The Game Still Matters: Michigan and Ohio State, the Hate We Love

There are days on the college football calendar, and then there is this one. Days that feel scripted by something bigger, heavier, more eternal than standings or playoff math. Days that carry the weight of decades and the heartbeat of generations. Days when maize meets scarlet and blue meets gray, and the world, for three hours, turns on a single game and two classic helmets crashing at the line of scrimmage.

Today, at noon, Michigan and Ohio State give us that feeling again.

This rivalry has always been a reckoning, but the game becomes mythic when stakes are involved. A Michigan win, and the Wolverines march toward the College Football Playoff, perhaps toward Indianapolis, toward another chapter in a run no one around here is ready to see end. A loss, and Ohio State gets everything it wants in its sickest imagination — the power to end Michigan’s postseason dream with one swing of its fist. This is The Game at its absolute purest: consequences sharp enough to taste, fear, and hope braided tightly together, everything on the line.

College football, in so many ways, has drifted toward something colder. Endless expansion, restless money, decision-makers more occupied with adding inventory than protecting soul. The postseason ballooning, geography dissolving, traditions bargained away for short-term gain. Sometimes it feels like the sport is being reshaped by people who do not love it deeply enough to understand what they are breaking.

But not today.
Not in Ann Arbor.
Not at noon, on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, as snow curls gently down around the Big House like the sport’s own form of absolution.

Today, everything feels exactly as it should.

Because this rivalry does something no committee, no network, no expansion model ever could — it remembers. It remembers the legends who stepped onto this same grass and changed their lives in a single afternoon. Recently, it was Kalel Mullings dragging tacklers, Blake Corum slicing through souls, Donovan Edwards sprinting into history, Rod Moore sealing the moment, JJ McCarthy refusing to blink, Cornelius Johnson turning a rivalry on its head, and Aidan Hutchinson baptizing the field in noise.

Before them, Woodson. Howard. Braylon. Names spoken like scripture. Names that echo.

And today, we wait for the next one.

Maybe it’s Bryce Underwood, the freshman who grew up dreaming of moments like this. Maybe it’s Andrew Marsh, slippery and fearless. Maybe it’s Jordan Marshall, a son of Ohio looking to carve a new identity in maize and blue. Maybe it’s Derrick Moore, ready to detonate the pocket and etch himself into rivalry lore. Maybe it’s a name none of us have bothered to say out loud — not yet. That’s the thing about this game: a quiet player at 11:59 a.m. can become immortal by 3:30 p.m.

Picture it.
The tunnel.
The banner.
The Big House opening like a cathedral.
The rival colors glaring back.
Breathe in the air.
Snow falling like confetti on a crowd ready to celebrate.

It will feel, as it so often does, like a movie that knows exactly when to cue the music.

Because The Game is not just what college football used to be — it is proof of what it still is, and what it stubbornly, beautifully refuses to stop being. A reminder, once a year, that the sport’s heart still beats loudest in places like this, in moments like this, when everything slows, and two teams step into the center of the country’s attention to fight for something that matters.

At noon, Ann Arbor becomes the axis of the sport again.

And somewhere inside, a new legend waits to be born.

There are games, but this game, is The Game.