As you may be aware, Michigan won the national championship. Brian’s said his bit on what this means to him, and now it’s everyone else’s turn. We’re inviting everyone who’s contributed to the blog over its existence to write whatever they want about the 2023 football team, and hope to roll out a series of these over the course of the next few months.
Our next writer is Jon Schwartz (@jonlschwartz). Freshmen athletes arrive as the hottest thing in the hometown, and most smack their heads in humiliation on their first encounters with the skill and talent at this level. For me, an award-receiving young journalist who thought he was the next Mitch Albom, that moment was joining the Michigan Daily and staring down four years of competing with Jon Schwartz’s pen. As Daily sports editor, he was the thinker you wanted to hear from before formulating your take. Jon has been around the writer’s block since then—New Jersey Monthly, Spin, and the New York Yankees, for whom he’s the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. Let him at Michigan again, however, and you’re all about see why I fled to Editorial rather than share a depth chart with the five-star of my class.
It’s strange that I found it during the week between the Rose Bowl and the National Championship Game, a stretch when I attacked each day with an enthusiasm for Michigan gear unknown to mankind. Packing for Houston, I came upon a navy shirt — purchased from the MGoBlog store — that, instead of Michigan, said “FERGODSAKES.”
It was a silly purchase, the type of faux-ironic shirt choice that you wear while silently begging for the opportunity to explain it. It’s also indicative of what was wrong with the University of Michigan football landscape for so long.
Let’s back up. In January 2011, Brady Hoke — not Jim Harbaugh and not Les Miles — stood before a packed media contingent to accept the job running the winningest college football program in history. He had been a successful enough head coach at Ball State and San Diego State, but — much more importantly around Ann Arbor — he had been an assistant under Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr.
“I can promise you,” he said, in a quote that wouldn’t end up on any T-shirts, but that would be the first sign of the incredibly poor in-game strategy and behind-the-scenes decision-making that became Hoke’s trademark, “we would have walked to the University of Michigan.”
We can make fun now, a decade later and finally recovered from the dysfunction of the Hoke era, but it’s worth remembering that the coach really did win that introductory press conference. Even Dave Brandon came in for praise at locking up a real Michigan man. “This is an elite job,” said the decidedly not elite coach, confident that he could return the Wolverines to glory both on the field and in the public consciousness. “This will continue to be an elite job. This is Michigan, fergodsakes.”
For a while, that was enough. Like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy, just say it and it’s true. We’re Michigan. Pay no attention to anything you’re seeing.
I graduated from Michigan in 2003, meaning that I saw teams that went 10-2, 9-3, 8-4 and 10-3. I saw Tom Brady and Drew Henson, David Terrell and Braylon Edwards. I saw Marlin Jackson and Larry Foote and any number of Spyteks. It was a solid and successful era, the worst season of the four ending with Michigan ranked 20th in the nation.
The vibes, though, were pitiful, and I wasn’t blameless. On campus, on message boards and in the pages of The Michigan Daily, we were convinced that we were looking at mediocrity. The 1997 championship was so recent, but it felt like a mountain we could never climb again. We had become a 9-3-ish football program. It was “unacceptable.”
Because we were Michigan, fergodsakes. We were supposed to be better than this.
Nevermind that we beat Alabama in the final game of that 1999 season, on the first day of a new millennium. Forget that those first two years saw Michigan continue its run of dominance of Ohio State, which didn’t finish in the Top 25 either season. The college football world was always and obviously cyclical, but that wasn’t supposed to apply to Michigan, and we weren’t going to abide it.
But our comeuppance came when we learned just how much worse 3-9 is than 9-3. Whatever the RichRod era was, it wasn’t Michigan, fergodsakes. Forget the silly scandals or the mounting losses, and ignore that the team actually got pretty fun to watch (at least on the offensive side) by the end of his tenure. He didn’t fit.
In the end, we got what we deserved. We got Brady Hoke. At least he claimed to understand us. At least he knew how to fluff our egos. If we could just be ourselves, the world would see that we were good enough. That our way was better. Maybe we’d even convince people that our way was actually working and that it would continue to work.
It was a smart press conference ploy, and it was a clever T-shirt. Mark Dantonio might have tried to warn us that pride comes before the fall; only at Michigan could the pride survive the fall unabated.
Everyone has always known that Michigan fans can be entitled, and certainly provincial. We do it better, we do it smarter, we do it cleaner. We could compete with those other teams if we were willing to cheat like they do, but we’d never stoop that low.
And let’s be clear: Everything I’m writing here is something that I’m guilty of. As the Ohio State losses mounted, I decided that we were playing a different sport, that we shouldn’t measure ourselves against them. I believed that. Don’t fire Harbaugh, I said when things were at their worst, because the next guy we get is also going to lose to Ohio State, because they’re willing to do things that we aren’t. That we wouldn’t. That we shouldn’t. If we can’t win, we can at least be Michigan.
I’ve long straddled two worlds, juggling sports fandom with writing about them professionally. I have waged good war against jadedness, convincing myself that if it ever stopped being cool to be at a playoff or World Series game, then I’d look for another line of work. But there’s still a natural detachment. I’ve gotten less emotional about all of it. A Michigan football loss used to ruin my month; these days (not that there have been many of late) it spoils some of my Saturday afternoon. Sure, part of that is having kids and a wife and other things to do. But it’s also just that I know a lot of the backstories at this point.
