We've all heard the repeated trope about how the winner of the rushing battle has won The Game since 2001. I wondered how this compares to other, non-weasel OSU games.

I did a comparison of all regular season games for the past 5 years (2020-2024) for total and YPA rush yards. All data was taken from here https://collegefootballdata.com/

The total rushing winner won the game 46/54 times (85%) while that rose slightly to 47/52 (90%) for the YPA rushing winner. Note that PSU in 2023 and Iowa in 2024 were pushes from a YPA perspective so I removed them from the equation.

This is a small sample size and I didn't do any sort of statistical significance analysis on it but I still found it interesting. It would be great to expand this to more teams/games but it was pretty time consuming.

That said, I feel that the whole stat for The Game is made out to be more than it should. In general, the team winning the rushing battle wins the game but that's likely just because, more often than not, they are the better/more efficient team. I think that conversation also doesn't account for the game flow. The state of the game will dictate your run/pass calling. Take The Game this year. Day says we passed almost as much as ran but, as mentioned in articles on this site, that drastically changes when you take out the last possessions of each half where you HAD to pass. The same could be said for other games where you might go to/abandon the run early due to the game dynamics and that could skew these statistics.

PS: I have everything in beautiful red green tables but I cannot figure out how to include it here. If anyone has advice, I'd love to share. I’m sure there are more interesting observations to be gleaned from the data but I need to get back to work.