i don't mean this dickish, but it might come across that way. if it does, apologies.
but osu doesn't really have a close 2nd rival (or 1b as some call it) like uga (and bama, which is where this comes from for me, i'll explain later). uga has at least 2, maybe 3 (au, tenn, uf) that were on par or close (maybe even above) gt in rivalry status when the domination started. I'll let uga fans tell me if i'm wrong (maybe i am), but that's the way it seems to me.
from my perspective, relevance of the rival matters. tenn just beat bama for first time in 15 years. since 01, it's 17-5 in favor of bama. 01 was end of a decent tenn streak, before couple years back and forth, then bama's dominance. point i'm trying to get to is that rivalry had started to wain a little in last few years. partly because tenn was i shambles, partly cause of bama dominance, but also partly because we had au and kinda lsu to step in as the 'important' game(s) on the schedule. don't get me wrong, we wanted to beat tenn, because F-tenn (that's for you @Drew4UTk ) but it wasn't really a worry or something? don't know how to explain that part.
No, your post didn't come across as "dickish".
Rivalries, IMHO, are built on a lot of things and it is interesting to get other perspectives on them. To that end, could you ever see yourself getting bored with beating Auburn?
I think that two of the biggest things are competitiveness and stakes so I guess I can understand where
@Cincydawg was coming from because:
- UGA/GaTech hasn't generally been all that competitive, and
- The stakes aren't very high since it isn't a league game so it has little or no bearing on postseason destination.
I'm obviously biased but I consider Ohio State/Michigan to be the greatest rivalry in sports and on the two metrics listed above:
Competitiveness:
This is a bit more nuanced than simply looking at the overall winning percentage because in a lot of these long-running rivalries one team or the other dominated early then maybe it got even or flipped. Specifically with tOSU/M, the Wolverines dominated early:
- The Wolverines built a 13-0-2 lead before Ohio State got their first win, and
- After Ohio State's first three wins closed the gap to 13-3-2, the Wolverines took over again with six straight wins to stretch it out to 19-3-2.
Bottom line, from 1897-1927 the Wolverines dominated to the tune of 19-3-2 (a winning percentage of .833). Since then Ohio State has a slight lead at 50-40-4 for a winning percentage of .553.
The thing is that by the time I was in school (mid 90's) basically nobody alive could remember Michigan's six straight wins from 1922-1927 and after that there was a remarkable period of about 80 years in which neither team ever won more than four in a row. The bookends were:
- Michigan won six straight from 1922-1927
- Ohio State won six (or seven depending who you ask) straight from 2004-2009/10.
Ohio State's eight straight from 2012-2019 was the longest streak in the series since Michigan won nine straight from 1901-1909.
In the 80 years from 1928-2007 neither tOSU nor Michigan ever won more than four in a row and the series was exactly even at 38-38-4. HFA wasn't even that big of a factor:
- Michigan led 20-17-3 in Ann Arbor
- Ohio State led 21-18-1 in Columbus.
I don't mean this to say that Michigan isn't entitled to their history, but things fade over time. By the mid 2000's the only fans who could remember Michigan's pre-1928 dominance were at least 90 years old. For most everybody alive the rivalry had basically always been relatively even.
Stakes:
The fact that it is a league game makes the stakes higher because it frequently impacts the league Championship. Ohio State and Michigan played a LOT of "Big Ten Title Games" before there ever was such a thing formally.
With all of that said:
If Michigan had continued losing rather than winning these last two, eventually most non-local fans would get bored with Ohio State beating up Michigan. They would but WE wouldn't. As I said above, even after my team went 17-2 over 20 years from 2001-2020 it NEVER got boring to me.
