Michigan OL Trevor Keegan: 'If we don't win this game, the season doesn't matter'

Every season since 1935 (except 2020), Michigan Wolverines football has played Ohio State at the conclusion of the regular season. In 49 of the games since then, ‘The Game’ had the potential for a major impact on the Big Ten standings, according to the U-M program.

Winning this game isn’t just the primary goal for each team, but the stakes are extremely high. They actually couldn’t get any higher — with the Big Ten championship and a berth to the College Football Playoff also on the line.

Back when head coach Jim Harbaugh was Michigan’s quarterback in 1986, he said, “If we win this game, it’s a successful season. If not, then it’s not a successful season.”

Simple enough. Thirty-six years later, one of Harbaugh’s captains, graduate left guard Trevor Keegan, agrees. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

“This game will always feel different,” Keegan said Tuesday after practice. “I grew up in this rivalry, and it’s always had a special place in my heart, because my mom is from Livonia, 20 miles away, a lot of my family is from Ohio. So, for me personally, it’s always the biggest game of the year for me. I know all of the guys on the team feel that way, as well. This is the game that we work for every day. You see it all around the building, ‘What are you doing today to beat Ohio State?’ Now that it’s here, it’s come to fruition, all of our work is going to play off and it’s going to show.

“We think about that every day. This is a game that we prepare for. If we don’t win this game, the season doesn’t matter. All of our goals are right there in front of us. We want to win the national championship, we want to win the Big Ten championship. And we gotta beat the team down south in order to do that.”

Keegan had numerous offers from other high-level programs, but he chose to come to Michigan due in part to a pitch from Harbaugh that included selling the opportunity to play against, and beat, the Buckeyes.

“You come here for this game. This is the reason why I came here,” the Michigan lineman explained. “I had offers from multiple different schools, but before I committed, Coach Harbaugh said, ‘You’re going to be part of the team that beats Ohio State.’ And that was a selling point.

“Now that it’s come to fruition, we’re going to keep doing it. It’s special, man. This game is special. It’s more than just a game. It’s a whole year — you’ve got bragging rights for a whole year. It’s special.”

Keegan knows Michigan’s pass protection will have to be on point. The Wolverines failed to protect junior quarterback J.J. McCarthy early in a win over Penn State and saw him pressured on 32 percent of his dropbacks — getting sacked once and hit a few other times — at Maryland last weekend.

“Obviously, pass protection, we haven’t been as crisp and clean,” the Michigan lineman admitted. “You can say what you want about the Penn State game. We couldn’t hear the cadence. Anybody could’ve been put in a bad spot there, but that’s not an excuse. We’re going to have to crisp things up, and we know that. It’s a huge game for us, and as you can see the last 20 years, this game is dependent on the trenches and whoever can rush the ball best. We know that’s really important for our unit, and we gotta take full advantage of that.”

Running the ball is important, too, as Keegan noted. In the last 21 meetings between the Wolverines and Buckeyes, the team with more rushing yards came out on top.

“I think they would do everything to stop the run, which a lot of teams have, and we’re just going to have to find new ways to get hats on hats, create better rushing lanes and be all on queue and in sync and on point,” Keegan said. “It’s going to be super vital in this game to come out with a victory.”