Everyone claims The Game is just another football game. Nobody actually believes it.
There’s a dance going on here, and I’m not exactly sure what in the world is going on with the greatest rivalry in sports.
But we should all thank the tortured offseason college football gods that we’re here for it.
New Michigan coach Kyle Whittingham says he doesn’t hate Ohio State, he just wants to win games. Specifically, The Game.
Ohio State coach Ryan Day says it’s no big deal, he just going to change decades of tradition and move Senior Day celebration to the season opener to avoid distractions of preparing for You Know Who in You Know What on the last weekend of the regular season.
Moved the team’s senior tackle event from Michigan week, too. Even told The Best Damn Band in The Land its annual practice visit during Michigan week is no longer.
Frankly, the fact that Day has the guts — and the capital — to stand up to TBDBiTL should be all you need to know about the bizarre twists to The Game, 2026.
Or the game within The Game.
“Hate is a strong word,” Whittingham said of Ohio State last month during Big Ten Media Days.
And you would’ve thought a bomb was dropped right smack in the middle of sacred ground. An impact that oddly left Ohio State fans losing their collective minds, and Michigan fans believing, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Whittingham was playing some chess-level Jedi mind tricks.
Because don’t kid yourself, Whittingham knows exactly what it’s like to play and coach in a game that means everything. He was a star linebacker at BYU as a player, and worked for Utah as an assistant and head coach for three decades.
The Holy War, everyone, is about as mean and nasty and downright disgusting as it gets in college football rivalries. In 2008, after Whittingham’s unbeaten Utah team beat one-loss BYU by 24 in Salt Lake City, a fan held up a large sign in the middle of the on-field chaos of celebration.
It read, ”Where’s your God now?”
Earlier this spring, I reminded Whittingham of that moment when he was sitting his office in Ann Arbor, barely three months into the gig.
“Yeah, that deal is unique. But it’s regional,” he said. “This one is national. This one is really big.”
He gets it. Just like Day gets it — though in a more oddly insecure way.
I’m not sure any coach in the history of The Game was more impacted by the five-season stretch from 2020-24. It began with the 2020 game, which Michigan eventually was forced to cancel because it said it couldn’t field a team with Covid restrictions.
It was earlier that year that then-Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh accused the Ohio State coaching staff of illegal contact with players during the suspension of activities because of the pandemic. You know, the very thing the Michigan staff was accused of, and eventually sanctioned for, by the NCAA.
Day privately told his staff they would “hang a hundred on Michigan,” and the declaration was leaked, and the teams never played — and the next thing you know, Michigan was hanging 42, 45 and 30 on the Buckeyes in successive wins.
Three losses that crushed Day and the Buckeyes, and then a fourth straight that brought the program to its knees. That was the season, in 2024, where Day bared his soul about the previous three losses, and how he compared the rivalry to war.
It’s not war, it’s a game. It’s about preparation and execution and more times than not, who controls the line of scrimmage.
Players win games. Not Jedi mind tricks or changing tradition or post traumatic Michigan disorder.
Ohio State beat Michigan last season in Ann Arbor because it had the better team, the better quarterback and the better coaching staff. The Buckeyes were better prepared, and made it look easy in the cold and snow.
That doesn’t mean we can’t enjoy the offseason dance of how The Game will be won. Or lost.
It will have nothing to do with hate or moving Senior Day festivities to the season opener.
For the winner, anyway.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB. Listen to him daily, from 12-2 p.m., on 1010XL-Jacksonville.