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‘You just can’t describe it’: Revisiting the 2011 Michigan-Ohio State Game

You just can't describe it': Revisiting the 2011 Michigan-Ohio State Game

There were plenty of signs that it was business as usual ahead of the Michigan football team’s 2011 matchup with archrival Ohio State.

Being a noon kickoff time, there were glazed donuts for the players at the team hotel, per usual during the Hoke era. Being a gameday, then-Michigan coach Brady Hoke didn’t have anything to eat ahead of time, per usual.

But as much as routines stay the same, no matter the opponent, this wasn’t business as usual. The Wolverines were facing a seven-game losing streak against the Buckeyes, but they seemed to have caught Ohio State at the right time — in a downturn and unranked. Michigan also boasted a first-year head coach eager to revive a slipping program.

So on that late-November day in 2011, Hoke had a nine-win Michigan team feeling different. After saying he would have walked to Ann Arbor from San Diego in his introductory press conference to take the job because, “This is Michigan for God’s sake,” he spent his first year installing countdown clocks for The Game, referring to Ohio State simply as Ohio and having every meeting all season end with saying, “Beat Ohio.”

“Everybody likes to say it’s just another game,” Hoke told The Michigan Daily, reminiscing on an afternoon from 13 years ago. “It’s just another game. Well that isn’t another game.

“That is The Game.”

And it’s one that anyone involved with can’t forget, even all these years later. For a 16 game stretch between 2004 and 2019, the 2011 installment of The Game was the Wolverines’ only win, a lone happy memory nestled within years of torment and anguish.

That lone memory was nearly just another sour note, as the game came down to the wire. No matter how much it looked like it might’ve been the year for Michigan going into it — the Wolverines ranked No. 15 in the country at 9-2, the Buckeyes unranked at 6-5 — this was still Ohio State after all.

“There was certainly (the feeling that) this was the opportunity,” Stephen Nesbitt told The Daily. He covered the game for The Daily and now covers the MLB for The Athletic. “… A Michigan team at 9-2 entering this game seemed to have the upper hand, but can you really have the upper hand when you have lost seven games in a row and most of the time gotten destroyed in this rivalry?”

Early in the game, Ohio State didn’t leave that up to debate. The Buckeyes got the upper hand right away, with a 54-yard touchdown strike to wide open receiver Corey Brown down the field. It spelled the start of the same story for yet another year in a row.

All the preparation, all the hype, all the anticipation, and all of it only to see Ohio State score an easy one. After all the talk, that was far from the ideal start — and far from pointing how this game would go. Despite evidence of years past, this Wolverines team wasn’t ready to get bowled over just because the Buckeyes had a dream start.

Too much was different for things to keep going the same way.

“You try to stay in the moment and not get caught up in the moment, because there’s a lot of build up to it,” Curt Mallory told The Daily. He was Michigan’s defensive backs coach in the game and is now Indiana State’s head coach. “… We had a good amount of guys from Ohio, we had a good amount of guys from Michigan, and they were an older group too. It wasn’t hard to get them ready. They hadn’t beaten Ohio State, they knew what the rivalry was about, they had played in the game, it wasn’t their first time.”

Quarterback Denard Robinson sat chiefly among the non-first timers. He’d been there before, and the dual-threat speedster at the helm made Ohio State’s opening strike a distant memory.

Because Robinson himself became the memory. He passed for three touchdowns and ran for two, accounting for 337 total yards and creating a nightmare for the Buckeyes’ defense. Whenever Michigan needed an answer — and it needed plenty in a game with five lead changes — Robinson had it.

“For Denard that’s kind of a ho-hum game,” Tim Rohan told The Daily. He covered the game for The Daily before joining the New York Times. “300 total yards and five touchdowns, he just kind of did that stuff regularly.”

While Robinson’s performance may have been average to his standards, it was an electrifying way to keep Michigan at pace. But even then, there looked to be trouble.

