Ohio State has won 39 Big Ten championships, second only to Michigan’s 45, and the two schools have decided the conference title between themselves more than two dozen times. Woody Hayes won 13 of the 39, a record he shares with the man who coached against him for a decade.
Every Title by Coach
| Coach | Titles | Seasons |
|---|---|---|
| Woody Hayes | 13 | 1954, 1955, 1957, 1961, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977 |
| Jim Tressel | 6 | 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009 |
| Earle Bruce | 4 | 1979, 1981, 1984, 1986 |
| Urban Meyer | 3 | 2014, 2017, 2018 |
| John Cooper | 3 | 1993, 1996, 1998 |
| John Wilce | 3 | 1916, 1917, 1920 |
| Ryan Day | 2 | 2019, 2020 |
| Francis Schmidt | 2 | 1935, 1939 |
| Paul Brown | 1 | 1942 |
| Carroll Widdoes | 1 | 1944 |
| Wes Fesler | 1 | 1949 |
Ohio State also won the Ohio Athletic Conference in 1906 and 1912 before joining the Big Ten in 1913. The 2010 Big Ten title under Tressel was vacated by the NCAA and is not counted.
Hayes and the Six Straight
Woody Hayes won six consecutive Big Ten championships from 1972 through 1977, a run no other coach in conference history has matched. Four of the six were shared with Michigan, and those years, 1972 to 1974 in particular, were the heart of the Ten Year War, when the two schools were so evenly matched that the conference title regularly came down to the final Saturday.
Hayes’s 13 titles tie him with Bo Schembechler for the most in Big Ten history. His 153 conference wins are the most by any coach, ahead of Schembechler’s 143.
The Ohio State and Michigan Problem
Since The Game moved to the last week of the conference season in 1935, the two schools have decided the Big Ten title against each other 26 times. The most famous instance was 1973, when a 10 to 10 tie left the two as co champions and the conference athletic directors voted to send Ohio State to the Rose Bowl. Michigan, unbeaten, stayed home, and the Big Ten changed its rules soon after.
Our rivalry page covers that vote and the series in full.
Twenty four of Ohio State’s 39 titles were won outright, the rest shared. That distinction is why Michigan and Ohio State can both claim to lead the other in a sense: Michigan has more championships at 45, but Ohio State has more outright titles at 24 to Michigan’s 19.
Before the Big Ten championship game arrived in 2011, shared titles were common because the conference used a round robin with no tiebreaker for the trophy, only for the Rose Bowl berth. Since 2011 every title has been outright by definition.
The Drought Since 2020
Ohio State has not won the Big Ten since 2020. Michigan took three straight from 2021 to 2023, Oregon won it in 2024 in its first season in the conference, and Indiana beat Ohio State 13 to 10 in the 2025 championship game.
Five years is the longest gap since John Cooper’s tenure. Ryan Day has reached the title game in three of those seasons and lost all three, to Michigan in 2021 and 2023 and to Indiana in 2025, though the 2024 team went on to win the national championship without a conference title.
The Vacated Title
The 2010 Ohio State team went 12 and 1, won the Big Ten and beat Arkansas in the Sugar Bowl. All of it was vacated by the NCAA in 2011 after an investigation into players trading memorabilia for tattoos, which also ended Jim Tressel’s tenure. Officially the 2010 Big Ten season has no champion from Columbus.
The Bottom Line
Ohio State has won 39 Big Ten championships, second to Michigan’s 45, with 24 of them outright. Woody Hayes won 13, including six in a row from 1972 to 1977, and shares the conference record with Bo Schembechler. The most recent came in 2020, and the five year gap since is the longest in a generation. Our page on most conference championships shows where Ohio State ranks nationally.