No rivalry in college football checks every box the way Ohio State-Michigan does.
It has the history, the stakes and the audience. It has stretched from 1897 to the present, with Michigan holding a 62-52-6 edge across 121 meetings.
It has lived through the Ten Year War, when Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler turned the game from a border fight into a yearly collision with Big Ten implications. And it keeps delivering drama in the modern era, too: Michigan won four straight from 2021 through 2024, including an upset in Columbus, before Ohio State answered with a 27-9 win in Ann Arbor last November.
The scale of it is impossible to ignore. The 2025 meeting drew 18.4 million viewers, making it the fifth straight year The Game was the most-watched regular-season matchup.
Ohio State’s 2024 national title added another layer, making the Buckeyes the first team to win it all after losing The Game. Fox has already set the 2026 edition for noon ET.
That kind of combination - tradition, pressure and national reach - is why Ohio State-Michigan sits at No. 1.
The Iron Bowl lands just behind it because no rivalry in the sport has a knack for chaos quite like Alabama-Auburn. The plays that define it are burned into college football memory: Chris Davis taking a missed 57-yard field goal more than 100 yards for the Kick Six in 2013, then Jalen Milroe finding Isaiah Bond for a 31-yard touchdown on fourth-and-31 with 32 seconds left 10 years later.
Auburn also ripped off six straight from 2002 through 2007, a run that included Nick Saban’s first Iron Bowl loss. Alabama now leads 52-37-1 after a 27-20 win at Auburn last November stretched its own winning streak to six.
The Red River Rivalry brings a setting no other game can match. Texas and Oklahoma have turned the Cotton Bowl at the State Fair of Texas into a yearly centerpiece, and Saturday’s game will be the 97th straight there.
Texas leads the series 65-51-5, but the recent run has been a wild swing from one side to the other: Oklahoma’s 55-48 win in 2021, Texas’ 49-0 blowout in 2022, Oklahoma’s 34-30 response in 2023, and then Texas’ two straight wins after that. The latest matchup, a 23-6 Texas win over previously unbeaten Oklahoma, averaged 8.7 million viewers, the best audience for the rivalry since 2009.
The Longhorns and Sooners also took the game into the SEC together in 2024, which keeps this one on the conference schedule every year. Kickoff for this year’s game is set for 3:30 p.m. ET in Dallas, four hours before Georgia and Alabama meet in Tuscaloosa.
Notre Dame-USC earns its place because the national pull has never really faded, even with a scheduling pause. The rivalry started in 1926, and the Jeweled Shillelagh has been at stake since 1952.
Both programs have had their stretches of control: Notre Dame went 11-0-1 from 1983 through 1995, and USC won eight straight on the field from 2002 through 2009. More recently, the Irish have taken eight of the past 10, including a 34-24 win in South Bend last October, and they lead the series 51-37-5.
The schools couldn’t agree on scheduling terms after 2025, so USC opened this season against San Jose State instead, but the series resumes Aug. 31, 2030, at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.
Army-Navy stands out for a different reason. It’s not about playoff positioning so much as the weight of the game itself.
The matchup draws a national audience no matter where the academies stand, and the numbers back that up: the 2025 game averaged 7.84 million viewers, CBS’ biggest college football audience of the season, after the 2024 edition drew 9.4 million, the largest audience for the game since 1989. Navy’s 17-16 win in Baltimore last December came when Blake Horvath hit Eli Heidenreich for an 8-yard touchdown on fourth-and-goal with 6:32 left, giving the 22nd-ranked Midshipmen a second straight win in the series.
“Who wouldn’t go to him?” Horvath said of Heidenreich, Navy’s career leader in receiving yards.
After the win, Navy sang its alma mater second, just as the tradition calls for.
Georgia-Florida, Miami-Florida State, BYU-Utah and Texas A&M-Texas all have strong claims in their own right, but the top five is shaped by the rivalries that have the deepest blend of history, stakes, spectacle and staying power. BYU and Utah meet again Nov. 7 in Salt Lake City, Miami visits Hard Rock Stadium on Oct. 17, Georgia and Florida play Oct. 31 in Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Texas and Texas A&M meet Nov. 27 in College Station, and Oregon and Washington close the regular season Nov. 28 in Eugene.
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