Every year, regardless of who ended up winning the Big Ten, Ohio State is the team that gets all the hype. That’s warranted, of course, given multiple decades of overall dominance. But even after 2021, Michigan football, coming off a Big Ten Championship, was given little chance to repeat.
Fast forward a year later and the Wolverines are back-to-back champs.
Still, we’ve seen plenty of power rankings and such that have the Buckeyes on top, regardless of Michigan returning the bulk of last year’s team while OSU has to break in a new quarterback. One key voice in college football media, 247Sports’ Brad Crawford, is bucking the traditional narrative.
Crawford put together his Big Ten power rankings entering fall camp and it’s the maize and blue he has in the top spot, with Ohio State and Penn State coming in after.
Jim Harbaugh‘s team earned any benefit of the doubt going into 2023. The defense should be one of the nation’s toughest units and Michigan welcomes back the best 1-2 punch in the backfield nationally. It also helps that quarterback J.J. McCarthy is a Heisman candidate with plenty of options to throw to in the passing game. This could be Harbaugh’s most talented squad in Ann Arbor, which is saying something given the four All-Americans he has produced since the start of the 2021 season.
What will help that much more is that the Wolverines’ schedule is amenable for the first nine games before they face No. 3 Penn State, No. 6 Maryland and then No. 2 OSU.
Michigan doesn’t face Nos. 4-5 in the regular season in Wisconsin and Iowa. Rival Michigan State is ranked No. 9, which is sure to draw the ire of many irked Spartans in East Lansing.
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