No Divisions Makes Ohio State vs. Michigan Big Ten Championship Real Possibility

Athletics directors Ohio State's Gene Smith and Michigan's Warde Manuel are in agreement that the possibility of two-consecutive Buckeyes-Wolverines games is best for the Big Ten.

Picture the scene: you're just getting over your turkey coma hangover from Thanksgiving Day and you're gearing up for one of the best games on the entire college football slate.

The Ohio State-Michigan game is a deep-rooted rivalry played at the tail end of the regular season, and, in the case of the past two seasons, it's for all the marbles. The Wolverines won "The Game" and went on to the Big Ten Championship, while the Buckeyes, who had the second-best Big Ten record overall in both seasons, watched from the couch while the Big Ten West representative played in the conference title game.

However, with the conference eliminating divisions in 2024 and sending the best two teams to the Big Ten Championship, there's a chance that Ohio State and Michigan could play each other in back-to-back weeks.

"We agreed to that for the betterment of the whole, the betterment of the league relative to our overall scheduling format and our television partners," Ohio State athletics director Gene Smith said on "B1G Live" Thursday. "At the end of the day, we needed to accept that as a possibility."

This isn't the first time in conference history that "The Game: Big Ten Championship Edition" could have happened, though.

In the first three seasons of the Big Ten Championship from 2011-13, Ohio State was in the Leaders division while Michigan was in the Legends. However, the two rivals never met in the title game in that three-year window.

The Legends and Leaders divisional format was scrapped in 2014 for the East and West with the additions of Maryland and Rutgers to the Big Ten. The Buckeyes and Wolverines were both placed in the East, thus eliminating the possibility of squaring off in Indianapolis.

Aside from the past two seasons, the only other time that "The Game" decided the Big Ten East winner was in 2018. Ohio State, with one Big Ten loss to Purdue, handed Michigan its first conference loss, and the Buckeyes went on to Indianapolis to play Northwestern which lost to the Wolverines head-to-head earlier that season.

The closest Ohio State and Michigan have come to facing each other in the postseason was in last year's College Football Playoff, where the Buckeyes and Wolverines lost their respective semifinal games by a combined seven points.

For the people that say the two meetings twice in a year takes away from the magnitude of Ohio State-Michigan, that's preposterous.

You don't think after the Buckeyes got run out of their own building in the second half, they wouldn't come out fired up and ready for a rematch with Michigan one week later?

Short answer: they'd be fired up. Long answer: they'd be really fired up.

The Buckeyes and Wolverines could theoretically play as many as three head-to-head matchups with the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams in 2024, and in each contest, both teams will play each other harder than any other game they played that season.

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