![]() National championships have been won and lost in The Game. (Michigan is “ that team up north” in Ohio State parlance.) Twenty times, these two have faced off with both ranked in the top 10 of the AP poll. The Buckeyes and Wolverines are two of the premier programs in the sport, and hate each other so thoroughly that their fans refuse to say each other’s names aloud. ![]() Ohio State–Michigan is definitely a rivalry game that matters. Yet while one of the programs hangs national championship banners, the other mostly reminisces about that one time it took down its rival. These games can still be magical for the once-a-decade upsets they produce. One team simply has other games that it cares about more, and bigger dreams than just beating the team from across the state. It’s not that these teams and fan bases don’t hate each other-you really start to despise the guys who kick your ass every year-but that hate tends to be one-sided. The teams play for some trophy named the Governor’s Bell or the Ol’ Maple Clogs, and it collects cobwebs in the back of the trophy case at the facility of the powerhouse program that sleepwalks through a win every season. The era when the programs involved were equals is decades in the past, if it ever existed. Then there are the games that just so happen to get played every year. But when there’s one game on the schedule that both teams want to win more than any other, it always matters. Some of these don’t feature teams in the national title hunt, like Army-Navy or Harvard-Yale. Even if one team is having a down year- especially if one team is having a down year-these are fun to watch, because that’s when things get weird, and weird is the best quality in college football. Some of these, like the Iron Bowl between Alabama and Auburn and the Red River Showdown between Texas and Oklahoma, are brand-name brawls that routinely alter the course of a college football season. You know all about the games that matter. ![]() There are two types of college football rivalry games: the ones that matter, and the ones that just so happen to get played every year. ![]()
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