One game I keep hearing mentioned as a contender for a worse loss than what happened on Saturday is in 1998 when #1 ranked OSU lost in the Shoe to a Spartans team that ended up going 6-6, with that loss ending up being enough to keep the Buckeyes out of the NC game. 

And, yeah, that loss totally sucked ass in so many ways, not the least of which it was a year in which John Cooper actually beat TTUN, only to have the other school in Michigan wreck our national title hopes. And I will never forget how eerily quiet the crowd was for that game, even when it looked early on that OSU might run away with it, it was almost like they knew what was coming and couldn’t get excited about anything. 

But let’s not forget that MSU team was coached by one Nicholas Lou Saban Jr. and, from what I understand, knows how to coach a mean game of football and went on to have a pretty decent career as a college football coach. IIRC MSU went on to have a 10-2 season the following year, with many of the players from that 98 squad being big contributors, before Saban bolted for LSU. So it’s not like that 98 team was totally devoid of talent either. 

I’m going to take a wild guess here and say that Sherrone Moore isn’t going to have anywhere near the level of success that Saban has. In fact, it’s questionable right now whether he’ll even end up winning as many games at TTUN as Saban did at MSU.

That we lost in 1998 to the future Greatest College Football Coach Ever, while Ryan Day was out coached by Sherrone Fucking Moore, puts the 2024 version of The Game solidly in first place in my book as the worst OSU loss in at least the last half century.