Even the most casual of Ohio State or Michigan fan knows what the current record is when the two teams play at the end of November with Ohio State currently on an eight-game winning streak and only dropping three games in the 2000s to “the team up north (2011, 2003, 2000).

The Buckeyes have only had a few select head coaches over the past 20-plus seasons during that streak with the end of the John Cooper-era leading into Jim Tressel, Luke Fickell, Urban Meyer and now Ryan Day. On the other side the Wolverines have been under the watchful eye of Lloyd Carr, Rich Rodriguez, Brady Hoke and Jim Harbaugh.

They are two programs who have been on very different trajectories over the course of the past 20-plus football seasons, the Wolverines have won just three conference championships, none since a split title in 2004 while Ohio State is currently on a four-year championship run and has won Big Ten titles in 12 of those seasons (though the 2010 championship was stripped from the team).

The days of the Big Two and Little Eight (that math does not work with a 14-team league these days) seem to be ancient history as the Buckeyes keep on rolling while each year seems to be a test on how warm Harbaugh’s seat actually will be and how many wins does he need to keep things going.

Ultimately everything comes down to recruiting and if you have the players, you stand to have a better chance to win games whereas a depleted roster generally won’t fare as well, over the long haul.

That does not mean that the better team in terms of star rankings, press clippings and all of that wins the game every year. There were plenty of Ohio State/Michigan games in the 1990s that saw the underdog (and almost always the team in the maize and blue) come in and be better for that day and dash yet another championship run by the Buckeyes.

But recruiting matters, especially when you look at the last two decades of dominance on Ohio State’s side of things.

For the sake of this exercise however, we are just going to take into account the past 10 signed recruiting cycles (2012-2021) as we see where Ohio State started to lap the field, not only against its biggest foe but the entire conference as the Buckeyes once again are prohibitive favorites to win the conference and head back to the College Football Playoff.

Recruiting rankings as a whole can be very subjective. How a recruiting service (such as Rivals) sees a class could be very different than how Day or Harbaugh sees a class. There is disagreement between services as well as there never is a true carbon copy of rankings that everyone agrees with.