ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Out of the snowfall and into the stadium tunnel came a long stream of muscular young men who had just slaughtered a hellacious demon. Their brutality and beauty had just ended 1,463 wretched days of Michigan owning the ha-ha-ha over Ohio State. They hopped and skipped and chirped to their visiting locker room with the exuberance of the victorious and the freed. “It’s definitely something I’ll always remember,” a defensive lineman, Caden Curry, would say.
Pretty soon, along came a bearded man roughly double their age at 46, walking along with his face down and his hell gone. He looked every bit like he had been out in the whipping snow for three hours, but seventh-year Ohio State coach Ryan Day hails from New England, so he has seen some Mother Nature. Somebody walking alongside him said something possibly funny or uplifting. He looked like he smiled.
“I’ve thought, as you can imagine, over the years, [about] after winning this game, what I’d say in the press conference,” Day would say moments later as he began to reflect out loud on No. 1 Ohio State’s 27-9 manhandling of No. 15 Michigan on Saturday after four Novembers of punishing losses to same. “I’m going to save all those comments because I think the best thing to do is win with humility.” He would also say: “To tell you the last four years have been easy is not true. I take the responsibility of being the head coach at Ohio State very seriously.”
One might have guessed he would look relieved or defiant, but he just looked exhilarated. Yeah, somehow, in the ruthless construct of rivalries, especially Ohio State vs. Michigan, the defending national champion coach wound up looking like he had just received a reminder of his own runaway excellence. “So happy for him,” linebacker Sonny Styles said. “Coach Day is an amazing leader.”
After all, to end the endless streak of woe that had tucked itself into the sprawling smiles of recent years, he had brought a team playing some of the highest-level football you’ll ever see. That team had played exactly as it can, with all its uncommon variety, its unusual capacity to master both ruggedness and artfulness. It looks superior to the national champion that preceded it.
It has a defense that hasn’t allowed more than 16 points in a game — Illinois ought to install a little plaque outside its stadium for the achievement — and has allowed only two opponents to exceed 10. Soon Michigan wound up with a puny 42 plays, less than 20 minutes of possession all game, 39 yards after halftime and 8-for-18 for 63 yards passing. Said Styles, “They tried to out-physical us, and we out-physicaled them.” Said Curry, “It definitely feels really good to come up here and physically dominate them like we did today.” Said Day: “They had a great look in their eye. I don’t think there was any doubt when we walked into the stadium what was going to happen.”
It looked like what Styles described with the fresh regime of coordinator Matt Patricia, that former coordinator in the Belichickian Empire up northeast.
“It’s like a sense of ease,” Styles said.
Such a defense wouldn’t let Michigan get close to any late window-dressing touchdown, which would have made defenders mad. “Yeah, of course,” Styles said. “We’re mad about every point.”
Well, their top-rated yards-per-play-allowed stat did just inch upward from 3.757 to 3.765, so maybe they can be mad about that.
And then, Ohio State also has an offense with its customary assortment of beautiful NFL-bound wide receivers, especially Jeremiah Smith and Carnell Tate, but also with a versatile marvel of a running back named Bo Jackson, and a quarterback whose precision and capacity for wise decisions tend to belie his age, which is 20. There was Julian Sayin, a San Diegan even, playing in the snow at 19 for 26 for 233 yards and three touchdowns, including a seeing-eye 35-yard throw to the right sideline on fourth and five to Smith and a 50-yard loft to Tate on which, Sayin said, “I feel like the whole sideline was …” — and then he inhaled dramatically.
“It was funny,” Sayin said. “Around like the second or third quarter, I was just looking around, seeing all the snow coming down, and I was like: ‘This is pretty cool. This is pretty fun.’”
Then, from the 5:06 mark of the third quarter to the 8:10 mark of the fourth, the offense displayed an altogether different knack: pounding. It kept the ball through 20 bruising plays, play upon play upon play. It could do that, too. “It was great to be able to dominate and pound our way down the field like that,” said Jackson, who finished with 117 yards on 22 carries. The trickle of exits became a gusher after Jayden Fielding’s field goal made it 27-9, such that Sayin noted, “We cleaned out the place.”
All the prowess at such high levels seemed to make the big screaming thing of the occasion — Michigan’s four-game winning streak in the rivalry, especially its baffling 13-10 win of 2024 — feel secondary. The 111,373 viewers at Michigan Stadium had attended some sort of football art installation. “Before this game,” Styles said, “we talked about not caring about what happened in the past, and [how] this team’s different, and [how they should] play for the love of your brother, not for the hatred of the other team.”
It’s just that all that unusual master did wind up reflecting upon Day, the one person with the hardest knowledge of the brunt of the 42-27 in Ann Arbor (2021) and the 45-23 in Columbus (2022) and the 30-24 in Ann Arbor (2023) and the 13-10 in Columbus (2024), and the daze from those days. “When you don’t accomplish those things,” he said of Ohio State’s declared No. 1 priority, “you take it personally.” Then when you do, and when your football team looks better than any team has a right to look but also as great as your fans think it should look, you finally get to walk a tunnel in catharsis. You finally say, even on the way to the Big Ten championship game at 12-0, “It’s one of those moments that you just want to grab onto for a while.”
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