How Could Michigan Lose
THAT?
By
Pete Fiutak
And you thought Boise
State beating Oklahoma was big.
How could this possibly happen?
This is Michigan, Michigan, vs. Appalachian State. You and some
friends should be able to throw on the Michigan helmet, jump up and
touch the Go Blue sign, and by intimidation alone, beat Appalachian
State.
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The other
bad Michigan losses
Michigan started playing football in 1881. During that time,
the winningest program in college football history has only lost
22 games to teams that finished with a losing record, and hasn’t
dropped a game to a non-D-I team, if you can call anyone that
back in the day, since a 1928 17-7 loss to Ohio Wesleyan 17-7
1928. With that in mind, before today, here were Michigan’s five
worst losses (considering how good the Michigan team was
compared to the team it lost to) …
1. 1976 at Purdue 16-14
2. 1969 Michigan State 23-12
3. 1939 Minnesota 20-7
4. 1954 Indiana 13-9
5. 1939 at Illinois 16-7 |
This is college
football. Yeah, upsets happen in college basketball when a few guys get
hot for a game and the shots simply don’t fall for the superior team,
but in football, you don’t just pull off upsets out of the blue.
Appalachian State just doesn’t beat Michigan.
Give Appalachian
State and quarterback Armanti Edwards all the credit in the world for
pulling off one of the great upsets in college football history with the
34-32 victory, and give them credit for coming up with the plays they
needed to, highlighted by the blocked field goal by Corey Lynch, to
overcome a missed offensive pass interference call, to end the game. But
make no mistake about it, this Michigan team lacked focus.
Again, give credit where credit is due, but play this game 99 out of 100
times and Michigan wins in a walk. This is a team with some all-time
caliber offensive talent, and despite the lack of overall starting
experience, loads of prep superstars on defense who probably couldn’t
even spell Appalachia. But this Michigan team’s head wasn’t focused on
the task at hand, as it was already working on a game in late November,
and possibly one in January.
I got a chance to sit down with Chad Henne and Mike Hart, two of
Michigan’s offensive superstars, and all they could talk about were Ohio
State, whom they’ve never beaten, a bowl game, which they’ve never won,
and coming back to school for their senior seasons instead of jumping to
the pros. They paid lip service to the rest of the Big Ten schedule, and
they each threw out the “one game at a time” cliché, but then the talk
soon went back to how their legacies would be defined by what they did
at the end of the year against the Buckeyes before finishing up with a
possible post-season victory.
For head coach Lloyd Carr, this could signal the beginning of the end.
After not getting to a national title game since winning it all in 1997,
and with all the goodwill from the great 2006 season being wiped away
with the Rose Bowl loss to USC, this loss erases just about all the
positives, and all the wins, Carr has been able to come up with in a
college football world that focuses solely on the right now.
And right now, Henne, Hart, and Carr’s legacies are defined by
Appalachian State.
Oh sure, Michigan could still win its final 11 games, and Henne and Hart
could still achieve their goals and win their final two games of the
year, but no matter what they do, their careers will be marred by a loss
that’ll be talked about as long as they played college football.
They’re the ones who were part of the all-timer loss. They’re the ones
who’ll have to hear about this for the rest of their lives no matter if
they win five Super Bowls and go to the Hall of Fame. They’re the ones
who were the leaders of a team that obviously wasn’t focused enough, and
Appalachian State took advantage.
Past Michigan teams were able to rise up and pull off close wins in the
final moments in close openers. In 2002 the Wolverines avoided disaster
with a 31-29 win to an average Washington team. In 1995, a last-second
touchdown catch by Mercury Hayes got Michigan by a Virginia team that
turned out to be better than expected. But this was something different.
This was Appalachian State.
How big was this? It was the first time an FCS program, formerly called
D-IAA teams, beat an AP ranked top 25 program. Of course, Michigan isn’t
just any sort of top 25 program; this is Michigan. The alleged Leaders
and the Best. The team that was supposed to be in the thick of the
national title chase.
Oh sure, there have been upsets before, and right now college football
writers all over the country are scrambling to find one bigger.
(Temple’s 1998 28-24 win at Virginia Tech actually has this one beat.
That Temple team was far, far worse than this ASU squad.) Oh sure, there
will be big upsets again. But this doesn’t happen to Michigan. This
doesn’t happen to a program that’s been playing football since 1881.
This doesn’t happen to one of the programs that defines college
football.
Besides a lack of focus, how could this happen? Remember, there isn’t a
preseason like there is in the NFL when teams get five tune-ups and
about three times the practice and film time the college guys get. If
there’s going to be an upset of this magnitude, it’s going to happen in
the opening game, when the supposedly superior team doesn’t have time to
jell or get all the new starters in place. Teams with a few talented
stars, and a ton of experience, like ASU, have the potential to pull off
shockers like this.
But again, this was Michigan.
This was Henne, Hart, Jake Long, Mario Manningham … Michigan. Yeah, it
was an unfocused Michigan, but there are only a few Appalachian State
players, if any, who could’ve started for the Wolverines. This is the
program that can get 100,000+ fans to turn out for, well, Appalachian
State. This is Michigan, and that’s why jaws remained dropped all over
the country.
Now we get to see what this program is made of in the rebound game
against Oregon. Now we get to see what kind of resiliency Carr and his
stars have. Now we get to see if Michigan really can treat this like a
preseason game and go on a big roll.
Maybe they can still beat Ohio State and win a bowl game
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