IT HAPPENED
Carmen Mandato | Getty Images
I don’t even know how I’m supposed to start this. It feels like I watched a miracle happen last night. As much as I’ve loved college football for most of my life, it’s always come with the understanding that it was a cruel and unfair game. A B1G Championship was a realistic goal, but anything beyond that was just never going to happen. I accepted this sometime in 2019 when I realized Michigan could never field a team like that LSU squad unless something drastically changed in the program. If you told me in 2018 that Michigan would qualify for, let alone win a four team playoff, I’d probably tell you to kick rocks. Instead, the Michigan Wolverines are one of the five most successful programs of the four team playoff era.
There’s something about this journey that could never in a million years be replicated by pro sports. Despite the incessant commercialization of college sports in the past decade or so, there’s still nothing in American sports quite like it. Seeing a guy like Blake Corum, who is not just an immaculate team leader that chose to return to college after a devastating knee injury but also a pillar of the community in the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area, raise the National Championship trophy as the game’s MVP. Seeing Trente Jones, who is open about his struggles with depression and suicidal ideation on his social media, dance in the endzone after leading Corum to the 27-13 touchdown. Seeing Mikey Sainristil, a player that did everything asked of him to the point that he switched sides of the ball three years into his career because the team needed a nickel corner, raise his arms over his head in disbelief as the clock hit zeroes. These moments hit me in a way that I really didn’t expect.
It’s not the same as if my favorite NFL team (the Cowboys, sorry) won the Super Bowl. This isn’t a win for Jerry Jones’ most expensive corporate entity. This is a championship for the city of Ann Arbor, Michigan, the best place I’ve ever lived. The game wasn’t played exclusively for the millionaires that could afford tickets. The game was played for an undergrad that proceeded to get loaded at Skeeps and climb a streetlight. The game was played for the guy I met at Joe’s Bar in Vegas last night who walked across the bar to dap me up after Sainristil’s interception. The game was played for my dad who has long sworn I was a curse on his favorite teams because they all suspiciously stopped being good after I was born in 1997, and now that I’ve moved across the country they all win again.
The game was played for Denard Robinson and Mike Hart, who now each have the championship rings they so richly deserved while they were playing for the Wolverines. The game was played for Grant Newsome, who nearly had his leg amputated thanks to a Wisconsin DB and had to learn how to walk again, and is now a National Champion coach before he begins his campaign for president. The game was played for Jordan Kovacs, Aidan Hutchinson, David Ojabo, Mike Onwenu, Jourdan Lewis, Jabrill Peppers, Josh Ross, Junior Hemingway, Andrew Vastardis, Brandon Graham and Jake Butt. The story for the team is obvious, their immense corniness fueled by manufactured disrespect and stupidly self-inflicted scandals. And yes, I’m aware how corny these players are, and how much I would dislike JJ McCarthy if he played for any other program. But he does play for Michigan, and he’s 27-1 as a starter, and he’s a National Champion. One of the main benefits of winning is that you don’t have to pretend you respect your opponents or have any grace whatsoever in victory. No, I didn’t contribute to a single win in Michigan football history unless you count the time I wore a panda mascot head in support of Khalid Hill during the 2017 Florida game, but telling Steven Godfrey that I would vandalize his house felt like my reward for being a fan of Michigan through all the bad times in the same way that Jim Harbaugh receiving the trophy must’ve felt last night.
What happened last night was so inconceivable to me that I had to wake up this morning and remind myself that it happened. Despite a shower, I still smelled like cigarette smoke because of the chain-smoking degenerate gambler that cornered me last night and tried to convince me to start gambling professionally because I made an off-hand comment about how Michigan was going to try and keep Washington to around 9 possessions. I thought about the water bottle I tossed off a balcony in 2021 when Hassan Haskins hurdled Cam Brown to effectively end the 2021 OSU game. I thought about the lightning delay I waited through while eating some very bad chicken strips at the Big House to see JJ McCarthy’s first start against Hawai’i last year. I thought about the second half of the TCU game that I watched on my phone in my own house because I needed to be able to ignore it when they let Quentin Johnston break another big play. All worth it.
There’s no larger point to this piece. I don’t have a life lesson to bury within metaphors about football. Last night just fucking ruled and I had to talk about it. The Michigan Wolverines won a National Championship.