No College Football Team in Years Has Won a National Title the Way Michigan Just Did

The Michigan Wolverines returned to college football’s pinnacle on Monday night by beating Washington in the national title game in Houston, 34–13. The game was close-ish on the scoreboard for a while, but Michigan left little doubt from the opening drive where it was heading. From the jump, the action was sprinkled with little and big indicators that it would be Michigan’s night. Donovan Edwards, a junior running back whose production and playing time had tanked in the back half of the season, was the third running back into the game and took his first carry 41 yards for a touchdown. Then he took his second 46 for another. Washington’s star quarterback and receiver, Michael Penix Jr. and Rome Odunze, failed to connect for a wide-open touchdown pass on a key fourth down. And on and on it went, until Blake Corum mashed into the end zone for the final touchdown to seal it. Michigan was inevitable.

The Wolverines turned back the clock with the fact and manner of their victory. They are one of the sport’s legacy brands but hadn’t won it all since 1997, the last year before the sport moved to a playoff system (of sorts) by way of the two-team Bowl Championship Series. They got back to the top in the final year before the College Football Playoff expands from four teams to 12. Michigan, as a powerful member of the Big Ten Conference, is a driver of that modernity rather than an outlier of it. But on the field, Michigan is a throwback, and chief among the things that will stick out about the Wolverines’ title is how they cut against the direction of the rest of their sport. Most national champions play offense one way now, and Michigan’s opponent on Monday appeared to have mastered that method. The Wolverines play offense a brutal old way, and they played it so well that the sport’s new rules did not apply to them. (Of course, as they won their title, some other rules very much did apply.)

It has become a college football truism over the past decade that a team needs to have a devilishly good passing game to win the ultimate prize. That started to be the case more often than not in 2016, when Clemson won the title behind future NFL star (and, later, embarrassment) Deshaun Watson. Alabama did it the next year with Tua Tagovailoa, Clemson again the next with Trevor Lawrence, and then LSU with Joe Burrow launching the grandest passing game of all in 2019. Alabama won again in 2020 with a grab bag of future NFL stars at receiver. In 2021 and 2022, Georgia’s team identity was certainly not the passing game, but quarterback Stetson Bennett became an excellent college passer anyway. In both of Georgia’s title wins, Bennett and a cast of receivers and tight ends put up gaudy totals. Most of these teams featured excellent linemen, but the passing game pushed them over the top.

Michigan, by contrast, just won a national title with an elite defense and an immense aversion to letting its quarterback throw the ball. J.J. McCarthy had a good year and posted sparkly clean passing stats, but he accrued those as Michigan sleepwalked through the easy opening part of its schedule. When the going got tough for the Wolverines, coach Jim Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore—who replaced Harbaugh during a late-year suspension for a sign-stealing scandal—declared their true intentions.

Nursing a slim lead in its first hard game, a road test at Penn State while Harbaugh was suspended, Michigan did not record a pass attempt after halftime. McCarthy threw just 20 passes for 148 yards in Michigan’s third straight win over Ohio State, on another day when Corum led Michigan’s charge. The QB made critical plays in a Rose Bowl semifinal win over Alabama, but those came when Moore schemed up short throws that his receivers took for lots of yards after the catch. And on Monday, McCarthy threw the ball 18 times for 140 yards, without a touchdown or an interception. He did not complete a pass to convert a third or fourth down. He didn’t need to, because Michigan’s offensive line was a battering ram. Corum and Edwards carried the ball a combined 27 times for 238 yards. Nobody ever found out if McCarthy could win a game for Michigan with his arm. The Wolverines went 15–0 and simply never tested the question. McCarthy might be a pinpoint passer in the biggest moments; his team’s playing style did not demand it.

The Wolverines’ manner of title-game domination was extra striking because of what it came against. Washington is the embodiment of the high-powered spread passing attack that now tends to define the sport’s upper echelon. Penix and Odunze will both be first-round NFL picks. Two other Washington receivers, Jalen McMillan and Ja’Lynn Polk, will play on Sundays too. That quartet spent the year dicing up a challenging Pac-12 schedule, then picked apart Texas in the Sugar Bowl semifinal. But Michigan’s brutal defense stuffed the Huskies into a box, harassing Penix all night and blanketing his star wideouts so that he had to throw into microscopic windows. Penix threw two interceptions, and a holding call nullified one of his few breakthrough passes, a 32-yard completion to Odunze when the team’s deficit was just a touchdown. Washington’s offense had been a supernova. Michigan’s defense, led by small but thumping cornerback Mike Sainristil, simply did not care.

Michigan bent the sport to its will in other ways. The school was far from a victim in its dramatic legal proceedings with the Big Ten, the most dramatic college football story of the season. Michigan was the site of an extensive and poorly concealed cheating operation for several years, and Harbaugh had to sit out several crucial games as a result. That the Big Ten made up a policy on the fly to punish Harbaugh was beside the eventual point. That suspension came down because the rest of the Big Ten pressured the conference’s commissioner into doing something, and Michigan’s response was to do exactly what it had done before the episode spilled into public view: beat everyone.

The Wolverines stayed on the tracks in more normal ways too. They lost All-American guard Zak Zinter to a broken leg in the Ohio State game; Corum ran for a touchdown on the next snap, and a rejiggered offensive line came together nicely in the postseason. They played not just through two Harbaugh suspensions totaling six absent games, but through a third year in a row of an active rumor mill around their coach. Harbaugh has tried each of the past two years to land an NFL job offer but has returned to Ann Arbor both times. His name will be a hot topic in the professional game again this week. Returning Michigan to the national championship means that if he leaves, his tenure will go down as an unqualified success. No demographic pays more lip service than football coaches to retaining focus amid adversity, but Michigan excelled at it.

Most teams don’t win that way—in any of those ways. They don’t watch their coach serve two suspensions in one year. They don’t lose All-Americans to gruesome injuries in the second half of the sport’s biggest rivalry game. And they don’t win national championship games by scoring 30-plus points on a night when their quarterback does not have to make a single conversion with his arm. National champions don’t have to be different from their opposition, only better. The Wolverines wound up being both.