A Woody Hayes quote that’s being used to trivialize Ohio State’s latest college football national championship has an online trail that dates back just two weeks.
It’s a trail that leads north.
Buckeyes fans basking in Monday’s 34-23 win over Notre Dame have probably seen OSU’s winningest coach invoked by rivals. The quote they attribute to Hayes goes like this: “You can’t claim a national championship without winning The Game. The only meaningful statistic is the number of times you beat Michigan.”
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This alludes to the Buckeyes’ 13-10 loss to Michigan on Nov. 30.
But there’s no evidence Hayes ever said it.
Searches for the quote turn up empty in archives of The Dispatch and OSU’s student newspaper, The Lantern. It’s not in biographies of Hayes on the third-floor reference shelf at the Columbus Metropolitan Library’s main branch. It’s not among more than 200 Hayes quotes in the 2002 book, “Quotable Woody.”
Its earliest appearance seems to be in a Jan. 10 post on X by @uofmcoverage, a page that follows University of Michigan sports and has more than 70,000 followers across social-media platforms. It went up at 11:19 p.m., two minutes after the final score of Ohio State’s semifinal victory over Texas was posted by the official College Football Playoff account.
The quote has been shared since by people and pages with names like Michigan Diehards, MGoBlog and AaBlue4Life. A few fans of the Oregon Ducks, who defeated OSU in October but lost a Jan. 1 playoff rematch, have shared the quote, too.
Ohio State’s Woody Hayes: “You can’t claim a national championship without winning The Game. The only meaningful statistic is the number of times you beat Michigan”
Interesting.
— uofmcoverage (@uofmcoverage) January 11, 2025
Ohio State’s associate athletic director Jerry Emig, who does his job in a center named for Hayes that’s packed with OSU lore, said he has never heard the quote attributed to Hayes. Nor has Archie Griffin, the two-time Heisman Trophy winner who played for Hayes from 1972 to 1975.
Griffin told The Dispatch recently that although the college football landscape has changed greatly since Hayes’ coaching days — “you didn’t have a playoff, you didn’t play a championship game, you just played your season” — national titles have always been the goal of Buckeyes teams.
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They’ve also been rarer than victories over Michigan. Hayes’ Ohio State teams won five national championships in his 28 years as coach. The Buckeyes defeated Michigan 16 times during that span.
“You win a national championship, that is the pinnacle,” Griffin said. “That was this team’s goal. They achieved it. Mission accomplished.”
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: A Woody Hayes critique of OSU’s championship appears out of nowhere
