What does it mean that Ohio State lost to Michigan?

College football used to demand perfection from champions—but Ohio State proved sometimes the sport's best team loses a few games. Can CFB keep the vibes we love, about our sport, even as it changes?

Companies selling Ohio State national championship memorabilia might be surprised to receive a couple of orders from Ann Arbor. Like so many other pieces of championship apparel produced over the years, this commemorative football and this shirt include the results of all the games the champions won en route to their title. But unlike every other piece of college football championship merch ever made, those results include two losses, including one in Ohio State’s annual rivalry game with Michigan. That means people ordering this piece of Ohio State Championship commemorative gear are getting a side order of Devastating Rivalry Game Loss commemorative gear¹:

Ohio State very clearly the best team in college football this year. As I wrote about last week, they were simply more talented than everybody else.

They faced what is surely the toughest playoff gauntlet ever, including matchups against the teams which finished the season ranked #2, #3, and #4 in the AP Poll. They won all those games by double-digits. The Buckeyes played the best teams in the country, and were clearly on another level.

It makes you wonder: How the hell did they lose at home a team that sucked as much as Michigan did this season?²

The Buckeyes were 21-point favorites against the Wolverines, who were missing multiple critical players due to injury. Michigan had to start a walk-on at quarterback—not due to injury, just because this year’s Michigan team did not have any good quarterbacks. But Michigan won, 13-10, somehow resistant to Ohio State’s waves of superstars.

The loss drove millions of Ohioans to the brink of madness. Since 2021, Ohio State had gone 42-2 in regular season games against everybody besides Michigan, and 0-4 in the game that mattered the most. The Buckeyes started a fight on the field and a state legislator tried passing a law in the Ohio House of Representatives to make Michigan’s post-game flag-planting celebration a felony. (The bill never made it to a vote, so the next team who beats OSU in the ‘Shoe is good to go.) People wanted Ryan Day’s head. Some said that even a national championship should not save his job.

It felt like a program-defining failure… and in every other year, it would’ve been. But when the pepper spray cleared, Ohio State’s season wasn’t over. Because the playoff tripled in size from four to 12 teams this year, teams like Ohio State that would have been eliminated under prior formats made the playoff made the field with plenty of room to spare. I knew teams like Ohio State would get into the postseason despite losses. I guess I wasn’t expecting them to win the whole damn thing.

It’s surely rude to witness Ohio State’s massive triumph and immediately start talking about their biggest failure. But this is new, and noteworthy. College football has historically demanded near-perfection from its national champions. OSU’s loss to Michigan is almost certainly biggest loss suffered by an eventual national champion in the sport’s history—and if Notre Dame had won the title instead, their loss to Northern Illinois would’ve taken that strange new crown³.

Two months after The Game, Ohio State’s loss to Michigan has become even more confusing. Ohio State’s national championship is forcing us to reckon with new emotions and implications created by an expanded playoff: How does it make us feel now that a team can win the national championship after losing their biggest game of the year?

Ohio State has shifted our understanding of what champions look like… twice.

Ohio State has now demonstrated the shifting stakes of college football’s new championship format by winning a title to erase the stain of a loss that would have previously eliminated them from earlier formats… twice. It’s a real two nickels situation.

In 2014, the College Football Playoff began. But when Ohio State lost a game in week 2 to Virginia Tech, dropping to 22nd in the AP Poll, people assumed their national championship hopes were over. (“The Big Ten is officially eliminated from placing a team in the playoff. It is September 6th,” tweeted fascism-but-make-it-sports promoter Clay Travis.)

The 2014 Buckeyes regrouped, went undefeated in Big Ten play, survived multiple quarterback injuries, dominated the Big Ten Championship 59-0, got the 4th and final spot in the new 4-team playoff, and then crushed Alabama and Oregon with back-to-back 200-yard rushing performances from Ezekiel Elliott to win the title⁴.

Ohio State’s turnaround instantly proved why people had begged for the sports’ new system for so long, and a decade later, still feels like the most captivating championship run of the decade-long 4-team era. And now they’ve done it again.

College football now feels a lot more like every other sport.

In 2007, West Virginia headed into their season ending rivalry game with Pitt in position to make the national championship game. Pitt won, 13-9, ruining West Virginia’s season with a remarkably similar scoreline to Ohio State-Michigan. A decade later, fullback Owen Schmitt was still telling people "we blew it against the shittiest fucking team in the fucking world."

In 2013, Alabama was undefeated heading into the Iron Bowl. They lost on a once-in-a-lifetime play with no time remaining. You may have seen it before. Because of that one loss, a fluky single-score defeat on the road against a top-5 opponent—their championship hopes were over.

