Before Tom Brady became the king of comebacks, before David Terrell became the MVP of the Orange Bowl, before Lloyd Carr and the offensive coaching staff eschewed running the ball for an aerial attack mid-bowl game, Michigan had to lose, and lose big. It was the the kind of loss that builds resolve when things get tough. And get tough they did, over and over again. The 1999 season ended on a high note in the wee hours of the second day of the new millennium, but whether Michigan would have been in the same spot without being blown out by Ohio State to end the 1998 regular season is an open question.

Aaron Shea, fullback: I remember one thing: 1998, the only year I lost to Ohio State, Tommy Brady and I, we walked off the field in Columbus and he looked at me and he goes, ‘We’re never losing to these motherfuckers ever again.’ This is a fact. And I go, ‘100%, let’s go.’ Coach Carr, he instilled in us in 1998 after we lost to Ohio State—that bowl trip was horrible. The entire offseason we worked so hard.

The hard work paid off immediately. Michigan opened the 1999 season with a visit from #16 Notre Dame and, in what would soon become the season’s signature, watched as the offense turned one final drive into the necessary points for a come-from-behind win. Lloyd Carr put Tom Brady under center with about four minutes left in the game—controversial in some circles given the competition with limitlessly talented Drew Henson—and Brady drove the offense sixty yards down the field, hitting David Terrell inside the 5-yard line to set up an Anthony Thomas plunge over the goal line with less than two minutes remaining. Michigan’s defense held on for a 26-22 victory.

Todd Howard, cornerback: We got off to a good start (against Notre Dame) and I ended up getting injured in the first quarter. One of the wide receivers clipped Tommy Hendricks while I was coming to make a tackle. I ended up breaking my wrist in that game and ended up playing the whole season with a broken hand. Played the rest of the game. Didn’t really find out it was broke until the following Tuesday right before practice. I was out there practicing, had it taped up literally, and then Tuesday they were like ‘Let’s get you an x-ray.’ Came back with a broken scaphoid or whatever it’s called, the smallest bone in your wrist. It was surgery or you could wear a cast for the rest of the season and I didn’t want to miss any time so I ended up playing the whole season with a cast, which as a DB is not the most fun thing.

Jay Flannelly, volunteer student assistant: The ‘97 team, the national championship team, was based on their defense. There were about five or six guys that started on the ‘97 team on defense that were seniors in ‘99, so it was very odd back then. No really good players are in college for four years or five if these guys redshirted. The linebacking corps—James Hall, Dhani Jones, Ian Gold—and Josh Williams, Rob Renes, Tommy Hendricks, these guys played a lot of games, so they were a very veteran defense. Then even on the offensive line, you had Steve Hutchinson and Jeff Backus. The ‘97 team, you think about that, Steve Hutchinson and Jon Jansen and Jeff Backus, they played about 40 years in the NFL combined if you look it up.

So we had a really strong foundation within the team; the ‘97 defensive guys, the two stud offensive linemen, Anthony Thomas was a great player, the receiving corps was underrated—David Terrell was developing but Diallo Johnson and Marcus Knight really had a good rapport with Tommy, and one of Tommy’s best friends is Aaron Shea, who was like a combination hybrid fullback like a—and you’re not old enough to remember this—Tom Rathman-type player.

The team, they were supposed to be good. Obviously the Drew and Tommy thing draws headlines, but we knew we were gonna have a really, really good team coming into the season.

Howard: Going through the season we were playing pretty well then ended up losing to Michigan State and then we lost the Illinois game. That was a tough one for me being from Illinois, and the team that we had that year, we were just loaded with talent and I remember us being like, Man, this is not how this season’s supposed to go. We had national championship aspirations.

David Terrell, wide receiver: Illinois was...damn. Me and Tom had a play in the back of the end zone.

[After THE JUMP: how South Beach scooters are the ancestor of today’s Schembechler Hall moped pit; a failed trade proposal]

Flannelly: Our running back was Anthony Thomas. We didn’t have anybody for whatever reason--attrition, injuries, Justin Fargas left, he broke his leg, had an awful leg injury and he left Michigan, and we really didn’t have a backup running back. A-Train hurt his hand and we didn’t have an X-ray machine at Michigan Stadium so they had to send him to the hospital. The thing about it is the guy who would have been the other running back on that team was John Anes and John Anes and Ron Dayne were the two biggest running back recruits in the country. John quit the team; he was battling depression and some other things and he had to quit the team. Well, if John Anes is on the team we probably beat Illinois because we had such a huge lead and we ran out of running backs.

