Ohio State is coming off the best season of all time for a team that finished in fourth place in the Big Ten. After missing out on the Big Ten Championship Game following their fourth straight loss to the Michigan Wolverines, the Buckeyes ran through Tennessee, Oregon, Texas and Notre Dame en route to winning the national championship.
But the Buckeyes will always have an asterisk next to their 2024 football season, and one of Michigan’s defensive leaders wanted to remind everyone of that. Speaking
at Big Ten Media Days in Las Vegas on Thursday, senior edge rusher Derrick Moore presented some key facts regarding Ohio State’s natty.
“First, I’d like to congratulate them for the win, but you know it’s not a real win if y’all didn’t beat us,” Moore said. “But you know, I’m gonna congratulate them on the win, but this year it’s gonna be different.
“I was hoping for them to lose, but at the end of the day, they won. They deserved it, they worked hard for it. Can’t take anything away from them.”
Ohio State fans probably won’t like reading this, but Moore simply presented a fact: Ohio State’s national championship isn’t as good as Michigan’s because the Buckeyes lost to their biggest rival the same year. Michigan, meanwhile, went 15-0 — including a win over Ohio State — in its national championship season the year prior.
Not done yet, Moore took it a step further and presented another fact — if the College Football Playoff hadn’t been expanded to 12 teams, the Buckeyes wouldn’t have won their national championship.
“With this playoff extension — if the playoff extension wasn’t around, they wouldn’t have won the national championship,” Moore said. “So we pretty much look at it like, hey man, y’all had a nice little, easy little run. But we helped y’all along the way. We pretty much helped y’all build back up. But like I said, after that game, they dominated everybody who came in front of them, so I gotta get a lot of credits to them.”
I’m sure this will be bulletin board material for the Buckeyes back in Columbus, but regardless of whether or not Ohio State is the defending national champion, the Wolverines have still handled business the last four seasons. That includes a massive 13-10 upset victory last year on Ohio State’s home turf when Michigan was a three-touchdown underdog by the oddsmakers.
At the end of the day, this is all fun and games. Big Ten Media Days is a chance for some guys to chirp a little bit before the football season begins. Of course, this could come back to haunt Moore and the Wolverines if they don’t end up backing up the talk and beating Ohio State at home this year, but the fact is nobody can say what Moore said was wrong. He’s simply stating the facts.
