As Ohio State University gears up for Tennessee, M’s on campus are still crossed out from Michigan game. Here’s why….

Ohio — Everyone knows that the Ohio State vs. Michigan football game is one of the biggest rivalries in all of sports. But until you spend that week in Columbus, you can’t get the full grasp of the rivalry.

Go on Ohio State’s campus for Michigan Week and look at basically any sign on any building.

During the week of the game vs. Michigan, whether the game is at home or in Ann Arbor, every “M” students can find is crossed out with red tape.

Whether it be a sign for an academic building, a dorm or even a street sign, good luck finding a sign the week of the Michigan game that has M’s that are not crossed out with red tape.

That carries out further than just signs on campus being crossed out with red tape. For example, former Ohio State coach Urban Meyer had the “M” in his last name replaced with a giant red “X” during Fox’s telecast of the OSU-Michigan game.

The Ohio State-Michigan rivalry dates back to 1897, although the exact date of when the signs on campus started getting crossed out remains unclear. According to Nathan Hart of the Columbus Dispatch, the first time the tradition appeared on social media was when Ohio State’s Facebook page posted about it in 2011.

It’s hard to tell who puts the tape on the signs and who takes it off every year. Ohio State’s communications office told cleveland.com the tradition is “not a university-sponsored event,” which is likely why multiple Ohio State departments including Building Services and Student Life either would not comment or did not return a request for comment.

But it hasn’t stopped students, faculty and other fans from putting red tape on the M’s all over campus.

Even as Ohio State prepares to face Tennessee at Ohio Stadium in a College Football Playoff game Saturday night at 8 p.m., tape still covers M’s all over the campus, nearly three weeks after the Wolverines won the Nov. 30 game, 13-10.

And no one is crossing out T’s.Second-year graduate student Hunter Handley from California went to an undergraduate school in Texas and had an idea of how big football was there. However, when he came to Ohio State, it was a completely different environment, especially when he saw the taped signs for the first time

“The rivalries up here are just super intense. I had no idea how ingrained Columbus was,” Handley told cleveland.com this week. “At first, I was a bit confused (when I saw the taped signs). But after I saw a few, I knew that there was something going on and everybody was talking about the game that weekend. So I knew it had to be connected.”

Max Scholl, a junior from Columbus, actually did some taping this year. The rivalry means a little more to him because his family went to Michigan, but he told cleveland.com he didn’t get a chance to really embrace it until he got to Ohio State.