There’s a tendency that a lot of people have to think that as more and more money funnels into sports — including, now, in college, and even (GASP!) at Michigan — the athletes care less and less about the outcomes. That they’re in it for paychecks. That’s never been what I’ve seen, though. I think that athletes — college or pro, whatever the difference is now — are just more practical about all of it. They know that at the elite levels, losing isn’t a moral failing; usually it’s just a function of the fact that there are two teams competing, and both of them want to win. They’re working just as hard to learn your weaknesses are you are to beat theirs.
For me, I think a lot of it started when I was walking through the parking lot/alleyway between Mary Street and Packard, right by Campus Corner, too late one Saturday night. With the confidence of a college journalist after too many drinks, I decided not to just keep walking when one of the football team’s linemen — a guy I vaguely knew, and who was walking in my direction — started yelling at me about what the Daily was writing about his good friend, John Navarre. Thinking that it was a good time to have a conversation about journalistic ethics with a drunk guy who had about 100 pounds on me, I wasn’t able to see what was actually happening, which was that a guy about my age was defending his friend. He was essentially acting like an offensive lineman. Nothing got physical, and nobody got hurt. But it stuck with me.
I’ve tried to carry that conversation with me for my entire career. Not that he was right about our Navarre coverage. Just that I try my best not to police intent. Baseball teams and football teams, no matter what we want to think, aren’t moated fortresses. They’re collections of individual people.
All of that went out the window in Houston. I pointed out to my friend before the game, sitting alongside him and his father, that my career has allowed me to see a lot of teams win a lot of championships. But I’ve never had the chance to see one of my own teams win anything. Whatever detachment I might have held evaporated. I’m confident that I would have been able to handle a Michigan loss to Washington; what I didn’t expect — what I had seen so many times but couldn’t conceive of experiencing myself — was the absolute enveloping sense of joy. From the moment of the Mikey Sainristil interception, I felt that I had stepped off earth.
I hugged so, so many people that night. I kissed strangers, then bought them rounds of beers. I kept screaming randomly hours after the game ended. What I felt — somewhat abashedly, but still overwhelmingly — was that we were back where it was supposed to be.
I’m sure that it was thrilling to see the momentous final seconds of the 1998 or 2024 Rose Bowls in person. But I can’t possibly express how happy I was to have the last few minutes to celebrate uncontrollably. To embrace my now-good-friend Dave Pearson, the same lineman who berated me that Saturday night more than two decades ago, and to recognize all that we shared. That we — both of us, all of us — were Michigan. Again.
There are legions of college football fans who will never find this Michigan season legitimate. That might be my favorite thing about it. From the illicit cheeseburger to Connor Stalions to whatever else they want to cook up in Columbus, Michigan fans have been forced to embrace the idea that we’re no longer above it all. You can think, like I do, that all these controversies are silly and overhyped. But they happened.
And maybe some fan bases would have responded more sheepishly. Maybe we should have. Instead, we latched onto the Detroit that lives in all of us, even those of us from the East Coast. Detroit vs. Everybody became Michigan vs. Everybody. Everybody against us.
What we were saying, finally, was that it wasn’t enough to be Michigan. Who knew that all along, we needed an enemy; that we were supposed to be focusing on the other team, not on ourselves. So we closed ranks, and we started taking names and numbers. And we were good at this heel turn! The wins got sweeter, harder to earn, impossible to forget. We celebrated differently, our high horses packed solidly away.
At every step along the way, though, the doubters tried to make us listen. Was Michigan really elite, or were the cards just falling in exactly the right way (as though that doesn’t happen to literally every champion in literally every sport)? First there were the digs at the nonconference schedule, then at the weak Big Ten. Then there was the fact that Michigan was cheating. Kyle McCord had a legion of NFL receivers to throw to, but he was still Kyle McCord, and a real quarterback would have beat Michigan. We dodged the obvious best team in Georgia, and barely beat a weaker-than-normal Alabama team that was held back by Jalen Milroe.
In the week leading up to the National Championship Game, as I was finding the FERGODSAKES shirt in the back of my closet, the previews were more of the same. How was Michigan going to stop Michael Penix Jr.? Would Dillon Johnson play? Could Michigan keep up with the Huskies’ pace?
They were all fair questions, and when there’s one game to break down over the course of a week, it’s inevitable that people start loving the underdog. What seemed to be missing, though, were the questions about Michigan. Not the breakdowns or the analysis, the bigger question:
What if Michigan is just the better team? What if the reason Michigan rolled through the easy nonconference schedule and the weak Big Ten and Ohio State’s receivers and Alabama wasn’t a fluke, but just the best team in the country doing what it was supposed to do. Maybe a million things went right for Michigan, but maybe Michigan was also just better.
Some years ago, I was talking to a reporter who had just come back from writing a preview about an elite college football team. He told me that he was shocked by the amount of access that he had, and he asked the coach why he didn’t follow the trend so many other programs did of keeping practices locked down and players unavailable. Wasn’t he worried about possibly giving his opponents an edge? The coach’s answer, as this reporter told it to me, still makes me laugh: “What do I care? We’re faster than they are.”
That’s the irony that has stuck with me since I got back from Houston, richer in joy and life experiences, poorer owing to merch purchases. For so long, I joined Michigan fans as we arrogantly propped ourselves up for artificial reasons. This year, we finally realized that we were part of what we loved condemning, and that the view from below the clouds was actually fine. And in developing a common enemy, in pointing our fire not at our own ghosts, but actually externally, something strange happened.
In the end, after all that, it wasn’t about the enemy, and it wasn’t about the situations.
It was about Michigan. Fergodsake
All that is to say, college football is really kind of ending.
And Michigan won the last season. They took over Spartan Stadium. They won the last real Michigan v. Ohio State game. They won the last game against that Bama.
