Judgement Day: 4 days Out

The media frenzy got off to a nice start on Monday for the OSU-Michigan game. I was afraid it would be real overkill, but so far its almost being covered like the rivalry itself is covered every year, only magnified a bit. My collegues over at the Sports page of the Daily are doing a fine job educating people about this particular game and the rivalry itself in case people don't realize how big it is. I was interested to see how they would cover it because this game hasn't had this much behind it in our lifetimes. I mean, I was in the stands for the '97 game, but Ohio State was the slight underdog, and Michigan was on fire, so this year is even bigger than that.
Ann Arbor News columnist Jim Carty, the best guy out there covering Michigan Football (way better than Mitch Albom), wrote about how much different the media coverage is as compared to the 1973 game, when both teams were unbeaten. In those days, he says. the story about the game was buried in newspapers on like page 6, hardly noticeable unless you were looking for it. He's right. I mean, one look at the ESPN college football page, they have links to about 10 articles already. They've even got some of Bob Ufer's classic calls from a few of the games on their video player. ESPN Classic is replaying about a half dozen of the games from the series (I watched the epic 1969 game before going to class this morning, and wanted to shout "Touchdown Billy Taylor! Touchdown Billy Taylor!" when I entered the lecture hall). After watching that game, it dawned on me that that was my dad's first Ohio State game as a Michigan student, so that's quite a way to introduce a freshmen student to an OSU game. Watching the ESPN 2 show "Cold Pizza" this morning, the two hosts of the show, Dana Jacobson and Jay Crawford, are UM and OSU grads, respectively, and they had famous UM kicker Jay Feely and OSU kicker Mike Nugent making their case for such things as: Which is better, The Big House or the Horse Shoe? Better college town: Ann Arbor or Columbus? Better coach: Bo or Woody? Of course any true Michigan fan knows the answers to such questions.
So far I'm a bit disappointed in the enthusiasm of much of the campus. This place just has too many people that don't really care about football (to which I counter: Why are you here?). I'm sure its there, but I jsut can't see it yet. Hopefully come Friday people will be out in force. Woody Paige and Skip Bayless on "Cold Pizza" this morning were saying that they didn't think this game deserved to be called one of the best games of all time, which of course shocks anyone in Michigan and Ohio. Thier argument was that these two teams don't have some of the legendary players that other rivalries in the past have had. They made constant referral to Oklahoma and Miami games of the past, and even last year's ND-USC game, which is questionable because, as we all know, Notre Dame is dumb. WTKA 1050 AM is doing great stuff on their morning show too. They had Anthony Carter on this morning, and just do a great job getting people fired up for the week.

Jim Carty's Monday Column
Michigan Daily Sports
Ivan Maisel
Gene Wojo
WTKA.com
Ivan Maisel pt.2
AA News Sports