Is Alabama the best team you've seen play Michigan?

This is the biggest discrepancy between a Michigan team and an oppenent when it comes to talent, speed, strength, size and youth.

Other teams mentioned were extrememly talented and a case can be made for all of them but we were much more physical of a team.

Yes, FSU had stallions vs our plow horses but they didn't beat us up like Bama did.  

At the top, I have to put the 1975-76 Oklahoma team that we played in the Orange Bowl.  We were ranked #4 and OK was #2 at 10-1.  Their defense was the best I have seen to this day.  The Alabama team has more offensive weapons than did Oklahoma, but overall toughness goes to the old guys.

As a point of perspective, Michigan had 33 yards passing while Oklahoma had 66.  Rick Leach was 2-16 passing and his two completions were for 17 and 16 yards.  Apparently our passing philosophy hasn't changed in 40 years - chuck it up!

The Oklahoma Boomer Sooner chants were no where near as annoying as Roll Tide however.

I've never personally seen the '91 FSU game, but it would be hard for me to imagine many teams being better, if any, than the one we faced on Saturday night. Every position on their team is packed with NFL talent. On a collegiate level, that was easily one of the most physical, brutal, punishing football teams I've ever seen play the game.

Don't want to imagine how bad it might have been if guys like Richardson, Barron, and Hightower all elected to return.

Others were USC in 07 and 04 Rose Bowls (06 and 03 seasons), Penn State in 94, FSU in 91, Washington in 92 Rose Bowl (91 season), Miami in 88. 

It is hard to compare somewhat this early with Alabama because we really dont know how good Michigan is.  But my guess is that Alabama is dominant like last year.

Florida State was probably the most shocking as our defense never let in points like that under Bo.  Unfortunately it was the beginning of a 20+ year trend of our defense not being what it was (with a few exception years).  People rationalize saying that college football is more wide open but I think the Bama's and the LSU's show you that defense can still reign supreme. 

Hopefully we return to being a top defense under Hoke and Mattison. 

Maybe we just suck. But from the eye test, they looked really good.  But it goes to the problem people are having in this thread...are we talking biggest discrepancy between a Michigan team and someone else? (a great team vs. an 8-4 Michigan team might look better than a great team vs. a 10-2 Michigan team)  Or just flat out the best team top to bottom?

Bama was good, and deserves to be on any list. But I don't think we're great, either. The best team I've ever sense was the '03 USC team. That team was at least close to this Bama team defensively (maybe better..they might have had more experience...could change by the end of the season), but lots better offensively.  That team had 52 players get a cup of coffee in the NFL, and two heisman winners on it. And back up quarterbacks who were NFL starters. Reggie Bush, Shawn Cody, Keary Colbert, Matt Leinart, Mike Williams, etc, etc.  

Alabama may have the line and running backs to match with that (as a group), but the QB and WR match up isn't close. That team was a great defensive team...and they were better on offense. It's just because we were darn good that it didn't look worse. We actually held them to the fewest points they scored after their opening game (which they shut out Auburn in, so they didn't need that many points). They did they annual blow one to Cal game, but that was the best team I've seen (us play).

91-FSU

91 -Washington

03- USC

Remember Bama hasnt been this BAMA for that long, they were sucking canal water after the 2000 season until Saban's 2nd year in 08. Ohio, USC, FSU, Oklahoma, all of the aformentioned programs have have multi-year periods where they were not world beaters. We'll be fine and we will get to the point where we can compete and win with any program in the Country very shortly. 

Go Blue!

91 Washington in the rosebowl is the best imo.............(but I preface that one because Steve Everrit didn't play and that messed up our oline)

91 Fsu, remember Grbac had 2 int's returned for td's...  that's at least a 14pt swing given to fsu.....   their offense was no more unstoppable then ours was.  They had a slightly better defense...and didn't Lance Dottin miss that game as well...  I know Everitt played with a broken jaw which was amazing...

2000 Orange Bowl...  that team was tough...one of the most physical games I remember..Brady/Terrell was the difference

03/06 usc, I thought were great but when their program immediatly took a drop off after balco got exposed through the Ting Brothers there....

You guys are overreacting. 2007 Oregon and 2006 would beat this Bama squad. Notre Dame last year could have easily beat us the same way this Bama squad beat us if they hadn't choked it up... And @ the Big House to boot. We scored two TDs on that mighty Alabama defense and Denard's crappy arm got us 200 yards on the air.

You guys just don't want to accept that both of our lines are terrible and this is going to be a long year. It's easier to say that Bama is the best team we've ever played and leave it at that.

Miami in 88 was amazing. Michigan played great that day and was a Rose Bowl winning team that season in it's own right.  

