THE SITUATIONAL: Executioner's Song

Word choice, comrades - no one is suggesting that winning The Game is bigger or more prestigious than winning a natty. It's just more important. To us. And them, too.

No regular season game is in the same nebula, constellation or realm as a national championship. The same goes for any conference title, with apologies to this weekend's enchanting festivities in Indianapolis.

But if you're toxically invested in Ohio State football, beating Michigan is a one-year reprieve for mental health and general well-being. I absolutely hate how true this is, but the rivalry operates a dichotomous heavenhell without any limbo or gradient for every single person emotionally invested in its outcome. Flip the teams and the paragraph still works.

Beating Michigan comes first, forever. National titles are a distant and treasured second.

You're either happy or miserable for a full fucking calendar year depending on the outcome. Even an improbable, glorious four-game playoff run cannot completely snuff out the misery of losing that game. Ohio State beating Michigan is necessary. Program Priority One. Nothing else comes close.

Winning a title is lovely, as we all know - but failing to win it is quite normal for every fanbase that's ever existed across sports. Let's say you're 30 and a lifelong member of our quaint little tribe. That means you have intimate memories of approximately 2.7 Buckeye national titles and 100% of College Football Playoffs.

Blessed beyond belief, we are. Now imagine if Ohio State had lost 26 of the 29* Michigan games over your 30 years. That's hell. The Buckeyes are 19-10 in your lifetime in the rivalry and that still feels shitty because it includes a full decade of sadness, the most recent part of it compounded annually.

Winning The Game is so much more important than the 27 national titles Ohio State failed to win since your world debut. Natties require four full months of operational excellence along with competitive stamina, cooperative selection committees and cosmic good fortune.

Losing in any postseason is lousy, but losing to Michigan stays with you long after that Saturday. Winning that game delivers a unique feeling of bliss with equal staying power.

The Buckeyes lost the College Football Playoff semifinal 31-0 to end the 2016 season a decade ago, and yet the third-most memorable game of the 2010s was the Michigan game Ohio State played right before it. I have no idea what other college football rivalry games are like, but that feels unique.

RELATED The Promise (2014)

Beating Michigan comes first, forever. National titles are a distant but treasured second. Securing individual awards of historic esteem for coaches and players, which feeds the program testimony that fuels recruiting legends who aren't just shopping for short-term cash - that's third.

And fourth will be decided in Downtown Indianapolis on Saturday night. Let's get Situational.

OPENER | DEVELOPMENT ARRESTED

Michigan went 9-3 this season. It went 8-5 last season. The Wolverines could have gone 9-3 with former Toledo/Miami-OH Dequan Finn at quarterback. It would have cost less.

But that wouldn't have allowed 2025's top overall recruit Bryce Underwood to develop against a squishy schedule. The Wolverines played three ranked-ish teams this season, and none of those three outings were particularly competitive.

Here's how Underwood's performance varied between Games 2 and 12:

TRUE FRESHMAN BRYCE UNDERWOOD vs. RANKED-ISH TEAMS IN 2025

OPPONENT	ATT/COMP	YDS	AVG	TD	INT	QBR	CAR	YDS	AVG	TD	LONG
@ NO.18 OKLAHOMA	9/24	142	5.9	0	0	44.4	3	(1)	(0.3)	0	9
@ SOUTHERN CAL	15/24	207	8.6	2	1	65.6	5	(4)	(0.8)	0	11
NO.1 OHIO STATE	8/18	63	3.5	0	1	48.8	6	1	0.2	0	7

(Southern Cal was ranked the week before and the week after it hosted Michigan, hence ish)

You see the stinky production and it screams true freshman as it should, but there aren't any others in the history of the sport who signed a 10-figure deal to stay in-state to play for the flagship program. He's 6'4" 227 and runs a 4.58 40 which means those stats also scream Michigan's coaches kept him in bubble wrap.

The program has to anticipate its investment is backloaded for the sophomore and junior seasons because the freshman performance was, uh, freshmany. If Underwood was necessary for the Wolverines to beat their non-ranked opponents, they have much bigger issues than the one I'm about to pile onto.

The QB room up there included a) Top-100 RS-Jr Jadyn Davis b) former UCF/Fresno State Grad Mikey Keene c) former ECU/The U Grad Jake Garcia d) last season's improbable conquering hero Davis Warren and e) some freshman named Chase Herbstreit.

Shorter version: One bust, two Eli Brickhandlers, one Rinaldi tear-jerker and a Symbolic Gesture. Even shorter version: In Case of Emergency, Here Are Some Unplayable Guys.

