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When The Game Becomes Just a Game.

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painterlad's picture
by painterlad
1/11/25 at 11:14a in the OSU Football Forum
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In 2013, Alabama head coach Nick Saban decided to try a very long field goal to avoid going into overtime against their hated rival Auburn. The kick was well hit, but not quite good enough. Auburn player Chris Davis caught the ball in the endzone, brought it out…and ran about 105 yards to score the winner in the Iron Bowl. That play became known as “The Kick Six,” and it was certainly the Play of the Year in 2013, and will go down in college football lore as one of those plays that will live long after everyone involved has hung up their cleats. Auburn won the Iron Bowl. Saban left the field looking like a broken man. The sold-out Jordan-Hare erupted in euphoria and for at least a year Tiger fans got to talk smack to their family members and neighbors who had the audacity to be followers of a team that featured a colorful elephant.

That is how rivalries should feel. One fan base is walking on sunshine and the other fan base is dodging thunderstorms. Cousin Eddie, who is a fan of Team X, wears his super extra battery-powered team sweater to the family Christmas gathering, while Uncle Stew sits in the corner, stewing over the knowledge that for the next twelve months, his Team Y has to eat piles of excrement.

You are either giddy, or you are despondent. The highs and the lows are what makes each season, each game, each goal-line stand that important. Nay, that critical. If you allow it to happen, the resulting final score of Your Big Rivalry Game could even send you spiraling down a rabbit hole of very unhealthy mental issues.

Welcome to The Game.

The Game (it should always be capitalized) has been played as the final contest of the season every late November since 1935. 1935. In 1935, Hitler didn’t quite have full power in Germany, the Great Depression was very much still a thing, and “Gone With the Wind” was a massive hit…five years later. There have been a small handful of exceptions to this rule, such as the threat of a Japanese invasion in 1942. In one case, The Game was even cancelled because one team felt it was in their best interest to not play due to illness.

Allegedly.

Entire generations of fans for both teams looked forward to The Game as the pinnacle of the sport’s season. Sure, you might have a big game or two sandwiched in before The Game, but it was that contest that made you grab a red marker and circle the date on the kitchen calendar. So much importance was placed on that one contest that coaches were fired due to losses, and the lads that won were hoisted onto the collective shoulders of local communities.

I know that there are tons of heated rivalry games every season that doesn’t involve Ohio State and Michigan. They go by names like The Holy War, The Apple Cup, The Egg Bowl, or the Red River Shootout/Rivalry/The Next Politically Correct Term. I am quite certain that the winner of the Oregon/Oregon St battle means a lot to people surrounded by a big ocean and trees. But The Game is different than any other of those.

For the longest time, The Big Ten sent only one team to a bowl game, and that was the Rose Bowl. Only one. That fact seems utterly ridiculous in an era where 90% of the conference makes a bowl game every year, but to the Michigan teams that went 40-3-1 from 1972-1975 and never even made a bowl game, that reality is a painfully biter pill to swallow. The only team that Michigan couldn’t beat in that time frame was The Ohio State University, and the Bucks went to four straight Rose Bowls because they won The Game (or at least tied) all four years.

That is one of the big reasons why The Game means Every Single Thing to both teams and their followers. For decades, the BIG title was the prize because it was the only way to measure success on the school’s Glory Meter. (Also known in financial circles as Big Donor Money.) And almost without fail, the outcome of The Game played an enormous factor in determining who won the conference title, and who got to make that trip out to Pasadena. So, going beyond the pride factor, schools had a financial interest and a national image interest in winning the Big Ten title. Down south, games just mean more. In the north, The Game just means everything.

Or at least it used to. If you are reading this, odds are really, really good that I don’t have to tell you who has the current win streak in The Game. You still can’t talk about the Buckeye game plan for 2024 without needing to make sure there is plenty of beer out in the garage, or if the pillow you cry into has come out of the dryer yet.

Each loss eats at your sports soul, and for every loss you have experienced in your lifetime, there is a chunk of scar tissue on your sports heart. Or your literal heart, depending upon the amount of plaque in your arteries.

