a great pedigree and winning tradition,” Downs said.

It’s tough to pick out a winner between Alabama and Ohio State when it comes to national championships. Alabama has claimed 18 national titles in its storied history, while the Buckeyes have won 9. However, Ohio State remains the only program to have never lost more than seven games in a season. The Tide, on the other hand, has had some periods where the team really struggled. The Buckeyes have the highest all-time winning percentage in college football history: 73.3%

And it doesn’t matter who the head coach is. The winning culture at Columbus carries on regardless. We saw the same when Ryan Day succeeded Urban Meyer. The same hasn’t happened in Tuscaloosa with Kalen DeBoer, who hasn’t yet matched the standards set by his predecessor.

But Downs also took some time to praise the Tide, especially when it was being coached by Nick Saban. “So Alabama is like back-to-back, like boom, boom,” the host said. “It’s a Saban thing, though,” Downs interrupted. “No, I’m saying that was Saban. So I feel like without him, it’s a different culture right now.”

Downs started his college career by choosing Alabama over Ohio State to play under Nick Saban. In his freshman year, he earned the Freshman All-American title in Tuscaloosa. When Saban decided to hang up his boots, Downs decided to enter the portal, and, no surprise, he went to the Buckeyes. When he was transferring to Ohio State, it was the culture he praised Ohio State for.

“I wanted to be a part of a culture and people that are like-minded to me, and they had a lot of great people that I knew from recruitment,” Downs told RGIII. “They had a couple of players that I knew, a lot of coaches that I knew. I knew it was a good situation coming into and then I knew that they had a lot of returning players and a lot of hungry guys that were eager to win. I knew we would have at least a chance to go do something special, which we did.”

The Ohio State and Michigan rivalry

While Downs is all about praise, there was one thing that gave him the ick when it came to the Buckeyes, and that was the intensity and importance of the Michigan rivalry. The fan bases can’t stand each other, and it can get really petty. For fans in Columbus, beating Michigan in The Game matters more than winning the national championship, and Downs couldn’t understand it.

“After we won the natty in my sophomore year, there were definitely people that came up to me after, like, ‘So that wasn’t a great season,'” Downs recalled. I was like, ‘What are you talking about?’ But it was what it was…It’s worse at Ohio State because they refuse to say the name Michigan. They X out all the Ms. I’m like, ‘Bro, we got to go play a normal football game. We can’t do this every time.’”

Unlike players like Jeremiah Smith, Downs couldn’t really get himself fully into hating the team up North. But maybe it would have been different had he started his college career at Columbus.