We didn’t have another running back. I don’t think Chris Perry was here yet. Because, think about it, Chris Howard and Chris Floyd played a lot. Those guys played a lot and particularly Chris Howard and Christ Floyd were four-down players. I mean, they played kick teams and you would never see—they were on cover units and punt protections and other teams. You won’t see other teams [do that]. The Anthony Thomas injury and not having another running back was a big part of that ‘99 game and not having John Anes. When you go through a whole season there’s going to be stuff like that that’s weird. Think about how Brian Griese became the quarterback in ‘97; nobody would have picked him at the beginning of the year and stuff just happens.

Marcus Knight, wide receiver: That Illinois game can be argued, it all depends on who you talk to. I mean, we lost the Michigan State game. Plaxico [Burress] had a hell of game. We lost that by three and then we came in feeling sorry for ourselves in the Illinois game, got out to a lead, took them for granted, and then they ended up coming back. If we would have found a way to win that game, we may still with having the second-toughest schedule in college football—you never know with the coaches’ [poll], AP, and back in those days the way that they used to vote was so weird—we could have easily been in the national championship game, which would have been the goal, playing Florida State. But with that loss against an unranked team and losing in that type of fashion, we knew we had a hill to climb.

We won the first five, lost to State, then ended up losing to Illinois and we had to turn it around then and look at ourselves in the mirror and say How do we finish this season on the right note? And we went down and we did some really, really good things playing a tough schedule and ended up getting into that game [the Orange Bowl].

I think we were one win away. Those two games we did lose, I thought we had the team and the talent to go undefeated again but Michigan State did a hell of a job and Plaxico had a great game and Illinois did a hell of a job taking advantage of mistakes that we made in those two games.

Shea: Growing up in Illinois, it was embarrassing to lose to Illinois and then we lost to Michigan State. Those were tough. Two games we should have won. We win one of the two, we were told we would have played for a national championship.

Howard: I think we kind of had a moment of clarity after that [Illinois] game. Which way do we want this to go? With the senior class that we had, Brady and those guys, it was kind of like we had to get back to square one and kind of refocus and recalibrate and from that moment on we played with Our record’s 0-0. We’ve got to win out and see what happens.

Went on throughout the season and played Ohio State at home and I remember that being a pivotal game for us. Wanted to get the win and let the cards fall where they may if we won out. We had to finish that game off and see what would happen. We ended up getting the Orange Bowl, which wasn’t a bad consolation prize, and here we are playing Alabama, two teams that could have potentially played in the national championship that year if things had gone a different way during the season.

Terrell: Pretty big bowl game. We were pretty upset because that year, we pretty much were one game away from a national championship [game berth], so it was kind of like a letdown year… It was pretty much a letdown year for us that year coming off the ‘97 year and then ‘98-’99 we were in the Citrus Bowl and that was a letdown year because, like I said, we had good teams.

For Michigan, it’s something that we just don’t talk about but pretty much if you come in the season, you just win the Big Ten and you win those couple big games strategically on your schedule—Michigan State, Penn State, all those big, dated games—along with all the other games, at the end of the year you’ll pretty much write your own story. You don’t have to talk about the national championship or the Rose Bowl. Of course our goal is the Rose Bowl because in the Big Ten during that particular time the Rose Bowl was the biggest game; you want to fight for the Rose Bowl, so if you’re fighting to get to the Rose Bowl, everything else is pretty much going to take care of itself. So that was our mentality always coming in.

That was what we were taught to think coming in. Coach Carr did a great job having us focus on that type of thing, along with all of the other little college stuff you go through.

Shawn Thompson, tight end: We were coming off four or five consecutive wins right at the end. I remember coming off those we ended up ending the year right where Tom really took over. I think it was really the Penn State game where Tom had really taken over as our starting quarterback for the full game. If you remember that first half of the year it was really Drew and Brady splitting time. We came back against Penn State and it was really that game moving forward that Brady kind of took charge and was our starter the rest of the season.

Flannelly: Tom wasn’t a big story. He’s kind of made up for it now, but back then he wasn’t. Tom wasn’t Tom yet. This is the mistake people make. They kill Lloyd; ‘Oh, how could you play Tom Brady over Drew Henson?’ or ‘How could you play Drew Henson over Tom Brady?’ Tom wasn’t Tom yet. There were parts of what--I’m talking about Tom Brady today, where literally he shows up at the stadium and the other team surrenders; it’s over. It’s like ‘Oh my god, we can’t win this game.’ But he wasn’t that, but what he was was the guys on the team believed in him and there were bits and pieces of what he’s become.

