BUCKEYE, Ariz. -- For 300 diehard fans, the last Saturday of the college football season has come down to waiting in line outside Beard's Western and Country Store in this dusty downtown.

Down the street from Buckeye Elementary and the Flat Tortilla restaurant, heaven is waiting in the desert for Buckeye Nation. They are wearing Buck nuts around their necks. They are elderly, small, tall, thin and overweight. They are also cold in the morning desert air, but it doesn't matter when free T-shirts are at stake.

Florida coach Urban Meyer, like counterpart Jim Tressel, is from Ohio. (Getty Images)

Mostly, they are jacked.

"Go (away) Gators," someone yells in the store, "and take Michigan with you."

Two days before the BCS title game, a small scarlet and gray army has driven 35 miles west from Phoenix to this quaint town of 35,000. Attracted by the town's name and the lure of free (with an Ohio driver's license) "Buckeye Championship Series" T-shirts, Buckeye Nation is on the loose during Buckeye Days.

Proprietor Levi Beard is losing money on the promotion. He hopes it will drive traffic further into his store, but who is he kidding? The town can't come to a standstill because it already is. Actually, "days" lasts only into the afternoon. An Ohio State alumni band plays. Fans have their picture taken next to a squad car emblazoned with "City of Buckeye."

The Ohio State University, meet the Buckeye, Ariz.

"We always knew that the town was founded by someone from Sidney, Ohio, about 1888, but we never really made a big deal out of it," said Beard, who has spent all of his 50 years here. "Now here we are with lines of people."

Welcome to the clubbed. Based on the red-tinged landscape, if Ohio State doesn't win Monday night there should be a federal investigation. It recently became the first school with a nine-figure athletic budget ($102 million). It has won the arms race in a blowout, sponsoring 36 sports (16 more than Florida). A typical Saturday features 105,000 screaming Buck nuts at Ohio Stadium.

Now they're overrunning bedroom communities. Bedroom communities that could suit their big-time, big-budget expansive needs. Buckeye's population is expected to be 100,000 by 2010 and could one day reach a million, making it the second-largest city in the state.

Dare we suggest a satellite campus? Ohio State-Buckeye.

"They're the same exact people that live right here in Buckeye, friendly, easy-going," Beard said. "My gosh, they're waiting in line half an hour for a free T-shirt. No one has hanged me yet."

The backdrop, of course, is that for the fourth time in five years, Ohio State is playing a bowl game in the Phoenix area. Jim Tressel could run for mayor and not have to worry about any residency requirements. More importantly for Buck nuts, Tressel could win his second national title in five years -- both in the Valley of the Sun.

As a person, Tressel is everything Woody Hayes wasn't. Namely, civil. As a coach he is carrying on the old man's tradition.

"It is a football state," said Bruce Hooley, longtime Ohio newspaper and radio journalist. "The time when sports was kind of taking over as a diversion for people, Woody was such a dominating personality. Even if you didn't care about sports, you paid attention to Woody. If you pay attention to Woody, by connection you pay attention to Ohio State."

It's all Ohio, all the time down here. The stadium where the Buckeyes will play Monday is named after a school without a football team (University of Phoenix Stadium), but the color scheme is almost creepy.

Scarlet and gray.

If Urban Meyer wins on Monday, he would be the third coach this decade from northeast Ohio to grab a national championship in his second year at a school. Not a bad triple for Youngstown (Bob Stoops), Mentor (Tressel) and Ashtabula (Meyer).

"I'm not real sure how to describe it," said Ohio's Kirk Barton, a Buckeyes offensive lineman from Massillon. "It's like the toughness of the old mill workers came down to the kids. The high school program I was at was all about toughness. We weren't the most talented, but we'll outhit them."

Combine a sometimes-pretentious major state university, a national championship and one of the nation's best football states and it can get, well, annoying.

C'mon, the Ohio State University?

"I never say it," Buckeyes receiver Anthony Gonzalez admitted this week. "It sounds dumb."

Still, the Ohio State alumni club could announce a watch party in Manchuria and fans would show up. Buckeye? No problem. The fine folks at Buckeye's Raven Golf Club at Verrado were setting up big-screen TVs for fans to watch Ohio State basketball on Saturday.

"It's like a Stepford Wives community," said local minister Steve Doerksen.

He was speaking of Verrado, a nearby planned community, not the wandering hordes of Buckeyes in downtown Buckeye.

If a few of them happen to someday retire in Buckeye, Beard will have done his job.

"Almost none," he says of the current Ohioans living in his town.

"I know what it's like to give away a few shirts, but this is something we didn't expect at all."