The Wolverines didn't whiff in the portal like the Buckeyes did in 2025, but stocking the cupboard with warm bodies isn't a plan to hang banners for a hanging banners athletic department with a $10M quarterback. Michigan was barely closer to the expanded playoff with Underwood than it was with Warren last season.

DAVIS WARREN & ALEX ORJI 2024 vs. BRYCE UNDERWOOD 2025

QUARTERBACK	ATT/COMP	YDS	AVG	TD	INT	RATE	CAR	YDS	AVG	TD
DAVIS WARREN	134/209	1,199	5.7	7	9	114.7	17	(22)	(1.3)	0
ALEX ORJI	25/47	150	3.2	3	2	92.6	57	269	4.7	1
BRYCE UNDERWOOD	179/293	2,229	7.6	9	6	131.0	74	323	4.4	5

That's Preferred Walk-On, Guy Who is Four Years Older Than Underwood and Underwood, in succession. Underwood was the best of the three. It's still not acceptable in an era where you're not required to have growing pains if you can write big checks.

Advancing a raw prodigy to something not resembling Expensive Alex Orji requires an incredible amount of player development, and Underwood's live arm shows up with every pass as he targets his own receivers like he's trying to murder them in dodgeball.

It's quite a contrast in personnel philosophy and player development. Julian Sayin - carrying an NIL valuation about 1/10th of what Michigan is paying Underwood - appears to be playing a different sport when the ball leaves his hand. He would be a quick out in dodgeball.

And Ohio State's In Case of Emergency glass has a playable quarterback behind it. The Buckeyes can win with him too. It seems this was a forfeited year at Michigan, traded for Underwood's college acclimation, and it still came within a win of returning to Indianapolis. Not their standard, but impressive nonetheless, even with a squishy schedule.

Their hope is that he develops into a quarterback that can overcome Ohio State's strategy for him on Saturday, which was - quite explicitly - just force Bryce to be a quarterback. Can Michigan...develop that? This guy did his homework and he doesn't think so:

5-star QB and #LSU commit Bryce Underwood had some very interesting comments for his in-state school #Michigan during an interview with @On3sports at the On3 Elite Series pic.twitter.com/EeiBt0V5GF

— Recruits.LSU (@RecruitsLsu) May 29, 2024

Is he simply regurgitating LSU's recruiting pitch, or what [any program goes here] says to every quarterback prospect whenever they find out that Michigan is involved? That's rhetorical.

If Underwood is going to be a difference-maker in a program righteously committed to bludgeoning opponents on the ground, he has to develop measurably better than Orji, J.J. McCarthy, Cade McNamara, Shea Patterson, John O'Korn, Brandon Peters, Wilton Speight, Jake Rudock, Devin Gardner or Tate Forcier did over the past 15ish years.

Maybe he could grow into Larger Denard Robinson, if the coaches will allow him to use the talent his parents bequeathed him sans bubble wrap. They didn't need the Oracle guy's money to buy one of those. Or perhaps they just need Underwood to be a swaggernautical handoff merchant like McCarthy was, but without the benefit of That Which They Refuse To Believe Made Any Difference.

Lean in and keep this between us - the longer Michigan (not Michigan fans, who think Ryan Day's brother is hiding in their attics - the Michigan program) believes 2021-2023 was due entirely to being Leaders and Best, the longer they'll think they're on the cusp of running it back.

In the absence of what's now Show Caused, they went right back to where they were before that all began - a prestigious Opt Out Bowl program. Dare yourself to bet against the school that developed Tom Brady into a 6th round pick. I write a homer column for an Ohio State media company. Should I do it? Okay, fine.

I'll do it. I'll short the development of a guy who needed over ten million reasons to stay at home.

BONUS CONTENT | ALL QUIET ON THE MIDWESTERN FRONT

Shortly after Ohio State's 56-27 win in 2019 - its fourth straight in Ann Arbor - DC Jeff Hafley left to take over at Boston College. This was abrupt and unexpected after just one season in Columbus. Ryan Day lured Kerry Coombs back to campus for a job he had never done before.

And immediately after that, the pandemic locked us in our houses. This created an extended quiet period that all but crushed recruiting efforts, except for programs willing to die trying to beat Ohio State. There was other stuff you probably heard about as well.

Fast-forward to the first full season post-pandemic and nearly two years after 56-27, when Jim Harbaugh declared Michigan would beat Ohio State or die trying. Didn't really know what that meant at the time, but the Wolverines never lost to the Buckeyes again while he was on the university payroll.

Day's chronic inability to understand the rivalry came to a head in 2024. That 2019 win was the most recent one Ohio State would enjoy until this past Saturday. The sequence which began with Hafley's departure, wound its way through five Level 1 NCAA violations and 29 years' worth of Show Cause penalties before ending at midfield in Columbus last Nov 30 is now, mercifully, history.

