Who Really Runs the Big Ten: Ohio State or Michigan?

Ohio State runs the Big Ten — or does it?

The Buckeyes want to be heard on this point: They’re defending nothing. They’re chasing everything. And everything better mean Michigan.

Ohio State players line up opposite Michigan players on Nov. 30, 2024, at Ohio Stadium. (Photo by Ian Johnson/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

It’s a sentiment that most competitors would embrace. Enter the silo. Silence the outside. Secure and protect. Focus on what’s to come, not what has come to pass.

However, that’s not what we do with defending national champions, especially when they’ve not beaten their arch nemesis since 2019 and haven’t won the league championship in a conference they claim to rule since 2020. 

Not only has Michigan — Ohio State’s enemy now and forever — won three of the last four Big Ten titles and claimed the 2023 national title, but the Wolverines have watched an entire class of Buckeyes go winless against a program they refer to as “That Team Up North.”

The best tact, the best take, in any conversation where points must be made, is sharpening the truth into an iron point, especially when sliced at a rival. And that is what Michigan defensive end Derrick Moore did on Thursday when asked what he thought about Ohio State winning its most recent national title. 

“First, I’d like to congratulate them on the win,” Moore said. “But you know it’s not a real win if y’all [Ohio State] ain’t beat us.”

Moore went on to elaborate on his statement, noting the first-year 12-team College Football Playoff and where the Buckeyes would have ended up had it not been for the expanded field.

“If the playoff expansion wasn’t around, they wouldn’t have won the national championship. So we pretty much look at it like, y’all had a nice, little, easy run. But we helped y’all along the way. We pretty much helped y’all build back up. But after that, they dominated everybody that came in front of them, so, I’ve got to give all the credit to them.”

Ahem: Where’s the lie? Ohio State, being the No. 8 seed, would likely have been left out of a four-team playoff. And that loss to an unranked seven-win Michigan team would’ve slammed the door on a conversation to get the Buckeyes in among most rational fans and, more importantly, a rational selection committee.

Derrick Moore #8 of the Michigan Wolverines runs a play during the fourth quarter of a game against Ohio State. (Photo by Ben Jackson/Getty Images)

Remember this: Michigan ran the table in 2023. The Wolverines ran through Ohio State without their head coach on the sideline, right through their competition in the Big Ten title game and over Nick Saban’s Alabama team and Kalen DeBoer’s Washington team to win the title. If not all national champions are alike, 2023 Michigan looks a lot like 2018 Clemson and 2024 Ohio State looks a lot like 2007 LSU.

It’s one thing to win the national title. It’s another for Ohio State or Michigan to beat the other, and that is by design. For so long, we’ve lived for rivalry games because it wasn’t that long ago that we counted votes to decide who the national champion was. No one was really playing for one as much as they were playing for the right to point at someone else in a game that mattered more than it should and say, “I beat you.”

That’s what Ohio State-Michigan is all about. 

It’s about eight consecutive losses from 2012 to 2021. It’s about Urban Meyer never knowing what it’s like to lose to Michigan, and it’s about Ryan Day knowing those four losses to the Wolverines might mean more to OSU fans than his one national title.

It’s about red X’s on all words that begin with the letter “M” during the week of The Game. It’s about 62-39 (2018), 56-27 (2019) for Ohio State, followed by 42-27 (2021) and 45-23 (2022) for Michigan. It’s about Michigan closing the gap from laughable in 2020 to “We Own You” in 2024.

It is reasonable that comparing how you win is as important as winning, especially given the Midwest penchant for fair play and taking the rough road, because it’s the right way. And that brings us to the obvious rebuttal, where Ohio State might look at Michigan and ask, sincerely, “didn’t they cheat?”

Michigan defensive back Rod Moore (9) holds up a Michigan flag at midfield after the Wolverines defeated the Buckeyes. (Photo by Ian Johnson/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

Here’s what we know: The NCAA launched an investigation early in the 2023 season amid allegations that Michigan used a robust in-person scouting and sign-stealing operation. The Wolverines served a penalty for this in the same season for which they won the national title, as the Big Ten suspended Jim Harbaugh for the final three regular-season games of the year after its investigation concluded Michigan had violated conference sportsmanship rules via an impermissible in‑person scouting operation.

Just two months ago, according to reports, Michigan proposed suspending current coach Sherrone Moore for the third and fourth games of the 2025 season for deleting a thread of text messages as the scandal broke. Then, this past week, Big Ten commissioner Tony Petitti reportedly sent a letter to the NCAA Committee on Infractions suggesting that Michigan’s football program should not face more sanctions stemming from the sign-stealing scheme.

I think what galls most folks isn’t that Michigan wasn’t punished, but that the program was not punished harshly enough for its transgression. After all, Ohio State likely lost a chance to play for the 2012 national title because, after a 12-0 season, it was forced to serve a bowl ban because players sold memorabilia. Today, that feels quaint.

Had some of these events not occurred, the question would remain: Who runs the Big Ten? In a season where the conference could win a third national title in as many years for the first time in the CFP era and in a league that Michigan helped found in 1896, which now features four programs in their second year as members, the consistent excellence of Penn State and the awakening of Indiana, now is the moment for the conference’s two best programs over the last five decades to throw down a gauntlet. 

Come Nov. 29 at the Big House in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the last two national champs will meet, and we’ll look at the scoreboard to see who really runs this league, and, perhaps, the sport.

RJ Young is a national college football writer and analyst for FOX Sports and the host of the podcast “The Number One College Football Show.” Follow him at @RJ_Young.

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