Michigan football's Big Ten title merely a stop toward the summit of eternal greatness
INDIANAPOLIS — There was a time not long ago when Michigan football would have given anything to experience a moment like this one, when confetti fluttered in the air, players clad in maize and blue hoisted a trophy, Jim Harbaugh was cheered and a conference title was celebrated on a platform inside Lucas Oil Stadium.
Go back to the summer of 2021 and Harbaugh stood inside this very same venue and declared his struggling program would either find a way to overtake Ohio State and win the league, or “die trying.” But 28 months after Harbaugh made that dramatic statement, so much has changed to the point that the latest coronation of the Wolverines as Big Ten kings has become anticlimactic.
As cornerback Mike Sainristil said and Harbaugh echoed in the afterglow of triumph early Sunday morning, "The worm has turned around here."
On a Saturday night when the Wolverines slogged through a 26-0 victory over impotent Iowa to win the conference for the third straight year, the focus had already shifted to what would happen the next morning in a meeting room 875 miles away in Grapevine, Texas. That’s where the College Football Playoff committee will select the four teams that will play for the national championship. Michigan and Washington have already grabbed the first two bids. But among Alabama, Texas, Florida State and Georgia, who will be picked to fill the other two slots?
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The answer to that question could determine Michigan’s fate in its all-or-nothing quest to claim a national title.
Since this past winter, the Wolverines have yearned for another opportunity to compete in the CFP after losing in the semifinal round to Georgia in 2021 and TCU last December.
Those defeats stung Michigan, sucking some of the joy out of the Wolverines’ new-found success against the Buckeyes, their sudden dominance of the Big Ten and the program rebirth they initiated. The accumulation of failure at season's end also left U-M’s players more covetous of the sport’s biggest prize.
As he addressed a crowd at Crisler Center last February, star running back Blake Corum boldly declared, “We’re gonna win the national championship and go down in history.”
Over the next five months, Corum framed the 2023 season in binary terms: It was title or bust, he said. Many of his teammates agreed.
When several players with NFL aspirations returned to the team, they announced they had “unfinished business.”
Defeating Ohio State and winning the Big Ten had already been accomplished.
Now, it was time to do more.
It was no surprise then that Corum seemed rather unmoved by the Wolverines’ third consecutive conquest of the Buckeyes last week.
“The job is not finished, man,” he reminded reporters after Michigan prevailed, 30-24. “We have a lot of work to do.”
The same refrain was repeated by Harbaugh after the Wolverines schlepped through a messy win over Iowa in a game that featured a combined 368 yards of total offense from both teams and 13 drives that ended with punts.
"The team still has more goals to accomplish," he said just after midnight Sunday.
That much is clear. But even Harbaugh, with his so-called "one-track mind" and forward-looking disposition, felt obligated to reflect on the enormity of what Michigan has achieved over these past three seasons.
"To me," he said, "It feels ten out of ten happy, like it did last year and like it did in '21."
"Back-to-back-to-back feels great," Corum gushed.
The triumphs at Lucas Oil Stadium have been the crowning moments of a historic run by the Wolverines, who have won 25 straight conference games. In a bygone era — when Bo Schembechler was coaching, Harbaugh was quarterbacking and Keith Jackson was broadcasting — Michigan’s reign over the Big Ten would have garnered greater appreciation. In those days, when the sport was more regional and homespun, winning the conference meant everything.
Now, it is merely another benchmark along the climb to the top of CFP mountain. It’s why Saturday didn’t seem all that special for the Wolverines. They have been to this stage before. In the next month, they're aiming to surpass it and disprove critics that claim Michigan's supremacy within the league has been artificially enhanced by a "years-long" impermissible sign-stealing operation that has raised suspicions about whether it can beat tough competition outside its familiar territory.
As Corum said, "It's been a heck of a journey, but the journey is not over."
Three years ago, it would have been hard to imagine the program arriving at the point where a Big Ten championship left the Wolverines unfulfilled and deprived of true satisfaction.
But so much has changed since then.
The Wolverines no longer fantasize about ruling just their conference. They now imagine themselves conquering the rest of college football. In a matter of hours, they will learn how close those dreams are to reality.
Contact Rainer Sabin at rsabin@freepress.com. Follow him @RainerSabin.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan football's ultimate CFP dreams could be determined by Sunday