I've gone back and forth trying to decide if that period of Ohio State football from the 2019 Fiesta Bowl Clemsoning until the Tennessee game last December (the Buckeyes went 50-9 over that stretch, the h o r r o r) was miserable, largely self-inflected and unnecessary. OR MAYBE: Did it unlock an unprecedented era that's only 16 games in-progress?

Seems like good off-season content. Let's check back in approximately four games.

But I do want to memorialize a recurrence since that 2021 game, one Michigan may have won anyway without half the Ohio State roster suffering from the Sparty flu the most curiously sluggish Michigan State team we had ever seen left them with the week prior. Or, in a parallel world where Coombs' indefensible unit is something more Ohio State-ish in nature. Loserish, coping scenarios - basically - nothing the NCAA would investigate.

It was the score: Michigan 42, Ohio State 27. This web site posts stories daily year-round, and starting four years ago the score of that game has shown up in the comments section for, conservatively, well over 100 of them in our social channels and sometimes on the site itself. Buckeyes land a verbal commitment? 42-27. Women's basketball won a game? 42-27.

That's the price of losing. You get to eat that shit until your team lifts the shit-eating mandate on the field. But then five months later Dwayne Haskins died in a traffic accident and we spent quite some time scrubbing all of the 42-27s (and replies) from the comments. This all has to be bots, I thought at first. No actual human would do this.

I wish that was true. Before deleting and banning each account, we'd click through to see who or what was behind posting scores among the eulogies and grief. On many occasions, it was humans with spouses and children who had human friends posting Happy Birthday on their pages.

Then William White died from ALS that summer. 42-27, 42-27, 42-27, here's how you can donate to ALS research, 42-27. More scrubbing. Former OSU captain and Michigan head coach Gary Moeller died that summer. 42-27. 42-27. 42-27. I'll never forget that score. I watched that game once.

Some bots, but a lot of humans as well. The following year, Michigan created a winning streak and the comments expanded to the two scores next to each other. A year later, three. Then four. One month ago I scrubbed a couple of 13-10s from the 11W story on Nick Mangold's passing.

This is not a moment for piety about Michigan fan behavior, because if there's anyone who knows what the underbelly of the Ohio State fan base is like - it's Ohio State columnists who don't write exactly what the underbelly prefers to read.

It is an opportunity to talk to yourself about what kind of a person you want to be in a world where you are empowered to be as shitty as you choose, from the semi-anonymity and comfort of your phone. Some do it under a pseudonym, but - absolutely incredible - far too many Father-Husband Michigan Helmet Background Facebook commenters did it for years while using their government names.

I like to think most if not all of the irredeemable non-bots who behave that way lack the stamina to read this many words, which means there's no better place to hide from them than in the middle of a Situational. Don't be like them. Even if you think no one can see you. Because someone can always see you.

INTERMISSION

The Solo

Last year in an attempt to exorcise the demons of Michigan claiming a national title* songs exclusively from 1997 were sacrificed in this space. This strategy worked marvelously, so this year's theme will be Songs From Any Year Except 1997 or 2023.

It is easily most requested solo I get from readers, which is hilarious for a multitude of reasons.

Since Michigan finally lost the only sporting event capable of obliterating my mental health, we can now tap in this absolute legend from The Lost Boys and finally give The Jacked, Oiled-Up Shirtless Saxophone God the treatment he deserves.

I Still Believe is a real song by The Call, whom you probably only know from their one big hit. The band was not deemed camera-friendly for a movie about Southern California vampires, so it was replaced by the fake band in the scene above. I Still Believe contains a sax solo. Let's answer our two questions.

Is the musician in the video actually playing saxophone?

That's Tim Capello, now 70, still playing, still touring, still shirtless, still jacked, still covered in oil, still ponytailed and still kicking ass. He is the only musician who was allowed to stay in this scene, having been Tina Turner's sax player. Everyone else on stage is barely trying to look like a musician.

Capello plays on the album cut, but this version is poorly synced. VERDICT: no, inconclusive.

does this sax solo slap?

The greatest achievements of the 1980s - in no particular order to avoid being provocative - were the artificial heart, the Space Shuttle, DNA finger printing and this performance. VERDICT: slaps.

The Bourbon

There is a bourbon for every situation. Sometimes the spirits and the events overlap, which means that where bourbon is concerned there can be more than one worthy choice.

Curt Cignetti's Indiana Hoosiers won't have the opportunity to host Ohio State until next season, which will mark the official end of a joke that's been in circulation for, conservatively, 50 years.

