So yeah, I've never written a Best & Worst (a) this late into the season, and (b) after a national title.  Because of course this game is on Monday so I'm running on about 6 hours of sleep and a full day of work in the bag, so if this comes off as particularly vibes-y you'll know the reason.  I also lost about 2 pages of this because my computer restarted, and I'm not going to try to recreate it.  Also, winning a national title is cool and fun and I'd totally suggest other fanbases experience it if they can.  A+ no notes. 

Best:  Savor

I was a high school junior when Michigan last won a national title, living in Metro Detroit and preparing to take the ACT and considering maybe applying to Michigan for college.  For those who are quick at math or who've seen me try to deploy hip-kids slang on the blog over the years, that means I'm in my early 40s, that wonderful age range where people most commonly assume you're either a really tired 30-year-old or a spry 50-year-old.  It's the age where I look at the Stella Artois in my fridge and Bulleit Bourbon in my liquor cabinet and then wind up drinking 2 cans of lemon seltzer and peeing like a race horse every 15 minutes in the 2nd half because I know I've got to get up and take the kids to school before work.

Regardless, it's the age where you start realizing you may not see everything you expected to see in your life in the future, or at least not at the frequency you assumed at a younger age.  In 1997 I thought it was awesome UM won a title but I sort of expected it to keep going.  College football was different back, captured no better than a final top-10 featuring UCLA, Nebraska, UNC, and Washington State.  But Michigan seemed poise to keep this level of championship competition going forward, with top-end recruiting and coaching to go along with all of their natural and historical advantages. 

But as we all know, that didn't really occur.  Michigan remained somewhat competitive nationally under Carr but never finished with fewer than 2 losses again, and their highest end-of-year finish was #5 in 1999.  They never quite recaptured that magical formula from 1997, and instead settled into being pretty good but a step behind the rest of the top teams in the country.  Then came the end of the Carr era, with The Horror and all that, then the tumultuous RR and Hoke years, and then the "return" to Carr-era success under Harbaugh, which was closer to greatness but never quite there.

My wife and I adopted our dog Zoey (who's official name is Zoltan, after famed UM punter Zoltan Mesko) in 2008.  She's been a huge part of our lives, from career changes to moves to being there when we welcomed both of our kids into this world.  My wife wrote a little book about her years ago, which apparently you can buy on Barnes and Nobles because the internet never forgets.  She turned 15 in August, and while she's got quite a bit of white she still looks and moves like a puppy.  My kids, who were babies well into me writing this column, have emerged into fully-formed children.  Job changes, selling and buying of homes, losing family members and welcoming new ones, all of these events have been happening over these past 15 years.  And yet, during this season I made a point of trying to savor my time with Zoey whenever I could.  I give her extra treats when I can, try to take her on walks when she wants to, my wife and I set up a heater and a blanket in her favorite spot on the coach so she can be comfortable.  She still drives me crazy, but I'm trying to remember that her crazy won't always be there, that expecting tomorrow to be like today and the day before that aren't given.  My kids are getting older and already don't need me as much, and my dog will one day not be able to get off that couch and go for a walk.  I don't think that'll happen any time soon but I'm not naive enough to believe it won't happen.

My point with all of this reminiscing is to tell you all to savor this season, to enjoy it for what it was and what it'll be forever.  Don't worry about 2024, or where coaches and players will be next season.  Live in the moment, enjoy this win, and never quite let it go.  Yes, this is all a sport and none of it has overwhelming significance in our lives as fans.  But that doesn't mean it's wrong to enjoy it, and to act dumb and childish for a while.  My wife and kids were fast asleep when the confetti fell down on this season, and I wound up telling them in the morning that UM had won and they were sufficiently excited for me in the way family is because they respect your hobby without really getting it.  But I knew I didn't need to tell Zoey about the win because she had been in that room with me all night, happily snoring away while periodically looking up when I yelped after a big play.  And I'm looking forward to her being there at the kickoff of next season too.

