Detailing what made 2021 Michigan win over Ohio State so important

If there was a true seminal moment for Jim Harbaugh and the Michigan football program during his tenure as head coach, it came on Nov. 27, 2021, under a blanket of slate grey clouds on the frozen field of Michigan Stadium.

That, of course, was the afternoon that a one-loss Michigan squad pummeled and ran over a one-loss Ohio State team to win the Big Ten East and advance to the Big Ten Championship Game for the first time. It was the first conference title for Michigan in nearly two decades and helped catapult the Wolverines to three-straight conference crowns, as many College Football Playoff trips and the 2023 National Championship.

Thus, the 42-27 win over the Buckeyes amid flurries and a rekindled belief that Michigan was a true national contender make it arguably the biggest win for the Wolverines in the 21st century.

“But this one really changed the course of the rivalry, kind of like the 1969 game did when, OK, Bo Schembechler comes in and says, ‘Ohio State, now this is our focus,'” The Wolverine’s Chris Balas said with On3’s Andy Staples. “Anything that happens, it all matters, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t beat Ohio State. He kind of set that expectation and Jim Harbaugh, in 2020 after that lousy season and after 2019, he says ‘We’re going to beat Ohio State or we’re going to die trying.'”

Staples posited that many might highlight the 2023 win, which preceded a run to the national championship, might be the pick for many folks, even though 2021 might’ve been the marker of the tides shifting.

And Balas also acknowledged there were a number of noteworthy non-Ohio State games worth mentioning, even if a victory over the Buckeyes was always going to be the choice.

“Well you knew it was going to be an Ohio State game, right, if it’s Michigan?” Balas said. “It couldn’t be anything else. And there have been some classic games with Notre Dame over the years, you have the three overtime game with Michigan State in 2004 everybody calls the Braylon Edwards game. And I’m a little older so I could even go back and remember some of the 80s and even late 70s games.”

But at the end of the day, it was getting over the hump against not only the biggest rival, but the effective obstacle standing between Michigan and true national contention, that wins out for Balas.

“And I think Ohio State fans would say, ‘Yeah, then you’ve got Connor Stalions who went out to games and so on and so forth and that’s how you did it.’ But I don’t think that’s the case at all and I think most people around college football wouldn’t say that. But this is the one,” Balas said about 2021. “It had been 17 years since they’d won a Big Ten title, which is unbelievable. And going back to 2004 and that one was shared. And they just could not get over that Ohio State hump and they had to do it one year, Andy. And to get themselves to believe that they could again and to make this a rivalry again, that’s what made this game so important.”