Michigan–Ohio State football rivalry
The Game
The Michigan–Ohio State football rivalry, referred to as The Game by some followers, is an American college football rivalry game that is played annually between the Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State Buckeyes. As of 2025, Michigan has the most wins and Ohio State has the second most wins of any program in NCAA Division I football history. The rivalry has gathered profound national interest as many of the games determined the Big Ten Conference title and the resulting Rose Bowl Game matchups, as well as the outcome of the NCAA Division I college football championship. In 2000, the game was ranked by ESPN as the greatest North American sports rivalry ever. The rivalry is listed in Rivals!: The Ten Greatest American Sports Rivalries of the 20th Century, published by Wiley. Encyclopædia Britannica includes the rivalry as one of the ten great sports rivalries in history.
The teams first met in 1897 and have played annually all but once since 1918. The only break in over a century came in 2020 due to a COVID-19 outbreak on Michigan's football team during the COVID-19 pandemic. The game has been played at the end of the regular season since 1935 (except for 1942, 1986, 1998 and 2020). Since 1918, the game's site has alternated between Ann Arbor, Michigan (in odd-numbered years) and Columbus, Ohio (in even-numbered years), and has been played in Ohio Stadium since 1922 and Michigan Stadium since 1927.
“Michigan–Ohio State football rivalry” enters the record as the Game. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Michigan, Ohio and State can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6837857. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2025, 2000, 1897 and 1918.
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This entry incorporates text from “Michigan–Ohio State football rivalry” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.