Before every home game at Ohio Stadium, a video montage is played on the scoreboard emphasizing Ohio State’s rivalry with Michigan. It doesn’t matter who the Buckeyes are playing that day — Penn State, Minnesota, Purdue — there is a special two-minute trailer dedicated to getting fans excited for the Wolverines.
There is always excitement for The Game.
“If you grew up a Buckeye, if you grew up in the great state of Ohio or if you are a Buckeye now,” Ohio State head coach Urban Meyer says to his team in the trailer. “This is the real one. This is the greatest rivalry in all of sport. Not college football, all of sport.”
The importance of the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry is pounded into the brains of players from Day 1 if the programs truly have coaches who understand what it is all about. The Buckeyes have one in Meyer; Michigan has one now with Jim Harbaugh.
When you choose to play college football at a place like Ohio State or Michigan, you instantly become part of the rivalry whether you choose to don scarlet and gray or maize and blue. Wherever you come from, however you got to Columbus or Ann Arbor, it doesn’t matter; you become part of the rivalry.
Players who hail from Ohio or Michigan don’t necessarily need to be told what this game means. They’ve grown up around it; they already know of the history and tradition.
But both the Buckeyes and Wolverines have players who are from places all across the country. Both have players who may not have been familiar with the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry until going away to college.
Take Ohio State sophomore middle linebacker Raekwon McMillan, for example. McMillan hails from the South. The Hinesville, Georgia native went to high school a mere 712 miles away from Ohio State’s campus. McMillan did not grow up a Buckeye nor did he have any familiarity with the biggest game Ohio State plays each year.
He does now.
“It’s one of the things that coaches emphasized while I was getting recruited, that we were going to beat the Team Up North every year,” McMillan said Monday. “Every year, you come in knowing you’re going to mark the last game of the schedule, knowing that when that week comes up it’s going to be intensified a little bit more.”
Buckeyes defensive tackle Tommy Schutt — who hails from Glen Ellyn, Illinois — grew up in the Midwest. He was aware of the Ohio State-Michigan rivalry, but he didn’t really know what it meant until he arrived in Columbus.
“When I first got here, I knew about the rivalry, obviously, but not being an Ohio guy I didn’t really realize how big a thing it was,” Schutt said. “It means a lot to everybody in the state of Ohio and everyone in the state up north.”
Meyer is obsessed with this particular game. Ohio State’s head coach blasts the same song on repeat all week throughout the walls of the team’s practice facility. He wants to drive the point home; the length at which he goes borders on insanity.
The bottom line? If you play for Meyer, you know what this game means. It doesn’t matter where you came from.
“This rivalry is so huge,” said Ohio State defensive end Joey Bosa, who is from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. "To know we are playing such a good team and it is back to where it used to be with two of the top teams in college football going at it, it makes it more exciting.”