Best:  Blocking and Tackling FTW

It's cliche but football often does boil down to blocking and tackling, physics and biology holding trump cards when offensive and defensive coaches and players enter into pitched battle.  You can draw up a fantastic scheme, drill your players to execute it with perfection, and deploy these plays with aplomb and it won't always matter because the guy you're trying to tackle is just bigger and faster than you, or the nose tackles across from you is "light in the ass" and can be moved back 4-5 yards consistently.

Both teams in this game showed toughness and a willingness to leverage their natural advantages to succeed.  Michigan started the game plowing the Huskies defensive line, consistently opening up holes that Donovan Edwards (sometimes immediately, sometimes eventually) raced through for the 2nd and 3rd-longest TD runs in championship game history.  In an inversion of expectations, it was Michigan's offense that was quick-strike, scoring TDs on drives of 4 and 8 plays covering 84 and 86 yards, while the Huskies embarked on these long, plodding drives of 11 and 14 plays.  At one point Michigan was averaging 20 yards per carry, and Washington's defense adjusted by run blitzing at the point of attack, accepting that what they couldn't make up in mass they'd overcome with numbers.  And that worked for a time, with Michigan scuttling on then ground in the 2nd and 3rd quarters while trying (in my opinion way too hard) to establish a quick passing game without introducing McCarthy's legs into the equation.  But as the game dragged on Washington's defenders clearly were spent, and those gaps started to open up again.  Michigan's last drive of the 3rd saw them unleash McCarthy's legs as massive holes opened up again on the offensive line, and while it ended in a punt you could see Washington realize they didn't have any more zags in them. By then the best they could hope for was the fortuitous defensive plays and offensive firepower that had carried them to the title game.

On offense, Washington's Joe Moore-winning line struggled against Michigan's defensive line.  Mason Graham and Kenneth Grant were nigh unblockable all night, but while Grant was the only defender to record a sack on the day McGregor, Steart, Moore, Barrett, and Jenkins all had their moments harassing Penix.  Much has been made in the aftermath that Washington needed a Penix-vs.-Texas-type performance to win this contest and didn't get it, and a big reason why was that he rarely had a clean, comfortable pocket to work in.  Michigan's defensive line was bigger and faster than any the Huskies had seen all year, and they came in so many waves and from so many angles that he didn't stand much of a chance.  By the end of the game Penix, who had escaped IU in part because his line couldn't keep him upright, looked like he had once again stood tall behind Bloomington's finest, limping around while clearly favoring his ribs after experiencing yet another shot by the Michigan defense.  A number of his missed throws were due to this increased pressure regardless of whether or not they got home; his missed wide-open throw to Odunze was due in large part to Michigan's pressure forcing a throw a split-second too early and off-balance.  Penix has a supernatural ability to get a ball out quickly while under duress, but even this magic had limits and Michigan's pressure was simply too much.

The difference in this game was that when Michigan needed to make a tackle and limit yards after contact, or needed to disrupt a block, they did.  All year Michigan was one of the best teams are closing down plays at first contact, of not missing tackles, and so when they did rarely occur in this game they stood out.  But the emblematic tackle in this game came from none other than Mike Sainristil, who on 3rd-and-5 in the first quarter seemingly velcro'd onto McMillan on 3rd-and-5 and wouldn't let him get another yard than the 2 the play got him.  All game Michigan tackled guys and they stayed down; they rarely squirted free for a backbreaking first down or a score.  When Washington got deep into the redzone and tried to barrel over Makari Paige, it was the veteran safety who went under the block and stuffed the back for a minimal gain.  By comparison, when Washington needed tackles to keep Michigan out of the endzone, they missed them (a problem for them all year) and Michigan took advantage.

So while I'm very excited for a UFR both of this game as well as against the Tide, and I'm sure there will be so nuggets of schematic gold in them, Michigan's championship season happened because they blocked and tackled better than anyone else in the country.

