‘It’s super weird’: Washington and Michigan share conference awkwardness in CFP final

Players on the Washington defense pose at media day on Saturday ahead of the Huskies’ College Football Playoff championship game against Michigan on Monday. Washington will play in the final football game involving a Pac-12 team.

As the Washington Huskies surveyed the scene at the College Football Playoff media day inside Houston’s downtown convention center, you couldn’t have blamed them for feeling a bit as if they were straddling two worlds.

The Big Ten Network was broadcasting the event live from the biggest set (naturally), adorned with the famed Michigan block ‘M’ on each side. The Wolverines, who had just left the building to rabid applause from their fans, will be a conference opponent for Washington next October in Seattle. Saturday morning seemed like something of a sneak preview of the Huskies’ future life.

Yet, it was hard to forget the recent past. As of late July, Washington’s players did not know what league they would be calling home in the fall of 2024. Yet , despite all of that, they showed no confusion about whom they are representing in Monday night’s national championship game.

“It’s super weird,” Washington linebacker Edefuan Ulofoshio said. “It doesn’t even feel real because we’re not disbanding as a university; we’re just going to the Big Ten. It’s kind of sad. The Pac-12 had a lot of great traditions. It’s a place that means the world to me. I love the Pac-12. I would have my kids play in the Pac-12.”

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Ulofoshio’s theoretical children won’t have that chance, along with any other kids who grow up on the West Coast with ambitions to play big-time college football.

Washington will play the last Pac-12 football game in history, and, given the rapid changes afoot in college athletics, how certain can any of us be that there will be a Big Ten Conference in 20 years?

But for seven more months, there is officially a Pac-12, and that’s where the bragging rights for this game would live for eternity, if the Huskies pull off a mild upset of Michigan.

“We might have Pac-12 logos on our jerseys still, I don’t know, for me I would say we’re the Pac,” Washington wide receiver Rome Odunze said. “I grew up watching Pac-12 football, and I’m a West Coast kid. I’m fond of the Pac-12 Conference and all the teams in it. Even though some of us have rivalries, I back the Pac. It’s surreal it’s going to come to an end. It’s going to be so different.”

On the other sideline Monday is a school that, at this moment, would caution Washington that the grass isn’t always greener.

Michigan as an institution remains fiery mad at the Big Ten — from the partnering universities, their athletic administrators and coaches to the league office, led by first-year commissioner Tony Petitti — for the handling of the NCAA’s investigation into the Wolverines’ sign-stealing methods.

The consternation over Petitti’s three-game suspension of Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh, announced late on a Friday afternoon before the Wolverines were set to play at Penn State the next day, is still reverberating — and probably will for some time.

Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh speaks during a news conference in Houston on Saturday ahead of the College Football Playoff championship on Monday night.

That the Big Ten gets to puff out its chest after one of its teams beat a Southeastern Conference power like Alabama in the semifinals, and that the schools that had wanted the Wolverines neutered now stand to financially benefit from their success in the CFP, are ironies that are not lost in Ann Arbor.

“I would say it’s bittersweet, because obviously we wanted support from our conference and the teams we have played,” Michigan defensive end Braiden McGregor said. “Shout-out to the couple of coaches where after we played them, they were like, ‘They were that good.’ But then you have the other coaches, who go behind our backs, say stuff that may or may not be true. At the end of the day, we are all a part of the Big Ten. We support any Big Ten team that’s playing in the bowl games, especially if they’re playing SEC teams. We just want support from everybody else.”