In a nutshell:  I don’t believe so.  And I don’t believe the past is weighing them down in any way at the moment.

I say this from my experience playing college and high school soccer years ago.

I played on an Ohio State-type of team in high school—we won consecutive state titles—and our attitude each game stepping onto the field was: we will win this game.  

I played on a college team that was more like Michigan; we were the underdogs against the very best teams.  Our attitude was somewhat different: we can win this game if we bring our A game.  And it didn’t matter if we had lost the previous year or years.

In fact, we were absolutely blown out my sophomore  year by a conference rival that was still fantastic and ranked 4th in the country when we played them my junior year—and we managed to pull off the upset.  We went into that match with a positive mindset.

I would be curious to hear from former players if they share my view about the attitude of the Michigan team coming into tomorrow’s game.

Of course, if we should be so fortunate as to see Ohio State go up early by two TDS, perhaps the doubts from past games will start to weigh on the minds of the players on TTUN at that point.