Michigan 34, Washington 13: Champions
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I’m currently sitting in my office doing exactly what I’ve done each of the last few nights — leaning back in my desk chair looking at my laptop with a largely blank screen staring back at me. It’s about 2:30 in the morning. Highlights from the Michigan-Washington game are playing on the TV mounted nearby. But let’s be honest. At this point, I don’t need to watch them. That entire game has already been burned into my brain.
Next to my laptop, I’ve got a little notepad that I took with me to NRG Stadium on Monday that was designed to be loaded up with a bunch of updates, notes and observations. It was a noble, albeit overly ambitious, idea. There are a few sentences scribbled from the early stages of tailgating on Monday afternoon. But by the time the game rolled around, I’ll let you take a wild guess at how much of my time inside that stadium was spent “taking notes.”
On the other side of that laptop sits a mason jar that became my newest office decoration upon my return from the National Championship Game. Inside it? About 100 little pieces of Maize and Blue paper that were displaced from the NRG Stadium field shortly after Jim Harbaugh and the Wolverines hoisted the National Championship trophy and answered questions from Rece Davis in the aftermath of their 34-13 win.
It’s a souvenir from an event I’ll never forget. The little pieces of paper are worth next to nothing when viewed through the value they present in a vacuum. But when combined together and presented as National Championship Game confetti, they’re borderline priceless, at least to me.
And every time I make an effort to really sink my teeth into the most impossible assignment I’ve given myself yet for this newsletter — describing what it’s like for Michigan to finally win it all — I can’t help but stay fixated on that little mason jar full of confetti. Each little piece was picked up and placed into an empty popcorn bucket that my buddy Brom carried around after the game — a bucket that became lighter and lighter as we exited the stadium and more and more Michigan fans desperately asked for their little sliver of confetti to commemorate the once-in-a-lifetime experience.
While it still feels like I escaped with a healthy amount of confetti, whenever I glance at the mason jar on my desk, it’s hard not to think about how each little piece of paper in that jar can signify an event or player that helped make Michigan’s dream season a reality — both throughout the fall and on Monday — and I wonder to myself if 100 pieces is enough to give everyone and everything their due credit.
One piece may be Mikey Sainristil, who somehow managed to steal the show yet again despite the reputation he has earned as the season has played out. Why balls keep getting thrown in his direction remains a mystery to me (though the fact that Will Johnson exists could provide a nice clue to that “why.”) There was no more fitting Wolverine to formally close the door on Monday’s game that Sainristil, who added another clutch interception and threw in 80-plus yards of return yardage for good measure.
Another piece? Look no further than Blake Corum, who single-handedly scored more touchdowns that the vaunted Washington offense we heard so much about heading into Monday night. His 12-yard TD run miday through the fourth quarter finally elevated Michigan’s lead beyond the one-score margin it had for the majority of the second half, and his one-yarder to cap the scoring a few short minutes later was the perfect final TD of the season for a Michigan team that saw so many of those goalline finishes from the undersized-but-mighty Corum, who earned Offensive MVP honors.
One piece has to be J.J. McCarthy. He didn’t match the numbers he put up a week prior against Alabama in the Rose Bowl. But QB was the missing piece for this program for so much of the Harbaugh Era before the five-star QB signed with the Wolverines on the heels of their worst season in decades. And all he’s done since arriving on campus is win championships and end up being college football’s starting QB with the best winning percentage in more than a half century.
If you want to save time and stop going piece-by-piece, you can grab a handful and have those pieces represent Michigan’s two lines — ones that dominated the trenches in both of the Wolverines’ College Football Playoff matchups. Michigan’s defensive line was the key to the game according to many heading into Monday’s title game. And if that was the key, then the lock was picked early and never replaced, because the Wolverines kept Michael Penix pressured and uncomfortable all night long, and did so without the aid of exotic blitzes. On the offensive side of the ball, Michigan was so effective on the ground that the Wolverines’ rushing total trumped Washington’s rushing and passing total combined. This isn’t to take away from the running backs’ big nights, but there were holes so big that I’m confident Cam Goode could’ve flirted with triple-digit yardage with an RB1 workload.
