Ohio State Can't Beat Michigan. They Might Beat Everyone Else.

After a Rose Bowl win, the Buckeyes look like the best team left in the College Football Playoff

- JASON GAY

Maybe it's just a Michigan thing - a physical-psychological tic, a yip, like golfers and second basemen suddenly develop.

How else to explain this robust and thoroughly revived Ohio State football team? A month ago, the Buckeyes were getting roasted as a laughingstock, a Big Ten juggernaut that habitually went cold against the only rival that mattered: That Team Up North, aka the Wolverines.

Fire the coach! Tear it down! May Day!

Four losses in a row to Ann Arbor was deemed too much to bear in Columbus, even with a 10-2, still playoff-bound team. A postgame melee over Michigan planting the flag in OSU's logo only underlined the public humbling.

What a freakout it was, on behalf of one of college football's most successful programs, much of it landing on the shoulders of head coach Ryan Day, whose record can be described as: Pretty Awesome Against Everybody But Michigan.

It reached the point that some Ohio State fans confessed they wouldn't mind the Buckeyes losing early in the playoff, lest a few wins subdue the Michigan despair and derail momentum to clean out Day & Co.

This self-loathing self-sabotage was a real thing! The Journal's Jared Diamond wrote about it! Nick Saban chastised Buckeye fans for their "psychotic obsession" with the Wolverines and urged them to rally behind their team.

I'm sure a few of those grim-faced pessimists are still out there. It is Ohio State, after all. The standard rules of football fandom don't apply.