The question of “who runs the Big Ten?” Might be obvious to Michigan fans. After all, the Wolverines have won the conference three of the past four years and even in a down season in 2024, managed to beat its biggest rival in Ohio State in shocking fashion for the fourth consecutive season. Michigan has also managed to win a national championship during that stretch in 2023, going undefeated at 15-0 in the last season of the four-team playoff.
The Buckeyes are the defending national champions and went through a gauntlet of a schedule in the playoff to get it done. However, many who cheer for the Maize and Blue look at Ohio State’s accomplishment side-eyed knowing that even in a national championship season, the Buckeyes couldn’t even beat the Wolverines on their home field despite being a 20-plus point favorite.
Even Michigan EDGE rusher Derrick Moore took a shot at OSU’s 2024 national championship run at Big Ten Media Days in Las Vegas this past Thursday, questioning the meaning of a title from a team who didn’t win it biggest rivalry game.
“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 then pointed out that if the playoff expansion hadn’t come to fruition, OSU would have been on the outside looking in during the old playoff format after finishing fourth in Big Ten play during the regular season.
“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.”
Moore’s comments came less than a month after Ohio State sophomore Jeremiah Smith vowed to never lose to Michigan again as long as he is playing for the Buckeyes.
After all the offseason chatter, Fox Sports Analyst RJ Young weighed in on the matter on which program runs the Big Ten, more or less making points on both sides of the argument. When reflecting on Moore’s comments and making the argument on the Wolverines’ side of things, Young wrote this:
“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. 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.”
When making the point on the OSU side of the argument, Young brought up the Michigan’s sign stealing scandal and that Buckeye faithful might look at the Wolverines and ask “didn’t they cheat?” As Young wrote this:
“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 reprotedly 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.”
If Ohio State’s only argument as to whether their program currently runs the conference is to point to Michigan’s sign stealing operation, that seems like a pretty shallow one considering the Wolverines have beaten up on the Buckeyes in the trenches over the past four years, which has been one of the main factors in Michigan turning the tide in the rivalry. On top of that, news that the Wolverines were being looked into for sign stealing was broken well before the teams’ matchup in 2023, so that can’t be used as an excuse for the past two losses.
And in Michigan’s wins in 2021 and 2022, the Wolverines completely dominated both games on the ground, which speaks more to OSU’s inability to get off blocks and get physical at the line of scrimmage than any sign advantage.
Come Nov. 29, the last two national champions and heated rivals will have a chance to perhaps settle which one runs the conference in 2025.
