Staples: Every team in the Big Ten should be rooting for Michigan in The Game

Every Saturday night, Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman react to the weekend’s slate of games on “The Andy Staples Show and Friends.” On Mondays, Andy revisits his and Ari’s biggest takeaway from Saturday night’s instant reaction. This week: Neither Michigan nor Ohio State is riding into The Game with lots of glories. But Michigan has a real chance to change everything … for everyone. 

The biggest game of rivalry week could signal the dawn of a new age in the Big Ten, or it could return the league to a mind-numbing status quo after an anomalous one-season hiatus. Michigan has a chance to change everything. Ohio State has a chance to ensure nothing changes.

Sound hyperbolic? Maybe a little. But such a storied rivalry deserves this brand of hyperbole. Especially when it’s rooted in truth. To understand the stakes on Saturday in Columbus, it’s necessary first to understand some recent history …

The tune was called “Buckeye Swag,” and the title seemed wholly appropriate. The Best Damn Band in the Land blasted that banger through a rapidly emptying Spartan Stadium a little more than 10 years ago. On the field, Ohio State players danced. Even Urban Meyer bobbed his head a little to celebrate a 17-16 win against a Michigan State program that had emerged as one of Ohio State’s chief contenders during the tail end of the Jim Tressel era.

After covering that game, I wrote this message to the rest of the Big Ten in a column for Sports Illustrated:

You are completely screwed.

You might get Meyer this season. His Buckeyes are still fragile and vulnerable at times. Heck, Nebraska might even beat Ohio State in the Horseshoe Saturday. But Meyer will put you through a living nightmare in successive seasons. It won’t last forever, because the same external factors that plagued Meyer at the end of his tenure at Florida exist at Ohio State, but the next few years will be miserable.

Nearly every word came to pass. (Unfortunately for Nebraska, Ohio State won 63-38 the next week.)

The point was that after watching Meyer defeat some of the league’s better programs with a roster consisting of Braxton Miller and duct tape, it was obvious that Ohio State would ascend to a completely different level from the rest of the league. Meyer would build the same kind of roster at Ohio State that he had at Florida. And unlike the SEC, which had Nick Saban and several others who understood what Meyer was doing, the Big Ten coaches were largely unprepared for how thoroughly Meyer would upgrade Ohio State’s talent. Tressel recruited well, but this would be a different beast entirely.

Mark Dantonio’s Michigan State program fought valiantly, beating the Buckeyes for the Big Ten title in 2013 and 2015. Penn State shocked Ohio State in 2016. But eventually, they all succumbed. As Ohio State won the league every year from 2017 to 2020, the Buckeyes were — according to Las Vegas power rankings — usually at least two touchdowns better than every other program in the league.

During that stretch, Ohio State went 31-2 in Big Ten regular-season play and 4-0 in the Big Ten title game. Even though Meyer stepped down after the 2018 season, successor Ryan Day followed the same approach to roster building. And nowhere was the gap between the Buckeyes and the rest of the league more apparent than in the Michigan game. After losing by a butt cheek in 2016, Michigan lost the next three meetings by a combined 63 points.

Too many COVID-19 cases got The Game canceled in 2020, and that was probably for the best for Michigan. It almost certainly would have been another blowout loss. Would that have been the final straw for coach Jim Harbaugh? That’s difficult to say. That year was strange. Perhaps Michigan’s administration would have been satisfied with the same Harbaugh pay cut and coaching staff revamp that happened in our timeline. But what emerged from that turmoil was an entirely different entity.

Harbaugh had been building a roster that he hoped could stymie Ohio State’s athletic advantage through blunt-force trauma.

In defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald — on loan for a year from brother John’s Baltimore Ravens staff — Harbaugh found a tactician who could match wits with Day and Buckeyes coordinator Kevin Wilson. (Harbaugh replaced Macdonald with fellow former John Harbaugh staffer Jesse Minter, and the defense continued to roll.) By moving tight ends coach Sherrone Moore to the offensive line, Harbaugh provided the position group that could do the most damage with the best possible person to teach it how to inflict that damage. In essence, Harbaugh built an old-school Big Ten team capable of playing a modern game.

Combine that with the development of elite edge rushers Aidan Hutchinson and David Ojabo, and you have the recipe for a statement win against the Buckeyes. Ohio State quarterback C.J. Stroud was pounded all day, and Moore’s offensive line mauled a…