It's the Memorial Stadium picture day joke, created by Woody Hayes acolyte Bill Mallory. He was operating the only era of sustained acceptability in program history, and he used to point to the current version of the stadium photo and say to recruits, just look at all of that red.

Buckeyes and Hoosiers look the same from a blimp 5,000 feet above the field, so converting Bloomington into Columbus West was a recruiting favor back during the decades when Indiana retained unemployable losers like Tom Allen, Bill Lynch and Cam Cameron - who each made sure the Hoosiers were everyone else's Homecoming away from home.

That's all changed now, as IU finally got serious about football. Jimmy Red corn, once two cobs away from extinction was brought back to life right around the time college football moved toward its playoff format. One of the byproducts of that effort is Jimmy Red bourbon.

If Bob Evans was a distillery, it would pour Jimmy Red. I couldn't stop thinking about the peanut butter pie slice and side of bacon I used to get there before tolerating high school. I got my hands on their straight bourbon; they have a sherry cask finish I have not tried.

Nila Wafers on the nose, over-syruped waffles on the palate and it clings to the roof of your mouth at the finish, almost oily. Available online and in clever liquor stores. Go Big Red.

CLOSER | RUTHLESS PEOPLE

Do you remember the last time Ohio State clinched the conference by playing Indiana? This is one of those open-book exam questions. Photo directly above can help you answer it.

Saturday will be the first time since 1996 that the Hoosiers are the final boss standing between the Buckeyes and some hardware. That late-stage Mallory team was a winless pain in the ass for everyone it played, including Ohio State. The Buckeyes survived and clinched their first Rose Bowl in a decade.

Don't ask about the following week. I was a year removed from living in Bloomington myself.

The last time the Indiana Daily Student newspaper published a story about an IU postseason football win, I was a copy editor at Ernie Pyle Hall. The current staff's parents might have been around for that Copper Bowl shutout over Baylor, but the number of IDS writers who have written a story about the Indiana Hoosiers assuming a no.1 ranking in college football is exactly zero.

So is Saturday the biggest game in program history? Yes, no hesitation. For maybe a month. Let's talk about Ohio State's opponent, which is not doing anything this season with smoke and/or mirrors. We'll get back to the game in a moment.

Curt Cignetti is ruining college football by making the impossible a reason to be impatient everywhere else. Indiana always capable of being good - if you've read me for awhile, you know I'm good for an IU Football Actively Chooses to Be Shitty story every couple of seasons. They didn't care about football, and it showed.

IU turned that page with Cig. The floor should be 7-5, but two years in that now feels like it would be a massive disappointment. Every win in Bloomington under him has been of the authentic culture variety, and this season they have their best quarterback since Antwaan Randle El (still the best QB in program history).

If you don't love Fernando Mendoza, that's a character flaw you should look into and remedy. Here he is after beating Stanford last year on the same day the Buckeyes were dispatching his future team.

Mendoza joining his brother Alberto in Bloomington for a year was a coup for a program that's now activating a winning foundation in an era where programs are no longer required to spend a few seasons waiting for $10M freshmen to grow up.

As for the two 12-0 teams facing each other Saturday, it's very easy to look at the schemes and starters and conclude that this will be a sledgehammer game until the 3rd quarter where the disparity between Indiana's 33rd-best guy on the roster and Ohio State's starts to show itself. I don't think that's the way to speculate. Day and Cignetti might publicly disagree with this, but the playoffs haven't actually begun yet.

If both programs are as good as the analytics would lead anyone to believe, then this Saturday's meeting is a Part One affair. They'll see each other again in January. That puts data collection on Saturday at a premium. What's more important, the first game of the postseason, or the last one?

I don't see either team exhausting the entire arsenal in Indy, but only one of them has operated in 2nd gear all season. IU has never been ranked no.1 before and only has two conference titles.

Ohio State has been no.1 since September and has only two conference titles since 2019. Both fan bases would agree that their respective droughts have been unacceptable and horrifying.

The Buckeyes have beaten every opponent this season the same way, which is the way of their choosing and seemingly predetermined. The Hoosiers have survived the talented teams they've faced and ruthlessly bludgeoned everyone else. That's their way.

SITUATIONAL ARCHIVE The Situational Whiskey Cellar

The conference title and in all likelihood the Heisman trophy will be determined in Indy, but depending on how the game is won, the winner is at risk of creating a January problem when they meet again.

The most dangerous version of either team is Ohio State's 2nd half against Penn State, its only accelerator moment of the season. We'll have to see if that's a pedal Day chooses to press prior to the CFP. I do not think he will. He's been down this road before.

Thanks for getting Situational today. Go Bucks. Beat Indiana.