Michigan Football Finally Found Its Ideal Form

Two things have happened in college football in the past 20 years. One, the sport has become increasingly given to corporate concerns, with more major bowl games and national championships played in glistening but sterile NFL stadiums that are built to squeeze dollars out of hospitality suites and VIP experiences. And two, the University of Michigan has slipped down the pecking order of the country’s elite programs.

On Monday night, the sport stepped into a time machine for a few hours. Michigan was here at the Rose Bowl, a 95,000-seat doughnut that opened its doors in 1922. It’s the only venue in the College Football Playoff rotation whose main purpose is to host college football games rather than professional ones, and its biggest calling is to host the Rose Bowl. The extent of football fans’ care about the Rose Bowl as an institution cleaves along geographic lines, with plenty of Southerners not yearning much for a game or stadium whose history is wrapped up in the Big Ten and Pac-12. But Michigan has as much of that history as anyone. The Wolverines won the first Rose Bowl in 1902, before the current stadium even stood, and no fan base sees its team as a guardian of sacred college football tradition quite like Michiganders do. The Rose Bowl is Michigan-core. (“Glorious. It was right where we wanted to be,” Jim Harbaugh said.) On New Year’s Day, it was the school’s opportunity to exorcise some demons and finally win a playoff semifinal. After capturing Big Ten championships the prior two years, the Wolverines had flamed out in this event.

About two hours before kickoff, Wolverines quarterback J.J. McCarthy paced around the field barefoot on the Rose Bowl’s silky grass and slid into some meditation underneath the uprights. Players sometimes lose their shoes at the Rose Bowl, where the grass is legendary for being somehow better than other playing surfaces. Maybe McCarthy was right to lean into it; Michigan’s best moments the past few years have come when the school has embraced its historic identity. In football terms, that means pounding the opposition with elite line play and solid fundamentals. But for much of their meeting Monday with the Alabama Crimson Tide, the Wolverines lacked those. They found them just in time, and the result was a win that wasn’t just historically resonant. It also left Harbaugh and his bunch 60 minutes from their first title since 1997.

As Michigan has broken through barriers these past few seasons, it has done so playing the brand of football that Harbaugh prefers: The Wolverines are a throwback in an era of spread offenses, aiming not to chuck the ball around but to ram it down your throat. (Granted, they often do that out of the shotgun.) That was the story of the 2021 win over Ohio State that announced Michigan’s return to national contention, and it has been the story of most of what has followed. (For instance, this November, the team did not record a pass attempt in the second half of a win over Penn State.) But the Wolverines lapsed in their other two playoff appearances. In 2021 Georgia turned out to be bigger and badder and spent the night blowing Michigan off the line of scrimmage. In 2022 a smaller TCU outflanked Michigan with speed and scheme to create another disappointment.

For a long while, this latest bid looked similar. Michigan showed some thump all night, mostly in sacking Bama quarterback Jalen Milroe six times and applying constant pressure. But the defense allowed a few gashing runs to Milroe and tailback Jase McClellan, and the offense lost a physical edge as the night went on. In the third quarter, the Wolverines ran the ball five times for a combined 4 yards. Their first four drives of the second half, after leading 13–10 at the break, ended in a punt, a punt, a punt, and a missed field goal from 49 yards. Harbaugh did not have enough faith in his offense to eschew the long attempt.

Michigan also inflicted misery after misery upon itself: a muffed punt that led directly to an Alabama touchdown. A botched snap on an extra point. A handful of misfires and missed catches between McCarthy and his wideouts. A handful of mediocre punts, which, contrasted with the excellence of Alabama’s punter, resulted in Michigan fighting a difficult field position war for much of the night.

And then Michigan got back in touch with itself in the nick of time. The Wolverines trailed 20–13 when they took the ball with just under five minutes left at their own 25-yard line. The drive began with two Blake Corum runs, as Michigan sought to put its fate in the hands of an All-American tailback. An incompletion brought up a fourth-and-the-season, and Corum again got the ball, this time on a pass to the flat that he took for 35 yards. (A block in the back erased a bunch of those yards, but at least the drive continued.) McCarthy ran 16 yards on the next play, then connected on a big completion to wideout Roman Wilson off a ricochet, and a short one to Wilson for the tying touchdown.

In overtime, the Wolverines were in their ideal form. Corum needed just two carries on two plays to cover the 25 yards needed for a go-ahead touchdown. Alabama’s attempt to tie the game was more plodding, but the Tide thought it could bulldoze its way through Michigan’s defensive front on fourth-and-goal at the 3-yard line. They could not: Milroe took a low snap—a problem all game with Alabama’s center—and barreled forward. He did not get close, as a pack of Michigan defenders buried him at the line of scrimmage. The Wolverines had lost the coin toss at the start of overtime, and when Alabama elected to play defense first, Michigan got to decide that the game’s decisive plays would happen on the end of the field where Michigan’s raucous fans had formed an almost complete enclosure of the end zone. The sound they made when their defense stuffed Milroe was the loudest crowd noise I’d ever stood amid.

This transcended cheering; it was a carnal roar. Michigan fans had waited for this moment for several decades, so they had pent-up energy from all of it. But there was more to it than that. The Wolverines and their fans have done a brilliant job contriving an us-against-the-world narrative in the back half of this season, rallying around Harbaugh because the Big Ten suspended him as punishment for an underling’s sign-stealing operation. It had been a while, and Michigan had been aggrieved, and those threads came to a head on the biggest stage imaginable. Perhaps Milroe never had a chance of getting the 3 yards he needed.

Michigan’s story isn’t all the way written yet, and much of how this team is remembered will come down to what happens when the Wolverines meet Sugar Bowl winner Washington in Houston on Monday night. But what Michigan did on New Year’s Day was special on its own terms, both because of the futility it ended and the place where it happened. In the seconds after his defense sealed the win, the quarterback ran over to a Michigan staffer. “Gimme that Rose,” he told the guy, and the staffer quickly obliged. The day had started with McCarthy’s toes in the Rose Bowl grass. It ended with a flower in his teeth.