I still haven’t touched on Jim Harbaugh, his coordinators, other assistants, Donovan Edwards, Colston Loveland, Will Johnson, Keon Sabb and countless others — don’t worry, they’ll all get their flowers either later in this column or later this offseason, since the vast majority (if not all of them) are coming back next season. But the fact there’s such a gaudy list of potential snubs proves my point even more.
Michael Penix was the star of stars heading into this game. And that was apparently enough for 32 of 48 “experts” from ESPN to pick the Huskies to win (with only 14%(!) of all panelists expecting Michigan to cover the 4.5-point spread). But when it came time to crown a champion, it wasn’t the team with the Heisman finalist hoisting up that trophy. It was the most complete team that ended up winning it running away. The one that did “the little things” oh-so-well all year long.
And hey, since we’re talking about predictions, let’s not forget which people had this pegged as a three-score Michigan win from the get-go…
Just like there’s no singling out one member of this team that made Monday’s National Championship win a reality, there’s also no single emotion or feeling that can describe what it was like to be there.
I’m not here to be a downer or make this all about me. But despite all the incredible things that were happening on the field over the past four months, this fall and the early stages of winter has been one of the most challenging stretches of my life. I’ve learned first-hand just how long and debilitating of a tail that grief can have. There have been more mornings that I care to admit where I’ve had zero desire to get out of bed and be a productive member of society. Hell, even with so many great things to write about, putting together substantive newsletters has felt more like a chore than a source of joy in the aftermath of most games this year.
But on Monday night, for the first time in a while, there was joy. And not joy with a “but” following it. Or joy with an asterisk. Just pure, unadulterated joy.
After Mikey Sainristil’s game-clinching interception with 4 minutes and change remaining, and once Blake Corum got into the end zone yet again to give Michigan a 21-point lead — and once I high-fived and hugged seemingly everyone wearing Maize and Blue within a 40-yard radius of my seat — I just took it all in. Phone down. Head up. Just taking it all in. The scene. The environment. The moment.
There was a sense of finality. Of accomplishment. Of uncharted territory. If you told me 15, 10, or even 5 years ago that this would be happening, I’d laugh in your face. If I’m being completely honest with you, even a year ago after a second straight CFP appearance, it really felt like Michigan squandered its last and best chance to win a National Championship. I really don’t think I ever even allowed myself to believe a Michigan National Championship could happen at any stage of my adult life until the middle of this August when after immersing myself in preview content and finding so few holes with this roster, I finally gave myself permission to stop being a scared fan, embrace expectations and predict a National Championship.
Yes, “my school” won it all on Monday, and it’s still wild to see that written out. But Michigan’s accomplishment is so much more than just having guys wearing your school’s colors holding up a trophy for being 2023’s best college football team. It was the culmination of a journey that took a quarter century and included more lows than a program that calls itself a Blue Blood should have in its entire program history. I was a senior in college for the Appalachian State game. My trips back for games as a recent grad consisted of the Rich Rod Era. After a first year of the Brady Hoke era filled with false hope, fans got a three year stretch that followed that was even worse than the Rich Rod Era — one filled with embarrassing buy-a-coke-get-free-tickets promotions, concussed quarterbacks and chicken-shit apologies to rival coaches after rivalry losses. And while Jim Harbaugh got this thing turned around in a hurry when he made the program-altering decision to return home from his alma mater despite unprecedented success at the NFL level, it was beginning to look like his level of success had a ceiling, and any sort of success at the national level would end up similar to Charlie Brown’s attempts at kicking a football.
But on Monday, all of that pain, all of those wounds that weren’t ever fully healed, really helped make finally getting over that hump all the more special.
As I looked around my section after Michigan went up 34-13, I had tears in my eyes that had nothing to do with sadness or grief or just the sheer weight that life can carry sometimes. I saw couples kissing, fathers and sons embaracing, complete strangers revelling in one commonality that brought them all together that night: Michigan football.
It hasn’t made everything that has rocked my world this fall go away — not even close — but for the first time in a long time, I was able to turn off my brain and sit in a feeling of joy. And it has carried over in the days that have followed.
By the time this column posts, it will be Saturday. Later in the day, Michigan will be hosting its National Championship Parade. Leading up to Monday’s game, I was pretty resigned to the fact that a Michigan win would almost certainly mean Jim Harbaugh rides off into the sunset and makes the leap back to the NFL — I basically tweeted as much in the aftermath of Michigan’s win. At 15-0 and with very little left to prove himself, logic indicated J.J. McCarthy would likely make a similar decision, with multiple NFL Mock Drafts earmarking him as a potential first-round selection. Those two things are very much still in play, and I will truly harbor zero animosity toward either if that’s what they choose.