Up 30-24 late in the third quarter, the Wolverines’ punter muffed the snap and couldn’t get the punt off, setting up an easy Buckeyes field goal to bring the score within three in the fourth quarter. Once again, Michigan needed a response.

Robinson led the Wolverines’ offense back down the field, but on a third-and-1 from the Buckeyes’ 5-yard line, then-tight end Kevin Koger wasn’t initially bought-in on the play call.

Michigan was moving on the ground, and Koger thought there was no reason it needed to get cheeky with a play action rollout pass on the third-and-short situation. But after discussing it in the timeout, he was sold.

So there it was, a heavy formation, a hard play fake and a roll out, where Koger was wide open in the back of the endzone and caught what turned out to be Michigan’s last touchdown of the game to give it a 37-27 lead.

“That touchdown for me was pretty cool,” Koger, an Ohio native who now serves as the Los Angeles Chargers’ tight ends coach, told The Daily. “You grow up and always imagine scoring a touchdown in the Michigan-Ohio State game.”

A couple days before the touchdown, Koger celebrated Thanksgiving with his dad’s side of the family in Detroit. At dinner, his uncle told him to throw up two peace signs as a celebration if he scored a touchdown. Koger didn’t think much of it after only scoring three in the season to that point, and he even thought he missed an opportunity to do it on a first-down catch earlier in the game.

When he hauled in the score, Koger remembered. He held up two peace signs, taking pauses to embrace teammates before holding them up again.

“I got back to the sideline and my teammates were giving me a hard time about it like, ‘What in the world was that celebration,’ ” Koger said. “(I said) ‘Don’t worry about it, it was a family thing, you guys wouldn’t understand.’ They still give me a hard time about it to this day, but it was well worth it.”

That’s what the rivalry is all about. For a guy who crossed the Toledo Strip to play at Michigan, he was able to do a celebration that honored his family at a key moment on the grandest stage.

His touchdown eventually turned out to be the difference, but Ohio State did have one last chance, down 40-34, for a game-winning drive. Cornerback Courtney Avery, another Ohio native, made sure it stayed just a chance. Despite spraining his thumb during practice that week and having a cast wrapped around it, he came up with a fourth-down interception in the final minute to seal the deal.

“Being from Ohio, it’s a super important game and even a little bit more personal for me,” Avery told The Daily. “… It’s funny, people reach out and say, ‘Hey you know it was fourth down you could have batted it down.’ I’m like nah, being able to pick it and have an interception was a much sweeter point.”

After the interception, there were 39 seconds left and Ohio State had no timeouts, but even then breaking such a long streak is hard to fathom. Hoke looked over to the sideline ref to figure out if that had actually happened.

“I looked at the umpire to make sure,” Hoke said. “He kind of shook his head at me and had a little smile, that the game was over.”

Robinson, who was so hard to bring down all game, took a knee on his own accord to end it as pandemonium ensued. Hoke was drenched with a Gatorade jug as he headed to shake interim coach Luke Fickell’s hand, and Robinson sprinted toward the student section to jump in even as fans were spilling onto the field.

Koger remembers turning around as he headed to the locker room, seeing fans take over the field and thinking, “I have class with that person,” as the mob grew. Everyone came together, as Michigan finally got it done.

“Just the look on everyone’s face spoke volumes, you just can’t describe it,” Mallory said. “When you don’t win that game for so long, it’s hard. But those seniors and those guys on that team, they never gave up; they kept fighting.”

Seniors like Koger were what it was all about. Running the risk of going an entire Michigan career without beating Ohio State, they stepped up.

Because at the end of the day, that’s why football players join the rivalry to begin with — to win it.

“There’s no question about it, that was a lot of fun,” Hoke said. “And any time you’re at Michigan and you can beat Ohio State, you’ll take it.”

After losing seven in a row, the Wolverines won in 2011, only to lose the next eight matchups after that. For a 16 year stretch of the storied rivalry, business as usual was Ohio State beating Michigan.

But a few hours in 2011 are etched in memory forever, because for once things weren’t business as usual.