Worst:  No Extra Credit

I'm not going to dwell on this much because when a team goes undefeated and wins a national title after beating at least 4 of the top 15 teams in the country it ceases to matter how wrong pundits are, but one consistent theme I've gathered from the coverage following this game is that purported Ball Knowers believe that Washington as much lost this game as Michigan won it.  There's some nuance to the individual arguments, but the gist is that once Michigan didn't blow out the Huskies after going up 17-3 Washington's offensive struggles were mostly self-inflicted and even an "average" Penix performance would have won them the title.  Michigan's defense received some credit, oftentimes somewhat faintly, for holding up against Washington but Penix himself claimed the Huskies beat themselves as much as the Wolverines shut him down.

In one sense I guess I sort of get it; fireball-throwing Penix for the first 3 quarters of the Texas game probably does beat Michigan because, well, that type of performance beats anyone.  76% completion for 11 ypa on 38 passes will do that to any team.  But Michigan doesn't let teams get "average" performances out of their QBs; they were in the top-5 all year defensively and finished the season #1 per SP+ and FEI by those metrics because they just ground teams down.  They only gave up over 200 yards passing 3 times all year, and in this game held the Heisman runner-up to a lower completion percentage than MSU's Katin Houser pulled off.  Penix looked uncomfortable and was undoubtedly in pain as the game progressed but that wasn't by accident or chance; it was because Michigan's defense consistently got pressure on him in the pocket, stuck to his receivers downfield, and made Washington one-dimensional by snuffing out their running game.  On the day Washington had 1 play over 20 yards after coming into the game 3rd in the country with 89 plays over the 20-yard mark, and I doubt a healthy Dillon Johnson changes that much considering how they struggled to move the ball on the ground against Texas.

Michigan's defense played like they have all year, and yet it seemingly still came as a surprise to some that it worked yet again.  I get that the Big 10 West's offensive ineptitude messes with some advanced stats to a degree, but it also seems like a lot of people simply underrated the defensive capabilities of Big 10 teams generally, and assumed that Washington's particular collection of NFL-quality WRs and dynamic QB play would be different than the other teams UM has faced with stocked WR rooms and dynamic QB play.  Clearly that wasn't the case.

Best:  Winners Win

One of the mantras that Washington's Kalen DeBoer took from his days coaching under storied University of Sioux Falls HC Bob Young was "winners win because that's what winners do", a somewhat reductive but still true outlook on sports.  We fixate on the upsets, on the times when teams fall just short and players stumble under the brightest spotlight, but in general the best teams win championships when they matter.  There may be aberrations in sports, even those with longer playoffs such as baseball and hockey, but in general the top teams sort themselves out after a long enough season.  Before the BCS you had multiple teams that could lay credible claim to the top spot, who due to the vagaries of conference bowl alignments and scheduling would have dominate seasons in parallel with little-to-no overlap for comparison.  The human element, in the form of voters in polls, came into play and allowed multiple "winners" of the title of best that year.  But since the BCS emerged the year after Michigan split a title with Nebraska due to those two titans' paths never crossing, we've had far fewer debates over the "true" champion.  Yes, you'll have a year like 2003 where both LSU and USC laid claim to titles, but long gone are the days where 3-4 teams would lay claim to a piece of the title, and with the expanded playoffs coming next year my guess is we'll have even fewer disputes over who got a fair shot.

That's all to say that Michigan was one of the best teams all year, from wire to wire, and they did it because this team's culture went from one where they seemingly hoped to win to expecting to win, regardless of the situation or the odds.  People all point to the win against OSU in 2021 as a turning point when Michigan turned it on, when that switch finally clicked and they started playing like a dominant team.  But I think it started before then, and in a game that at the time felt like an omen of failure, not rebirth.  It was 2020 at Rutgers, an absolutely stupid game that featured UM going down big to the Scarlet Knights, clawing back behind Cade McNamara (who subbed in for an injured/ineffective Joe Milton), giving up the lead late and then winning in double OT.  That synopsis doesn't really do justice to how bugnuts the game was to witness, but even though Michigan lost the next week to PSU (with McNamara getting hurt early) and ended their season due to a COVID outbreak on the team, this game laid the blueprint for how the next 3 years would go.  Haskins ran for 111 yards on 23 carries and the team moved back toward a bruising running style, while Michigan's passing game started to be a bit more coherent downfield after some erratic play by both senior-year Shea Patterson and first-time starter Joe Milton.  Don Brown left in the offseason and was replaced by Mike MacDonald, who brought with him the multiple formations and defensive backfield complexity that are earmarks of the Raven's defense.  Michigan came back in a dumb game against an (assumed) inferior opponent, as they've done in the past.  But as I noted at the time, this felt different:

