OSU-Michigan Rivalry The Best In All Of Sports
Friday, November 20, 2009 at 11:21AM By JOHN P. WISE
One Great Season
NEW HAVEN, Conn. -- No clever lead-ins here. I'll just get right to the point. The Ohio State-Michigan rivalry is the best in all of sports.
Yankees-Red Sox? Sorry, they play 18 times a year, which means unless it's September or October, most of the meetings have nothing at stake.
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Lakers-Celtics? That was a great rivalry in the 1980s when Magic and Bird led their teams, but the 2008 Finals brought none of the drama we remember from the Forum and the Garden.
Duke-North Carolina? This is probably the closest contender, but since college football is better than college basketball, Ohio State-Michigan wins out.
The Ohio State-Michigan rivalry is a game played on a Saturday, and many plan an entire weekend around it and tailgate early in the morning and celebrate -- well, if you're in Columbus, you do -- until the wee hours of Saturday night. Thanksgiving usually follows five days later, and it's less of a holiday for the most loyal fans; it's just a continuation of the celebration of what happened on a football field the previous weekend.
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A Duke-Carolina game can be played on a Tuesday in February and you're in and out in two hours. It's merely a game, instead of an event. The teams meet twice each year, which means an even split leaves no bragging rights. There's also a chance for a third meeting, which can solve the bragging-rights issue, but then three times in a span of two months is far too often.
When you mix scarlet-and-gray with maize-and-blue, you get cold November football, often with Big Ten and Rose Bowl implications at stake. You get front yards in Ohio, filled with kids emulating their Horseshoe heroes, one claiming to be Beanie Wells; another says he's Troy Smith. Up the road in Michigan, front-yard footballers think all the way back to Tim Biakabutuka and Charles Woodson, insisting no one will catch a pass on his side of the field.
In 2006, you had a pair of 11-0 teams, ranked 1 and 2, playing for a berth in the BCS Championship Game. Ohio State won, 42-39, in one of the best games in the history of the great rivalry. There was no rematch on the schedule a few weeks later. The Wolverines, who haven't beaten OSU since 2003, would have to wait 52 more weeks for another chance at revenge. They're still waiting, actually, and after tomorrow's 106th meeting, the fans in Ann Arbor likely will hope 2010 will produce a more favorable outcome.
Like all things in life and in sports, Ohio State's current dominance is cyclical. Buckeyes fans will at some point suffer a stretch where Michigan is the superior squad, fighting for BCS cred while OSU considers a coaching change.
But I like to live in the now. All OSU fans do.
Michigan, Ohio State
Reader Comments (2)
I just went to the OSU-UM game today for the 1st time. I am a 21 year old die hard Michigan fan, and I truely mean DIE HARD. I know where every recruit and every player on the team are from, star rankings, just everything. I pay 40 dollars a month for every recruiting/team site that I can find, I blead Maize & Blue, and I can honestly say, even tho we lost, there is NOTHING that compares to this rivalry. I dont know how so many OSU fans got in our stadium today but I actually enjoyed the hate/respect for eachother. You are right, NOTHING compares.
And I just can't wait untill next year, I PROMISE you we will come to the Horse Shoe and put a fuc*in pounding on you guys. You will never make it far with a QB that can't throw and a coach that won't call a pass play that goes more than 10 yards.