That was a tweener year for Miami as they missed out on the National Title because of a very controversial 1 point loss at Notre Dame. That Miami team beat no. 1 Florida State by 30, No. 11 LSU by 40 in Baton Rouge, and No. 6 Nebraska by 20 in the Orange Bowl.

I thought the 2011 Michigan State Spartans also just on the basis of being the toughest in the history of the game maybe. No one's mentioned them.

the '68 OSU team was as well-put-together as the '69 team, which makes the upset all the more surprising. '68 OSU had several key games by which they slithered to the MNC; '69 OSU was never in a close game until they lost to UM. So I would put the '69 team over the '68 team. It just so happens that Bo was able to get ready for them with mostly Bump's team while staying under the radar; I think Woody overlooked us.

Across-the-board talent and execution-wise, Albama is the best.

But they are not the best overall.  With Alabama, we knew what we had to do to compete, we just could not do it with the players at hand.

The best teams that I've seen play Michigan were ones that not only outclassed us in talent and execution, but also outclassed us in scheme and coaching.  In these games, we were completely flummoxed across the board:

- Washington 1991 season Rose Bowl.  This was the worst I've ever seen, even worse than FSU that year.  The Huskies employed a blitzing 1985-Chicago Bears defense that compeletely ovewhelmed us.  We just did not know what to do.  We had Grbac and Desmond but it still did not matter.  Our response turned out to be the worst thing we could do - rather than spreading them out and hitting short passes and screens and draws, we bunched our O_line into extremely tight splits, making our QB and RB a static sitting duck target.  By the third quarter, I just wanted it to be over.

- Oregon 2007.  Another flummox.  We already established against App State that we did not know how to defend the spread, now we had to do it against elite talent.  We were chasing ghosts.  The epitome of this was their sand-lot Statue of Liberty play, probably the most humilitating play I ever saw against Michigan. 

- 1991 FSU.  We had just beaten Notre Dame on Grbac-to-Howard on 4th and 1.  We were riding high and ready for a shootout.  We actually hung with them pretty well for the first half in a shoot out.  But in the second half, they just kept coming.  They passed over and around us, they ran through us, they fooled us with trick plays, over and over.  We had never seen this kind of relentless onslaught before.

The key takeaway from these games, though, is that we learned from them.  We beat Washington a year later in the Rose Bowl with a more dynamic offense.  We used the Washington defense as one of our role models for our own 1997 defense.  We beat Urban Meyer's and Tim Tebow's Florida spread team by utilizing a better contain defense and by taking the handcuffs off of our offense.  

Blowouts are painful, but not permanent.

the season.  Alabama could fall flat and lose a couple or they could run the table.  Who knows 14 points might be the most Alabama gives up all year.

This Bama team probably is the best I've seen U of M play.  The Texas and USC teams we played in the Rose Bowls in the early/mid 2000's were pretty good but not quite there, and I honestly wasn't too impressed with OSU's national championship team.

A surprise pick for a team that may have been better that I remember (I was only 6 when we played FSU, so I can't say I remember that) is Oregon in '07.  Before they lost Dennis Dixon later in the season and nose dived, they were most likely on their way to a National Championship and a Heisman trophy winner.  Only OSU held us to fewer points that year, but they only put up a 1/3 of the points that Oregon did against us.  At the time the Ducks didn't seem that great because of how we had done the week before, but in retrospect after the decent season we ended up having, I was definitely impressed with that team when Dixon was at the helm.

The 2004 Ohio team had something like five first-round NFL draft picks. That team also had two other guys that would get drafted the next year.

Was it the 2002 team that had 14 players drafted?

I'm 23, so yes.  I thought of the 1991 FSU team that seems to have delivered a legendary ass-whooping, but I don't remember them, being 2 at the time.  This might be the first time I have seen a good Michigan team (not the 2008 version) in a game where I can't rationalize a way it cold have been close (usually I can convince myself that if we got this call, and this bounce and one more block here, things could have turned out differently).  I don't know if I've ever seen a top-25 defensive line get blown up all day like that.

Best defense I can remember going back to 1991, period.

The offense was great, but not historically great. Let's not forget 2007 Oregon, as hard as we've tried.

I wouldn't really put 2006 USC in the same class as 2012 Alabama. They were good but relative to other USC teams around that time, it was actually sort of a down year. I am still surprised that they beat us so comfortably in the Rose Bowl.

2007 Oregon would get demolished by Alabama IMO.

To answer the OP's question, yeah I think Alabama will prove to be the best team I've seen us play, though my memory doesn't go back much beyond 2006.

Indiana is the probably one of the best offenses we'll see in the B1G this year..

/2010'd

/Small sample size