There's been a lot of rivalry talk lately, mostly by bored former players and opinion writers desperately searching for offseason topics, but also occasionally from current Ohio State head coaches.
And every time the topic comes up, either in real life (usually at some grill-out where I stand around awkwardly as my extended family asks me to break down the third string long snapper for the Buckeyes, and I, not knowing who the hell that is, make up a very obviously fake name like "Chili Rutabega" and say that he might see some playing time on special teams) or on the internet (usually in the comments section of something dumb I wrote), the most common reaction that I hear from Buckeye fans about their rivals is something roughly like this:
Which is all well and good and a socially acceptable reaction to pretty much only a sports rivalry and almost nothing else in life. But seeing as how Ohio State's greatest rival is struggling a little bit in football as of late, maybe a little perspective is needed.
First, it's one of the most historic rivalries in all of college football. Not too many teams can claim to have played each other over 100 times, going back to the Roosevelt administration. And beyond that, the implications of the outcome of those games have been enormous. Over two dozen times has the winner of this matchup gone on to win the Big Ten championship, and the two teams have over a dozen claimed national championships between them.
Initially Ohio State was on the losing end of this rivalry, falling behind in the early part of the 20th century, but aside from that hiccup that I personally refuse to acknowledge because it mostly took place before the Hoover administration, the Buckeyes have been the victors more often than not. It's a pretty big point of pride that their rival refuses to acknowledge because they've accomplished very little nationally in the last several generations, and hell, they need something to hang their hats on.
Overall though, this is pretty clearly one of the greatest rivalries in all of sports (not just college football), and if that's not enough to sell you on it, there's a big damn wooden turtle that goes to the winner.
I was born in 1985. My formative years in the mid-to-late 90s were spent hating the University of Michigan for depressingly obvious reasons. The Buckeyes could beat the Wolverines every year, forever, and because of the concentrated bile that's built up in my soul I'd still take some small measure of perverse pleasure in watching them lose no matter how many seasons in a row it happened. I even believe people who say that they want Michigan to lose every single game they play; I think that's really silly and short-sighted, but I believe it.
But there's a problem.
Imagine that you're an incoming freshman to Ohio State this fall. You were likely born in the year 2000 (yes, that's really how young kids are these days, time is linear, we're all old, life sucks), meaning that you grew up watching bad Simpsons instead of good Simpsons, you're only vaguely aware of Ted Ginn and Troy Smith, and cell phones were only ever magical rectangles that can access the entirety of human knowledge instead of weirdly shaped bricks that you can play blackjack on.
And, this is the kicker, if you were born in the year 2000, the Fighting Illini have beaten Ohio State exactly as many times as the Wolverines have from between the time you emerged from the womb to right this second.
You know implicitly that you should hate Michigan; you trash Michigan fans and you'll happily tape over campus M's in November and you'll never wear either yellow or blue in any combination of clothing for the rest of your life, but because in practice Illinois has had the same kind of impact that Michigan has had on Ohio State football in the last 18 years or so, maybe in the back of your head you begin to wonder what the big deal is.
That's a bad sign for the health of any rivalry, but what should really concern Ohio State and Michigan fans is that everything that I wrote earlier about the Illinois/Ohio State rivalry is 100% true. The Fighting Illini were, at one point, one of the most important and powerful college football programs in the country. Over time their impact faded and, aside from some brief blips in the early 1990s and the early 2000s, they've been largely irrelevant to both the Buckeyes and the country at large.
Illibuck still exists, as does a rivalry that's working on its 104th edition, but if you ask Ohio State fans to rank Big Ten teams in terms of bitter rivals Illinois probably doesn't make the top ten. That's in large part because of their decades-long inability to pose a threat to Ohio State on a consistent basis.
That can happen at Michigan, and while we (me and you) will always carry the torch for The Game, younger generations may not. For The Game to survive, the unthinkable needs to happen. Michigan must be... good.
And horror of horrors, maybe even beat the Buckeyes once in a while. That's an anathema for a lot of us, but it's also exactly part of what drew us to the rivalry in the first place. The Ten Year War wasn't Woody Hayes beating the absolute piss out of Bo Schembechler for a decade, and my animosity towards That Team Up North didn't materialize because John Cooper won five national titles when I was a kid.
A rivalry can't be this one-sided for this long and survive indefinitely. A loss to Michigan now and then would be painful, or watching them re-emerge as a legitimate threat to Ohio State's Big Ten hegemony.
But none of that would be as painful as losing the meaning behind The Game, and forcing us to move on to the third most important historical rival for the Buckeyes: the Indiana Hoosiers.
