Even Ohio State football greats go winless vs. Michigan, but the legacy of the returning 2024 Buckeyes is unwritten (2024)

Ohio State receiver Marvin Harrison Jr. (18) sat disappointed on the MIchigan Stadium turf after another loss to Michigan last season. He is one of several Buckeye greats who never won The Game —something the OSU players who put off the NFL Draft to return for 2024 endeavor to avoid.David Petkiewicz, cleveland.com

COLUMBUS, Ohio — For the better part of a generation, one Ohio State football star after another capped his career with the glory of victory over Michigan.

Winning The Game became the default setting for Thanksgiving weekend. It was the football equivalent of the Roaring 20s — a streak of success trending toward dominance in a rivalry unlike any other.

Then came the crash. Listening to C.J. Stroud stand at the lectern in Ohio Stadium’s interview room in 2022, or watching Marvin Harrison Jr. sit behind a microphone at Michigan Stadium last November, the same hollow feeling resonated through the speakers.

Both knew their final chance to ever beat Michigan had come and gone, unfulfilled.

Those two Heisman Trophy finalists — considered among the best to ever play their positions for the Buckeyes — could have come back for a fourth shot at gold pants. Both made prudent choices to set any regret aside and begin their professional careers.

It seems like such a contradiction of terms. The modern standard bearers for OSU greatness at multiple positions combined for zero victories against Michigan. Stroud and Harrison and their recent teammates were not the first, though. They joined an exclusive and unpopular club.

Then the teammates they left behind built an offseason of optimism with pledge after pledge that they would put a stop to this slide.

The five highest-ranked players from the 2021 signing class who remained on the roster last season all put off the NFL Draft to play Year 4. So did three other players who had turned themselves into not only crucial starters but legitimate pro prospects.

Beating Michigan was not the sole motivator drawing them back for another season, but it was a major one. To a man, each returning Buckeye said he could not stomach what he was leaving behind as it pertained to the rivalry game.

With a win in Ohio Stadium on Nov. 30, that group can secure its own collective legacy.

Confronting the finality of their third-year losses in The Game must have been a lonely feeling. However, Stroud, Harrison, Paris Johnson Jr., Jaxon Smith-Njigba and other recent Buckeyes have plenty of company. Even some legendary company. Many of them did not have the option to take yet another shot at a rivalry win.

• College football Hall of Famer Tom Cousineau was the No. 1 overall pick in the 1979 NFL Draft. The linebacker from St. Edward played on teams ranked No. 8, No. 4 and No. 16 when they played Michigan in mid-November. All three of those Wolverine teams, though, were ranked in the top six — and all three won The Game. (All three also went on to lose the Rose Bowl, failing to fully capitalize on their run in the rivalry.)

• Dan “Big Daddy” Wilkinson also went No. 1 overall, in the 1994 draft to the Bengals. He played next to Alonso Spellman in his second season with the Buckeyes and next to Luke Fickell in his third. Yet his tenure comprised the latter half of a six-year OSU victory drought in The Game.

The best his squads could do was a 13-13 tie in 1992. The next year, the year Wilkinson earned first-team All-America honors, the No. 5 Buckeyes went to Ann Arbor and lost to an unranked Michigan team, 28-0.

• Kirk Herbstreit had lost three straight as a Buckeye before that 1992 tie. (He set the program record for completions, since broken, in that game.) As one of ESPN’s featured big game and studio voices, the former quarterback is one of the most visible OSU alums around college football. He was the first player to commit to John Cooper after the coach’s hire in 1988. Those losses in the The Game stuck to the coach’s legacy more than any of the players.

• One of Wilkinson’s and Herbstreit’s early 90s teammates? Current secondary coach Tim Walton, who went 0-3-1 in his career. The secondary he built for this fall — from Denzel Burke and Davison Igbinosun at corner to bringing Caleb Downs in from Alabama at safety — may be instrumental in breaking the current losing skid.

In the case of each of those individuals, some other accomplishment in and around the game comes up before anyone mentions going winless against Michigan. The same will almost surely happen for the recent stars who left Columbus without gold pants. It will look like an anomaly at best, or perhaps a damning indictment of the staff and the program as a whole during this period. One can imagine yet-born Buckeye fans reading back through the team history someday and encountering this victory gap.

“Wait, they had C.J. Stroud and Marvin Harrison Jr. on the same team and couldn’t win?”

That future scarlet and gray fanatic will of course need some additional context. Ohio State’s talent did not dip during the past three years. It did not sink into a prolonged stretch of performance issues which showed up in other games.

After years of dormancy, Michigan elevated back to the upper tier of the sport. The Buckeyes’ response, three years running, has fallen short.

Winning on Nov. 30 to end the streak — and perhaps start another — will boost the current players’ legacies far more than another loss would harm them.

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