Yes, it's Rutgers. Yes, it's a triple-overtime game wherein Michigan was down 17-0 midway through the second quarter, gave up nearly 400 yards passing, and missed 3 FGs. Yes, it's a game where after finally taking an 8-point lead Michigan gave up 16-play, 75-yard TD + 2 pt drive to head to overtime, featuring a Rutgers QB dragging multiple Michigan defenders 4 yards into the endzone (!) on a designed QB sneak (!!) to tie the game. And yes, Michigan is still 2-3, likely looking down (at best) a 4-4 regular season with a battered, ineffective defense, a janky offense, and no marquee wins in this, Jim Harbaugh's 6th year at his alma mater.

All of that is true, and yet I don't care. Michigan had every reason to pack this game before kickoff, with 3/5th of their starting offensive line out to go along with their 2 all-conference/all-american defensive ends. They have even more reason once they were down 17-0 to Rutgers, having accumulated 118 yards of total offense on 5 drives that featured a fumble, yet another failed 4th-down short-yardage run, 2 punts, and a missed FG. If Twitter, Reddit, and this site are to be believed, Michigan would have been best served rounding up all of the coaches on a tarmac in suburban New Jersey, taking anything of value they may have on their persons, and shipping them off to a volcano to be sacrificed as tribute to the gods to lead Matt Campbell or Luke Fickell to Ann Arbor. In a season of lows, being blown out by Rutgers felt like the 6 inches of concrete you put around the coffin nailed shut by Indiana and Wisconsin; an unnecessary but emphatic coda to a lost year and, likely, yet another underwhelming coaching regime.

And yet, the players seemingly never gave up. Cade McNamara relieved Joe Milton and led a 3-play, 63-yard TD drive featuring a wide-open bomb to Cornelius Johnson. After a rare 4-and-out by the defense McNamara valiantly fought against Michigan's inability to run a hurry-up offense and got the team down into reasonable FG range (thanks to maybe the longest second in recorded historysince Spartan Bobwas at the controls) which, because reasons, Michigan couldn't convert due to a high snap forcing Quinn Nordin to double-clutch his approach (leading to a memorable if deeply ironic "Do your job!" exclamation from Nordin to no one in particular as they went into halftime).

Not to draw comparisons to the men's basketball team, which is currently suffering its own calamities, but Michigan coming back in this game is what winners do, teams of players who haven't given up the ghost regardless of how bleak it may appear.  That 2020 team wasn't quite as bad at Rich Rod's first year because you could see the talent at key spots and knew it could come around, but at least in 2008 you knew why they were bad and there was optimism about the future.  2020 was Harbaugh's 6th year at UM and the conventional wisdom was that they had peaked in 2016, falling painfully short in Columbus and then seeing the Buckeyes take a step forward offensively in the next two seasons while Michigan seemed permanently stuck a step behind.  This site isn't the most accurate barometer for the overall mood of the fanbase but it was undeniable that there were real questions about Harbaugh's ceiling at his alma mater, that maybe Michigan was destined to be pretty good but no longer elite in college football.  And yet, it appears this team never lost faith in themselves, never lost sight of what it needed to reach the top of the sport again.

Since that Rutgers game, Michigan has lost 2 regular season games (PSU the following week and @MSU in 2021) and 4 total games in 3 years.  They lost to eventual national champion Georgia in 2021 and in the playoffs against TCU last season.  That's it - they have vanquished OSU 3 straight seasons, walloped rivals like PSU and MSU repeatedly, and just completed the first 15-0 season in school history to claim a national title.  There's no debate anymore, no asterisk or split title handed out like a gold watch to a departing coach.  They are winners and we know that because they have won basically every game for 3 years now.  This team is going to be markedly different next year, as a lot of this talent will head off to the next stages of their careers.  But Michigan again is playing like champions and, more importantly, has the aura of a team that expects to be champions.  Say what you will about Rutgers in this conference but I don't know if Michigan would be where they are without that game. 

