The coronavirus pandemic upended Ohio State’s football season in 2020.
It began with the postponement of games until late October, shortening the Buckeyes’ schedule, and continued with the implementation of health and safety protocols that included daily COVID-19 testing for players and coaches and attendance restrictions that left stadiums without fans in the stands.
But one of the strangest elements of the unusual year was the absence of OSU’s annual rivalry game against Michigan.
The Wolverines suffered a COVID-19 outbreak in December, leading to the cancellation of The Game, a staple of the end of the regular season. The Big Ten deemed it a “no contest.”
It was not uncommon for games to be called off amid the public health crisis six years ago. A week before the Wolverines were scheduled to visit Columbus, they canceled a game against Maryland due to a surge in positive cases. Outbreaks also led to the scrapping of two of the Buckeyes’ previous games.
The announcement still proved jarring. It was the first time since the 1917 season that the bitter rivals would not play each other.
“They were very devastated that we’re not playing that game,” coach Ryan Day said during his weekly radio show on 97.1 The Fan two days following the cancellation. “We’ve been really looking forward to playing these guys, all of us.”
The cancellation had little impact on the Buckeyes’ path to the postseason. The Big Ten removed a minimum-game requirement for its conference championship game, allowing the Buckeyes to represent the East Division despite having played only five games during the regular season. They would meet Northwestern to win the league title by a score of 22-10.
The Buckeyes also remained on a path toward the College Football Playoff, making the four-team bracket as the No. 3 seed and reaching the final, where they ultimately lost to Alabama 52-24, the last national championship team of the Nick Saban era.
But 2020 was not without significance on the rivalry as the pause zapped Ohio State’s momentum in the series.
The Buckeyes had been dominant against Michigan for two decades. When Day led them to a rout in his first year at the helm in 2019, it marked a school-record eighth straight win over the Wolverines.
Had they played during the pandemic-plagued year, the Buckeyes would have been heavily favored to throttle their rivals and tighten control of the rivalry. They had opened as 30-point favorites over the Wolverines, the largest point spread since at least 1993, two days before the cancellation.
The programs were on divergent paths at the time. Ohio State was unbeaten, and Michigan was in a tailspin, heading toward a 2-4 finish that would be its first losing season since 2014 and put coach Jim Harbaugh on the hot seat.
Harbaugh, spared from a potentially embarrassing defeat, a setback that might have further threatened his job security, took a pay cut to remain at his alma mater and remade his staff, bringing back only two assistant coaches the following year.
The staff makeover in the immediate aftermath of 2020 included hiring defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald, an up-and-coming assistant who had spent the previous seven seasons in the NFL with John Harbaugh’s Baltimore Ravens. Macdonald is now the coach of the Seattle Seahawks, who won the Super Bowl last February.
Michigan bounced back in 2021, making the playoff and capturing its first outright Big Ten championship since 2003.
The breakthrough included a 42-27 win over Ohio State that ended the Wolverines’ years-long slide.
Without the interruption in the series, Day might have started 2-0 against Michigan, furthered his early success and reinforced the gap between the programs.
The cancellation elevated the significance of the Wolverines’ win in 2021, allowing Harbaugh to even his record against Day and pour salt in the wounds of his coaching counterpart.
Following Michigan’s triumph, he took a veiled shot at Day for inheriting a program rebuilt by Urban Meyer.
“Sometimes people that are standing on third base think they hit a triple,” Harbaugh said, “but they didn’t.”
The victory proved a turning point with Michigan wresting control of the rivalry moving into the 2020s.
Ohio State would lose four straight games to the Wolverines, their longest skid since 1988-91, before a 27-9 win in Ann Arbor this past November.
The fallout from 2020 has made the cancellation as much an intriguing ‘what-if’ as a pandemic oddity.
Would Harbaugh’s tenuous job status have survived another loss to Ohio State? Would Day have been emboldened by another blowout win? Does the balance of the rivalry avoid swinging toward Michigan?
As 2021 became a seismic shift for The Game, it’s worth pondering if the tilt began a year earlier with an unprecedented pause.
Joey Kaufman covers Ohio State football for The Columbus Dispatch. Email him at jkaufman@dispatch.com and follow him on @joeyrkaufman on X.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Ohio State-Michigan game canceled by COVID-19 in 2020 — and the rivalry shifted
Reporting by Joey Kaufman, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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By Joey Kaufman, Columbus Dispatch | USA TODAY Network