Even last year, deep into in the 4-team playoff era, everybody knew what it meant when undefeated Ohio State lost The Game 30-24 to #3 Michigan. It was all over. They finished the regular season ranked 6th and punted on fielding a competitive roster in the Cotton Bowl.

College football is pretty much the only big-time modern sport that has ever been like this. The NFL, the only American major pro sport whose season is realistically short enough to feature a perfect champion, has gone 50-plus years without one. Everybody intuitively understands that the eventual champion might lose a game or four along the way, and it doesn’t diminish their claims to legitimacy. Even at the Olympics, gold medalists sometimes lose in the prelim rounds, but they’re still the best in the world. It even happens at the World Cup sometimes!

But college football’s purity test made the sport unique. There was something thrilling about the way single slip-up could cost a team everything, where every Saturday had potential season-changing implications. “Michigan’s win over Ohio State should have gone down as one of the most painful losses in rivalry week history,” tweeted Georgia writer Graham Coffey. “Instead it doesn’t matter at all. Congrats to everyone who ruined the best regular season in sports.”

As one of the people who pushed for playoff expansion and, I suppose, helped ruin the best regular season in sports, I feel conflicted. I liked the idea that losing The Game served as an an automatic kill-shot for Ohio State, a disqualifier whose loser was exempt from any future success or happiness, a big Scarlet-and-Grey Letter across their chest. (Probably an L instead of an A.) It makes me sad that a team can win this big after losing like that.

But… Ohio State clearly deserved to be in the Playoff. They won the championship! Pretty easily! They finished the season ranked #1 in Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings. In past years, this would’ve made people look at the stat nerds sideways, because their supposed best team didn’t even make the playoff. This year, OSU got to keep playing, and the nerds were proven right. Incidentally, Connelly’s #2 and #4 teams—Ole Miss and Alabama—did not make the playoff. The playoff is only going to get bigger. (Which Ohio State should support, since they win every time the field gets bigger.)

But college football fans can keep college football feeling like college football

Two months ago, I wrote a piece called “They can’t make College Football suck.”

It was about how, in spite of widespread changes in the sport, I had optimism that we could retain some of the things that make the sport special. (One of the things I wrote about was how Ohio State fans were treating the loss to Michigan like the worst thing ever to happen to anybody in planetary history when they still had a pretty good shot to win the championship. Read me now and believe me later.)

The past few weeks have proven that college football fans are uniquely qualified to keep our sport special, even as it sacrifices romance for logic. Our fandom evolved in a system where everybody who wasn’t 12-0 needed to figure out what to care about That meant we got awfully good at finding joys in college football’s crevices, like winning bowl games with no connection to the actual championship structure of the sport, or beating the team you hate the most.

These may be new stories, but they still feel to me like college football stories. There’s a palpable pain in the way Ohio State talks about what they went through. "We knew that we could play better than what we presented," All-American lineman Donovan Jackson told ESPN. "So having people tell us we're trash, terrible, garbage, half of us should transfer, half of us should leave the state of Ohio. No, we know how good we are." The Chiefs do not talk about losing regular season games to the Bills that way.

And look at Michigan fans. Two days after their biggest rival won the national championship, they seem… happy??? Maybe it’s just cope. But they seem to genuinely revel in the absurdity of 13-10, those 60 bizarre minutes when their ramshackle squad discombobulated the future national champions. Are they… are they happier than they were when they won the national championship outright last year? I mean… it seems close? They seem to derive deep satisfaction from casting a small block-M shadow on Ohio State’s brightest moment. Let me tell you: Bills fans absolutely do not talk this way about winning regular season games over the Chiefs.

Our sport may be changing. But ultimately, we control the narratives that come out of it. We may now have never-before-possible commemorative gear celebrating a massive rivalry loss, but no other sport can pack so much meaning into a few words and numbers printed on the back of a t-shirt.

1. Yes, I’m dropping a link with my promo code at Homefield Apparel in case anybody wants Ohio State gear that does not celebrate a Michigan win.

2. I do not need an actual explanation about Michigan’s gameplan and incredible defensive tackles. I am choosing to chalk Michigan’s win up to magic, and so should Michigan fans.

3. I’m also gonna throw in a vote for Georgia losing the 2021 SEC championship game to Alabama and then beating Alabama in the national championship. Still feels wrong to me!

4. (That year, Ohio State beat Oregon 42-20 in the national championship game; this year, Ohio State beat Oregon 41-21 in the Rose Bowl. At this rate expect an Oregon playoff win over Ohio State in the early 2100s.)