But now I find myself fantasizing about the possibility of Harbaugh stepping up to a microphone at the post-parade celebration inside Crisler Arena and telling the sold-out arena that he’s coming back, and that his decorated QB is returning with him. A heat check? Sure. But when you’re hot, you’re hot.
I’m enjoying this high. This feeling at the top. I’m not so wrapped up in this feeling of euphoria that I’m delusional: I know either return (let alone both) could end up being a pipe dream. But something I basically settled on being a foregone conclusion in the build-up and immediate aftermath of the National Championship Game is a lot closer to the coin flip than I ever thought it could be, and people I trust on the Michigan side of things have almost a quiet confidence building over the course of this week.
With that said, I worry about myself and my expectations for this program. I worry about the fanbase as a whole. I appreciate what happened on Monday so much, I never want to take it for granted. It was so hard to imagine what winning it all would feel like because I never really allowed myself to think it could even be a possibility.
Just a month or two shy of four years ago, I decided to start this newsletter. Little did I know that I’d roll it out one week before a global pandemic, and the tentative plan of just having it be where I’d host some random mailbags would drastically change. Now, more than 1,350 days, 370 posts and 1 million words later, there are 4,000-plus subscribers here along for the ride.
After a handful of mailbags, my first “major” newsletter post was a State of the Michigan Football Program column. Given where the Michigan program was at that time (and according to my tiers in that column, that was somewhere between the No. 7-11 program in America — an assessment that led to many criticizing me over and labeling me a home), the column didn’t explore how Michigan can become a National Champion, because that didn’t seem realistic goal at the time. Instead, it was about how to get Michigan to go up a tier and get closer to the Ohio States and Alabamas of the world, something that felt borderline impossible at the time.
My path toward that happening was as follows:
It’s OK being just a “good” recruiting team in the 8-12 range if you can continue leaning into being an elite development team
Michigan needs to invest in Jim Harbaugh long-term and get him an extension
Jim Harbaugh needs to get back into focusing on innovating/forward-looking thinking, whether it's through NIL, the transfer portal or something else we haven't thought of yet
Get over the Ohio State hump (which was truly the lynch pin for all the other things Jim Harbaugh hadn’t yet accomplished), and other good things will follow
Little did I know that once I hit send on that newsletter, Michigan would check every single one of those boxes, most of which in emphatic fashion. And as a result, the Wolverines have gone 4-0 against Ohio State and Alabama since, and just won a freaking National Championship on the heels of a Big Ten three-peat.
If I were to pen a similar piece right now (and maybe I will later in the offseason), it wouldn’t be a roadmap for the program to reach college football’s mountaintop. That’s exactly where the program resides right now, and Jim Harbaugh and Co. are far beyond the point of needing advice from a guy with a newsletter on how to reach excellence on the field. Instead, my piece would consist of instructions to fans on how to best appreciate what we have. This feeling won’t last forever. But you can extend the runway by living in the moment and appreciating the now — and not instantly worrying about what comes next.
In other words: You should absolutely strive to beat Ohio State and Alabama on the field. But I implore you as fans to not end up like them off of it. Bottle up this feeling and savor it for as long as you can.
This season was special. This team was special. And this program remains special. Just don’t take it for granted.
So why have I been sitting here the past few nights staring at a largely blank computer screen? Honestly, as weird as it sounds, I think part of it had been some odd fear that publishing this means the season is over, and this feeling might go away. But if there’s anything this season has shown me, it’s OK to stop living in fear and expecting the worst when you’re a Michigan football fan. Not every season has to end in heartache. Not every up has to be followed by a down. Sometimes Charlie Brown really does connect with that football.
So thank you J.J., Blake, Mikey, Will, members of the trenches, new additions from the portal, Jim and everyone else represented in my mason jar. These championships are truly about the journey, and it’s far more than just Monday night that I’ll be able to fondly look back to in the years (and decades) to come. But damn, that exclamation point on Monday sure was special, too. And it’s one I’ll never forget.
Let’s talk some more about it below.