Best:  Star Gazing

So I had a whole section here about recruiting rankings and blue chip ratios and why the whole industry around recruiting rankings is silly and of limited value in identifying the quality of a college football team.  For example, Blake Corum was the 19th-ranked RB in his 2020 class and Rod Moore was #28 in 2021, and let's just say the 20-ish guys ahead of them weren't all household names.  Mike Sainristil was a who-dat kid out of Everett, MA, while Zak Zinter was a 3* and Mason Graham just snuck into the bottom of the 4* range behind a lot of tackles who didn't just ragdoll an award-winning offensive line.  Michigan is, per the recruiting metrics, the "least talented" team to win a title in the playoff era but is also poised to have a ton of players drafted into the NFL.  Now, to 90% of college sports Michigan is still supremely talented, and for every 3* who became a starter you've got your Will Johnson, your Donovan Edwards and JJ McCarthy.  This team has elite talent in a lot of spots.  But it's a team unlike those Alabama, Georgia, and Clemson teams in that the talent is more diffuse and developed, less guru-approved and more program-hardened. 

I don't like making cross-sport analogies but this team feels a bit like the 2003 Pistons, who won a title despite being perceived as less talented than their peers, especially the Lakers whom they 5-game sweeped in the NBA finals.  That wasn't fair to that team, which had hall-of-fame defenders and an elite backcourt, and it isn't fair to this Michigan squad to act like they lunchpailed their way into a title over more star-studded squads.  This team isn't one that should be defined by what men and women thought they'd be 4-5 years ago in high school, but instead what they turned into.  Michigan is unlikely to ever recruit like your Alabama's, OSU's, or A&M's, but they've shown for years now that it doesn't matter and I doubt that'll change going forward.

Quick Hits:

• This was the second straight game Michigan has rushed for over 300 yards against the Huskies; they racked up 343 in 2021.  This game felt similar to that one in which UM ripped off some big runs and while UW adjusted somewhat Michigan was always able to keep the ball moving when they needed to.
• Fowler and Herbstreit were fine during the broadcast but as Michigan kneeled the ball out to end the game Fowler noted that even if this title is "tainted" Michigan should enjoy it.  That's just such an asshole thing to say at the end of a game, and then to kick it to Pete Thamel's buddy Rece Davis to do the trophy presentation drove me nuts.  ESPN is not garbage as a source of sports journalism but I thought they'd have enough respect to not beat that dead horse for a couple of minutes.
• I saw some Washington fans and media types bemoaning the lack of holding calls on Michigan, but both teams were called for 5 penalties each and while UW got hit wit two obvious holding calls UM got called for 2 DPIs that kept their drives going.  Washington threw the ball 55 times compared to UM's 18, and so it's far more likely you'll see more contact on those plays than when UW was on defense and UM was throwing the ball.  Washington didn't lose this game because of a couple of missed holding calls, especially when their own defenders and linemen were getting away with the same infractions.  The referees clearly decided that if it wasn't egregious they wouldn't call it and while I have an issue with not calling obvious penalties when they occur, at least consistency was maintained.
• Michigan's two best scoring drives came when Semaj Morgan took the ball off kicks and set UM up behind the 25.  I think Morgan has a ton of potential but the moment was a bit too big for him in these playoffs, and so it bummed me out that he kept trying to hit a home run every play.  But it also worked out for Michigan's offense, so maybe in the future if UM needs a spark offensively they can just put him back there and let him try to house a 109-yard-kickoff.

Next: 

There's so much more to say about this season that I'll probably come back in a week or two with a season recap.  It's hard to get this all down in one space, and season-long narratives have emerged that deserve real focus, not a tossed-off paragraph.  Thank you all for reading these and commenting all season long, and I hope they've been an enjoyable part of this wild season.  National Champs baby!