New Miserable Experience

Michigan has won The Game 59 times. It's terrible every time.

It's also inevitable, no matter what Urban Meyer has said about how to respect a rivalry. He's right in that losing to Michigan should be a Never event - but the longest OSU streak in rivalry history deluded us into believing beating them forever is the primary goal each season.

It's not. That's not a season goal, it's a fever dream. Those were the words of a man who was no longer coaching the Buckeyes. Live long enough and you'll see superior Ohio State teams squander everything to middling Michigan ones.

Inferior Buckeye teams - they have also been known to appear, however unwelcome - have sprung up from the dumpsters they had been playing football in all season to salvage it everything at the Wolverines' expense.

Today's loss gets engraved at the very top of the 2021 season epitaph. Among the casualties:

An unprecedented fifth-straight outright B1G title
C.J. Stroud's Heisman speech, unless he pulls an Eddie George
"Michigan can visit France or Italy but it's still never been to Indianapolis" jokes
The slightest hint of legitimacy for this defense or its coaches

The run would have ended someday - but today, like this, seemed impossible. The 2021 edition of The Game will be remembered as a mediocre pastiche of the 1995 catastrophe but with more snow than mud; a Michigan pounding decorated with an orgy of self-inflicted errors. Ohio State made everything for the home team so much easier.

The Buckeyes committed more unforced errors in Game 12 than would be acceptable at the season's halfway point. This was magnified by an officiating crew that largely stayed out of the way, barely paying attention to holding or defensive pass interference on either end.

Laissez-faire officiating benefits the team that doesn't commit the penalties refs have to call. The disciplined team. The composed team. The prepared team. Today, that was the home team.

Nobody will look back and fondly remember when the Buckeyes pounded the Hoosiers, Spartans or anyone else on the schedule into oblivion.

Second place in the East Division is brand new real estate the Ohio State football program never wanted to own, but that's where it's going to live until the 2022 season kicks off - no matter the postseason destination. Today the Buckeyes coached scared, played sloppy and got run over repeatedly. This is the one game that can't happen, and all of it did.

Live long enough and these ugly surroundings become familiar. You can still see and smell the stains the Wolverines holed up on the miserable side of the outcome created over the past decade and most of the previous one. It's all ours now. This is a one-year sentence.

And there's no parole, ever. This sentence can be canceled or extended in one year.

But as with the organizational shakeup that took place in Ann Arbor over the offseason, there's a silver lining to come for the program in Columbus - because today isn't something that's shrugged off with a speech, a staff shuffling or a renamed drill.

Ohio State will get a reupholstered defense in short order, perhaps with new coaches. A renewed sense of rivalry urgency will follow, as the same strategy that worked for so long was bound to grow stale with entitlement. The past decade was a delusion, not an illusion.

Yes, Urban was wrong. Beating Michigan forever is a misplaced goal. Beat Michigan this year.

That's it. That's Ohio State's rivalry goal, and it's renewable on an annual basis - the seasons prior do not matter, and the years beyond the current one can incubate in time until they matter too. One at a time. Michigan wasn't focused on reversing the entire rivalry trajectory this offseason. That's not a season goal, it's a fever dream.

Michigan was laser focused on beating Ohio State today. Not the past five or the next seven, just 2021. Winning streaks can be intoxicating. It's time for Ohio State to sober up.

Over the next 12 months we'll get a much-needed rehabilitation that's been absent for the better part of the past decade. Nobody will look back and fondly remember the 2021 Saturdays when the Buckeyes pounded the Hoosiers, Spartans or anyone else on the schedule into oblivion.

Everyone will remember how they played Michigan. That's what makes it so great. Or, so terrible.