I also don’t need to inform you that Ohio State is on the cusp of winning their ninth national title, and that they will be highly favored by guys who happen to be wise out in Vegas. But what you may not know is that, for all of the pervious eight national titles won, the Bucks beat Michigan that year. Without fail. This year they did not, but as January 20 winds down, and as the last few seconds of the game clock expires, will we still care that we didn’t win The Game?

Our beloved team will be national champs. (I am assuming here.) We will spend lots of money buying hats, shirts, sweaters, coffee mugs, banners, golf balls and Christmas inflatables to make sure everyone knows that The* won it all. Well, except for The Game. We lost that one.

People outside the fanbase are calling us idiots for being pissed that Michigan won again. People are suggesting that we need to seek professional help because we value one stupid, meaningless game over a title. Fans of Florida or Auburn or Michigan State or UCLA or Nebraska would pull out blank checks and tell Ryan Day to fill in whatever he wanted to get him to come to their schools and do what he has done here after so many of us, myself included, wanted him gone on the 30th of November.

Yes, Michigan went all mid-November SEC and chicken-shit their way out of an ass whooping in 2020. Yes, they cheated in ’21 and ’22. Yes, nobody outside of sports pundits trying to remain neutral, Ann Arbor elites, and the cooler poopers who frequent Detroit area Walmart’s think that their title from ’23 was legitimate. But unless the NCAA finds the lost key to that dust-covered file cabinet in which their shriveled-up balls are stored, Michigan will continue to claim all of their ill-gotten gains.

If Ohio State goes on to beat Notre Dame, that loss to those nameless bastards up north will have absolutely no meaning. It will have had zero point zero affect on the Bucks winning a natty. In fact, the evidence suggests that losing The Game forced Ryan Day into becoming Evil Ryan Day, and that is what caused this particular team to be able to win the title. Again, I am assuming here.

Ohio State is about to prove the American Dream is still alive and kicking. They lost a close one on the road to a very good Oregon team, they spent five days eating nothing but items on the Taco Bell value menu before they shit the bed against Michigan, and from all of that darkness arose a team willing to fight and scrap to prove that they are the best. That is a redemption story almost uniquely American.

I’m too old to not let a loss in The Game bother me, especially when you know that you are the much better team. If-sorry, when-we beat the Irish, I will be very, very happy. But we still lost The Game. But we won it all! Not so fast my friend, we didn’t win the one that normally matters over all the rest. But we beat not one, but two! SEC teams, along with the only undefeated team, and Notre Dame.

Maybe we do need help.

The day is coming when The Game will start to become just another game. Always important to be sure, but not life-altering. That day won’t happen when this Day is in charge, but it will get to that place. If Auburn were to lose to Alabama, but still won the national title, do you think they would give two hearty swigs from the moonshine jug that they lost the Iron Bowl? No.

We live in a culture where that Really Big Title means everything. We collectively screamed for a playoff, and then an expanded playoff. Ohio State appears to be the first team to benefit from the new system. The days of college football being a uniquely regional event are long gone. The midwestern-based BIG now goes from the Jersey shore to the blue waters of the Pacific, for crying out loud. The NCAA is about a salary cap and collective bargaining agreement away from officially becoming the NFL Lite, and that means the big trophy at the end is the goal, not some game in October. Or late November.

It will be difficult to transfer our raw, seething hatred for all things urine-and-blue to our kids and grandkids when all they know is teams no longer have to win every regular season game to be champs. Just as there are no Notre Dame fans that have a working memory of being able to beat Ohio State, the day is coming when Buckeye fans will just have a dislike towards Michigan. I still flip the bird to every car I see with a Michigan license plate, but fans like me are probably the last vestiges of a bygone era where ripping down banners or planting flags on the 50-yard line led to fistfights and verbal outrage.

Call me crazy, tell me I’m unhinged, assure me that I’m on the lunatic fringe, but on the day when The Game is relegated to being just a game, I hope that I am long gone, and that someone, somewhere, will put a handful of buckeyes on my grave every late November. Or whenever it is they move The Game.

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