Ohio State threw away a chance to put Michigan back in its place, literally

ANN ARBOR, Mich. - So what are we to make of Ohio State’s 30-24 loss to Michigan, which made it it three-straight losses for the first time since 1995-97?

Should we focus on the interception Kyle McCord threw in the first quarter that set up the Wolverines’ first touchdown while dialing all the momentum in their favor?

Should we focus on a defense that was constantly being asked to get stop after stop until it couldn’t go any further, resulting in a 22-yard touchdown run for Blake Corum?

Maybe we talk about the OSU run game, which we thought had progressed over the past month only to average 3.8 yards per attempt on a Saturday afternoon. TreVeyon Henderson spent the day trying to find holes that were hardly ever there.

Perhaps this isn’t about the football things that happened during this game, and instead we should look at the big picture.

A little more than a month ago, news broke that Michigan had allegedly been purchasing tickets to attend games around the country of its future opponents and stealing their signs in an effort to get a competitive advantage. Those allegations have put an asterisk on the 2021 and 2022 versions of The Game in the minds of many fans. It’s created a feeling of “Michigan vs. World” inside the program and within the fanbase. Meanwhile, Ohio State felt cheated and tasked by everybody else as the team best suited to put the Wolverines back in their place.

Both sides felt cheated by the allegations, just in very different ways, and out of it was finally born a hatred unlike any other time in the rivalry’s history . But just like the past two years, only one team was ready to turn that hatred into something tangible on a scoreboard, where it mattered.

Ohio State fans are going to feel a certain way about what may or may not have happened in 2021 and 2022. So will the program. But it doesn’t change the harsh reality of it all.

Its head coach is now 1-3 in The Game. His first recruiting class — 2020 — has players in it who will graduate having never gotten a pair of gold pants. His first full recruiting class — 2021 — arrived with all the expectations in the world and plenty of them have lived up to them individually, whether its five-stars like Henderson and J.T. Tuimoloau, top-100 recruits like Marvin Harrison Jr. and Jordan Hancock, or middling four-stars like Denzel Burke and Tyleik Williams.

A good chunk of a group that was once the second-best collection of talent in the country and one of the top five ever is about to head off to the NFL having never beaten Michigan, won a Big Ten title or most certainly a national title.

Is that failure? Depends on who you ask.

The good thing is there’s a chance that the pressure behind winning this game is about to change next season. All of the reasons from a cultural perspective may remain, but the penalties in terms of what comes next won’t be as harsh in a world where a 12-team postseason almost certainly secures OSU’s spot to still compete for the ultimate goal.

But this is a harsh way to end an era of the greatest rivalry in sports.

This is Year 5 of the Ryan Day era. Ohio State is easily one of the five best programs in college football and its first 11 weeks prove that every year. But that 12th game has become an uncomfortable burden on the back of a program that spent the last 20 years making Michigan feel the way OSU feels now.

Day’s success outside of that is undeniable, and any fan base should be proud to have a head coach whose first five years have resulted in a 56-7 record, where it takes the nation’s best to take his teams down.

In this case, all Michigan needed was an ill-timed interception to set up the seven points that ended up being the difference in the game. An interception that officially marked at least the beginning of the 2020s as the decade where Michigan finally flipped the rivalry back in its favor.

The Buckeyes could’ve put its rival back its place after two years of having to deal with the noise. Instead, they literally threw that chance away, tarnishing the legacy of a few important places in program history along the way.