Lord Stan The Man

The biggest rivalry meant for October? Red Sox-Yankees, not Bo's Wolverines and Woody's Buckeyes.

“The Game,” contested between sworn enemies Michigan and Ohio State, is played each season on the third Saturday of November, a date as entrenched as Thanksgiving falling on the fourth Thursday of the same month.

But this year, the Big Ten scheduling gods have already drawn the ire of your humble narrator, as they have decided to place the contest a week later. Proponents argue that the pushback will minimize the effects of the long layoff between the Big Ten season and the bowl games, an excuse used by the conference for poor January performances the past few years.

While the one-week pushback is troubling enough, it appears the Big Ten is willing to reduce the tradition of college football’s greatest rivalry even more. According to Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports, “The Game” will be moved to October when the conference adds Nebraska and a Big Ten Championship Game for the 2011 football season. Bo and Woody each just rolled over in their respective graves.

For fans all over the world of both schools, “The Game” is like Christmas. The league apparently wants to place Michigan and Ohio State in separate divisions, meaning they could meet in the Big Ten title game. For obvious reasons, the league doesn’t want the schools facing off in back-to-back weeks, so apparently it has simply decided to move Christmas to October.

To continue with the ridiculous yet accurate holiday analogy, for Wolverine and Buckeye fans alike, it would be like moving Christmas a month earlier just because New Year's is a week later. Michigan vs. Ohio State is synonymous with the last game of the season, and moving it to the middle of the schedule would greatly diminish the rivalry.

“As a former player and fan of the game, there’s something missing from the sport when you don’t have the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry in late November,” Wolverine legend Desmond Howard said of the potential scheduling change.

Take a look at college football’s greatest rivalries. Michigan-Ohio State, Auburn-Alabama and Army-Navy are all the final games of the season for the teams involved. And trust me, if Texas-Oklahoma had been played on the final Saturday of the season all these years, that rivalry would have taken on a whole new significance in that part of the country.

Here’s the answer to the issue, Big Ten: Don’t put Michigan and Ohio State in the same division!

For years, “The Game” basically served as the Big Ten championship, with the winner advancing to the Rose Bowl. With the new Big Ten title game in place, this obviously will not be the case, but surely the winner of the contest would often represent its division in the title game. Michigan vs. Ohio State, in many years, would likely serve as a playoff game, with the winner advancing to the Big Ten Championship. This way it would still be the last game of the regular Big Ten season for each team. Tradition would be preserved, and the game would still have huge meaning.

I hope Jim Delany understands this. But with athletic directors, coaches and columnists beginning to publicly comment on the possibility of Michigan and Ohio State playing twice in one season, I’m beginning to fear that the Big Ten has forgotten its greatest tradition.


You can e-mail Stanley at lordstantheman@gmail.com with any comments or questions. Stanley writes a Detroit Lions blog for NFL.com's Blog Blitz powered by SportsFanLive.com.