Bob Cook

Sadly, Hate Week is ending a lot less hateful.

The death of former Michigan coach Bo Schembechler on the eve of the biggest Michigan-Ohio State game ever can't help but put a pall over Saturday's proceedings. After all, without Schembechler, Michigan-Ohio State doesn't advance from regional grudge match to become one of sports' most storied rivalries, and the battling schools' respective Hate Weeks don't mean any more than the scores of other Hate Weeks around the college football schedule.

Schembechler died Friday morning after collapsing at WXYZ-TV in Southfield, Mich., where he had taped his television show. Schembechler, 77, had suffered two heart attacks, the first on the eve of the 1970 Rose Bowl, and doctors had implanted a pacemaker to regulate his heartbeat after he fell ill during an Oct. 20 TV show taping at WXYZ.

Even the Columbus punk band that calls itself the Dead Schembechlers, scheduled Friday to play its annual Hate Week, anti-Michigan show featuring such songs as "M Means Moron" and "Schembechler Kicked My Crippled Dog," acknowledged the late coach's role in Ohio State and Michigan history. "We are crushed to learn of the death of Bo Schembechler, OSU's most valiant foe," the band said in a message posted on its Web site. "We named this band after Coach Schembechler to honor him as the face of Wolverine football. We have never wished ill will upon him in any way and have always wished him the best."

The band announced that Friday night will be its final performance and will donate all proceeds from the show to a charity chosen by Schembechler's family.

Schembechler became the spark for the rivalry as we know it thanks to his first game, in 1969, perhaps the most important Michigan-Ohio State game played before Saturday. The 1969 game was his first coaching against former mentor Woody Hayes, for whom Schembechler had been an assistant coach. Michigan had suffered a decade of mediocrity before Schembechler's arrival, including a 50-14 loss in Columbus in 1968, a game after which Hayes said, reportedly, he went for the two-point conversion on the final touchdown "because we couldn't go for three."

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Ohio State entered Ann Arbor as the defending national champion, the nation's No. 1 team, and a prohibitive favorite to beat Schembechler's 7-2 Wolverines. But Michigan won, 24-12, breaking Ohio State's school-record 22-game winning streak. (The Buckeyes' current streak is 18, third-longest in school history.) For the next 10 seasons, the Big Ten title always came down to Michigan-Ohio State, and the intensity generated by the 1969 game and the Schembechler-Hayes rivalry didn't die down even after both coaches departed — Hayes in 1978 and Schembechler in 1989.