Where Was THIS Michigan?

Michigan football and its fans endured a seemingly endless amount of criticism throughout the 2007 season, ranging ironically from the losses to Appalachian State and Oregon to “spoiled fans” complaining too much about losses.

I have wanted to address the latter criticism for a while now, but waiting to do so turned out to be a great decision—the Capital One Bowl ended up providing the perfect illustration of exactly why so many Michigan fans had been complaining.

The Michigan that won the Capital One Bowl game 41-35 over Florida and their Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Tim Tebow is the National Championship-caliber Michigan that fans rarely got to see but always knew they had for four years.

Instead, the Michigan that fans saw over these years demonstrated some combination of injury-hindered, “we are Michigan and thus victories are supposed to just fall in our lap,” sometimes strong, and the-other-team-is-performing better over the last few years. The arrogance of  “We are Michigan” finally caught up with the team in the loss to Appalachian State and is also likely somewhat responsible for Mike Hart’s arrogant putdown of Michigan State being immediately followed by a 16-point loss to Wisconsin after a six-game winning streak.

The injuries killed their 2005 season and their hopes of beating Ohio State to win the Big Ten and get back to the Rose Bowl in 2007. Facing a better opponent put them right at the doorstep of the 2006 National Championship game when the Wolverines lost by a field goal to Ohio State.

In the meantime, some fans always felt that the players and Lloyd Carr had more talent than they were demonstrating or getting credit for, which was costing them victories and opportunities. It seemed that the more credit Michigan did get and the more that was expected from the Wolverines, the worse they performed.

When Michigan was favored to win the 2006 Rose Bowl, they didn’t even come close. When the Wolverines were considered a near shoo-in for the 2007 National Championship game, they handed the football program the most embarrassing piece of its legacy, ruining their chances at the title after just one game. When they were still given the benefit of the doubt and were expected to reveal the Appalachian State game as a fluke, they were blown out by Oregon the very next week.

Michigan had already, at the very least, gotten very close to only being put in the same league with teams like Oklahoma, USC, Florida, and LSU because of history, not because of anything they’d done recently, before they lost to Appalachian State. But before that loss—despite having ended the 2006 season with losses to Ohio State and USC—college football commentators must have still seen in Michigan what the team's fans saw, or else they would have never felt confident that Michigan would be a contender for the Championship title.  

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