Like many of you I felt an unease as Michigan put together a decent season. Used to seeing Harbaugh’s teams sulk and give up every time the slightest adversity presented itself in a road game, I figured Wisconsin would smash them, they didn’t. Like clockwork, they dropped a winnable game at MSU, which I figured locked them into 9-3 with a perfunctory bowl game pout-fest blowout. It didn’t. I got pretty excited at the idea of Ohio State lambasting them 78-6, but we know how that turned out.

A funny thing happened on the way to that beat down, though. Well, less a “funny” thing than a “Rocky IV” thing: Michigan came out and played poised, physical, team oriented football and despite having accumulated roughly 1/4th the premium talent on their roster as had Ohio State, they bopped the Buckeyes in the nose and won handily, in a game that wasn’t as close as the 42-27 final indicated.

Rather than being put out by the Wolverines’ success, though, I have been shocked to find myself at the threshold of cheering them on! Why? Read on!

 

Stipulated: Hating Michigan is Very Fun and Rewarding

Since 2009 or so, Michigan is the non-ND team I’ve watched more than any other. It hasn’t been “hate watching” per se, moreso that I just love watching bad things happen to them. And there’s been a lot to love:

  • The late RichRod era, when any team with a pulse (plus Illinois) could push around the Wolverine defense with delightful impunity. Game crushing turnovers, crying recitation of Josh Groban lyrics, showing-your-ass classism from Michigan Men against the coach from West Virginia who dared to bring the spread n’ shred to Ann Arbor, and Greg Robinson rubbing a stuffed animal all over the faces of his players during a road-paving by Wisconsin;

 

 

  • The late Hoke-era, when negative net rushing yards against Michigan State were a favorite pastime, ass-slaps the height of in-game coaching, and a loveable lout in the driver’s seat somehow lowered the collective university IQ by one-third;

 

 

  • And, perhaps most richly, the heretofore pervasive floundering of wundercoach Jim Harbaugh, whom the wits on the Victors Board until very recently hilariously referred to as “Low T Jimmy.”

 

A bitter rival who tried to strangle ND’s football program in its infancy, Michigan provides a great foil to Notre Dame. Whereas Michigan’s tradition, history and standing have, with some exceptions, been built on decades of sturdy but relatively nondescript achievement, Notre Dame’s history has been a roller coaster: grand arcs punctuated by improbable moments and larger than life personalities. Notre Dame has Ronald Reagan as The Gipper, Rudy, and the Four Horsemen. Michigan has the most wins, The Big House, and The Big Chill. This drives Michigan supporters to distraction, and ND fans take outsized umbrage at the resentment.

Both schools fancy themselves as ideal matchings of academic prestige and big-time athletics. There are huge overlaps in applicant pools, feeder schools and post-graduation career paths. There’s a familiarity and resonance between each place and fanbase that creates something of a sibiling rivalry dynamic. Add in some unbelievably memorable contests over the years and you’ve got a recipe for Sports Hate.

Now add to those dynamics the overlapping existential crises of extended down periods and the long-and-tenuous climbs upwards into the light both programs have been mired within for a generation. Both fanbases fear, perhaps rightly, that only one of them can be asked to the ball and every ounce of beauty the other accumulates is a direct threat to their own chances.

But we both need to look past our old, comfortable hatreds and realize there are bigger picture problems.

Fighting for the Scraps from Longshanks’ Table

As fun as it is for ND fans to wallow in Michigan’s crapulence (and vice versa), we need to acknowledge there’s some real whistling past the graveyard going on.  Perhaps the most overwhelming trend of the playoff era has been class consolidation at the high end. A mere five schools own twenty-three of the twenty-four CFP victories since implementation of the playoff system (pour one out for Oregon in the very first CFP game ever).  There are ramifications to this! Very Top Talent is (probably correctly) perceiving the chance of winning a championship at any school outside of that “Win in the Playoffs” as prohibitively small.

Here’s a look at how many Top 100 Recruits the ‘Real Power 5’ schools have recruited in the latter-day playoff era (e.g., the 2019-22 classes), with also-rans ND and Michigan thrown in for scale.

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Alabama – 47 Top 100 Prospects

Georgia – 38 Top 100 Prospects

OSU – 32 Top 100 Prospects

LSU – 25 Top 100 Prospects

Clemson – 24 Top 100 Prospects

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ND – 11 Top 100 Prospects

Michigan – 8 Top 100 Prospects

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You can see the implication. The rich are getting ever richer, which promises a vicious cycle of talent acquisition to such point that other schools really end up doing nothing more than jostling for stature as sacrificial lambs on the high altar of a playoff game. Of the 14 CFP seminfinal games played to date, the outcomes of only three have been held in doubt into the fourth quarter, and of those games two of them (OSU-Bama ’14, Clemson-OSU ’19) were intra-power-5 tilts.

There are a handful of “talent black holes” in college football, and they’re sucking the stakes out of the game for everyone else. What’s more, this is accelerating.

 

The Four Bonus Armies of The Apocalypse

This is the image I really ought to have made the header for this article:

 

This is what’s been happening to college football in the playoff era. Saban is out there getting 7 bonus armies every turn. OSU is picking up reinforcements from the windswept heartlands of  Fortress Europe. Clemson has been cruising through domination of the entire western hemisphere, and only needing to defend like 2-3 territories. Georgia is the kid who is just overloading Indonesia with masses of armies but can’t get any purchase in Southeast Asia.

In this scenario, ND and Michigan are jockeying for position in the mid-board territories of Africa. You can make a persuasive argument that ND actually struck first, Ian Book finding Avery Davis across the vastness of the South Atlantic to rupture Clemson’s hold on South America. It was a close-run thing, though. The Tigers swept back through the token force the Irish had left behind only a few weeks thence. Perhaps some damage had been done, though. The Buckeyes thrashed the Greenland garrison that postseason, and now today we see the Pawprint Empire wobbling how it has not for a decade.

Enter 2021. Michigan’s trampling over Southern Europe was even more resounding. Could this roughshod thrashing of the Buckeyes reverberate throughout The Continent for more than a turn or two? Hard to know, but it’s possible a good showing in Miami could bolster Ann Arbor’s Italian force to a degree not measurable only in men, but perhaps by horses or even cannon. And who, ask yourself, would stand to benefit most immediately from a crisis in the EuroZone? Why none other than General Freeman and his troops, who are embarking from desert shores in an invasion of Columbus/Western Europe on the third of September. Two months after that, we’re heading back to Brazil. Chaos is a ladder, and ND has been poised and ready to climb for a good long while now.

Today, Michigan constitutes not our blood enemies in an interceine war for to be the last eliminated from the game, but our allies in the glorious cause of breakout! The board has been almost fatefully tilted against us both, and in moments like that all disruptions of a hostile hegemony ought to be welcome. If Michigan can play a few RISK cards and break through, than so can we, and that’s exactly the proof-of-concept that can make that pivotal recruit and/or 3rd/4th year player believe they really can make all the difference for the next year’s team.

TL; DR – Go Blue!