That Alabama game, you saw parts, like they were behind and they came back. Never say die, we have Tom Brady, and Drew Henson was basically John Elway and he had the leverage with the baseball situation so it magnified things, plus he was a local guy. It was such a screwy situation.

Howard: Back then we did things a little bit differently. Our bowl prep, we went down almost two weeks or a week and a half in advance. Coach had it so we stayed our first week in Fort Lauderdale, and then they moved us more centralized to Miami. That was actually pretty common where they’d keep us away from bowl activities. Conditions were a little bit different back then. Our indoor facility was just astroturf and was rough on our knees specifically in the winter, and it allowed us to get down there and kind of get acclimated to the climate. It allowed us to practice outdoors, which was a lot better back then. Now we’ve got that fancy indoor facility where they can pretty much practice regular practice indoor year-round. I think my senior year we finally got FieldTurf in our indoor facility. 

Terrell: We got to the bowl game, to the hotel. It was beautiful. The bowl trip, the bowl gifts, the food was remarkable. Orange Bowl did a great job in hosting.

Howard: The hotel that we ended up staying in was the Eden Roc in Miami, which is a pretty cool hotel. It was funny because our first day there I think we had a half a day so we went and practiced, we came back and it was like everybody just kind of beelined to South Beach. We found the quickest way down there. We all got cabs and split cabs like We’re going to South Beach right now and it was a good group of us—I want to say 10-15 guys—we all just rented scooters for the week. Took whatever per diem they gave us and we went down and we rented scooters and we all came back and it was like the whole week you’d see these scooters parked outside the hotel. Our coaches weren’t too happy about that. ‘Where the heck did all these scooters come from?!’ It was just the easiest way for us to get around instead of having to wait for cabs and spend all the money for cabs. It was a way for us to get down there and get to the beach as soon as practice was over. Getting close to the game obviously Coach was like, ‘Alright, time to get rid of those scooters.’ 

Shea: No, no, no, no [I didn’t rent one]. We did that in Hawaii when we played them in ‘98. Actually Tai Streets sent me a text; it was myself, Drew Henson, Tom Brady, Larry Foote, Dave Terrell and it was kind of funny but no, I didn’t. I learned from my mistakes because someone ruined a scooter in Hawaii so I thought No, I’m NOT doing that. 

Thompson: One thing you remember is the whole New Year deal with 2000 and everything with Y2K, so I think there was a lot of hype about all that. It was a cool place to be at that time. The week leading up to it, for us, coming from Michigan it’s such an important couple of weeks of practice and back then, that’s when coach Carr started changing things up—I think it was my second year there—where we would start coming down so much earlier to the bowl game and it was really for us to get used to the weather and just kind of get acclimated with that being up here in the north. I just remember how important those couple weeks are in preparing for Alabama. You could feel the excitement being in Miami at that point.

Knight: We knew that they had a great offense. They had Shaun Alexander; they had a great running game. We knew it was going to be a team that was very similar to us in a lot of ways, because we had a lot of success running the ball with A-Train, so I thought we matched up really well.

Kind of looked up and researched yesterday and in that year both us and Alabama had the toughest and the second-toughest schedule in that year, so it was kind of odd that we ended up playing each other in that 2000 bowl game.

Howard: Any given game week, our coaches—coach Carr and his staff—they just did a phenomenal job of letting us know about each player. We knew every player: first name, last name, where they were from, hobbies, likes. Coach Carr would sometimes joke with us, like, ‘I’d trade our whole defensive secondary for a couple of their receivers.’ He’d make little jabs at us like that.

Going into the game defensively, they had Shaun Alexander at running back, they had a talented offensive line with Chris Samuels on the line, and Freddie Milons was the guy that sticks out as far as skilled guys. He was just a guy who was a home run waiting to happen, whether it be on special teams or as far as playing receiver.

Thompson: What I remember is their defense had a lot of speed and then really a lot of speed and a great offense as well with Freddie Milons, [who] had just a great year and I know he kind of tore up Florida a few times. He was a big special teams guy and obviously he hurt us, too. We were preparing a lot for him from a special teams standpoint and preparing a lot for Shaun Alexander and their offense. From what I remember, obviously I was so focused on the defense but really both sides of the ball they had a very good team. Defensive-wise, yeah, very fast from what the scouting report was showing.

Coming in part 2: Turns out the scouting reports were accurate