How do you think Michigan would have done against Georgia had it beat TCU?
OT season yada yada yada . . .
I just watched a quick five-minute recap of Georgia's domination over TCU (here). Cripes. Georgia might as well have been playing a MAC team.
THIS TCU team put upon 51 points on Michigan (an forced 3 turnovers)?? THIS Georgia team barely got by Ohio State (who got pantsed by Michigan at home)?? Was this all about matchups, or just the randomness that is college football?
Regardless, had Michigan pulled off the comeback against TCU, what do you think the final score would have been against Georgia? I honestly have no idea anymore.
Two thoughts:
1. We would have fared much better than TCU against UGA and you could talk me into believing we could have won a close game.
2. We would have beaten TCU if we played them a week or two after conference championship weekend.
For some reason, our last two team lost their rhythm during the bowl layoff. UGA was too good two years ago for us to do anything about it. TCU had enough holes defensively, that we were able to get back into the game. If they would've beaten TCU, I think the rhythm would've been back and the team we got in the regular season would've been back for UGA.
It depends on the number of pick-sixes we throw.
Would've lost badly. But then we could legitimately say we're the best team in the country the last two years other than Georgia
i think we can say that, vlad. two (silly) losses in two years to non-georgia teams - we got screwed vs sparty and shot ourselves in the foot vs tcu...nobody else can say they were that close to perfect.
Which is an awesome thing to say, when you have Alabama and Ohio State looking up at you.
Don’t do it bro…
I hate to say it but not great bob. Georgia was unbelievably stacked. I really believe OSU had better matchups and a flasher team with Harrison. Had he not had gotten hurt (Harrison) i really think osu wins the game. With that said man what a season! Can’t wait for the next
38-17 Georgia
Never bet on Michigan to win a post-season game against a team from another conference.
For a brief period from 1997 to 2000, Michigan won four bowl games. The first and only time in its history. Not sure what was going on in the bowl preparation in that era. I liked those results. :)
3 of them against SEC teams! Say what you want about him, but Llloyd was the SEC killer.
Michigan would have played much better against Georgia than we did against TCU because the Georgia game is the only one the coaching staff prepared for. and for this team, coaching matters.
Got to say this 100% It looked very well like Michigan only prepared for the Bulldogs and caught looking ahead.
This is the year to win it all as we basically 1 of 2 Top teams returning a starting QB (USC being the other). Honestly, with all of the firepower we have on offense there is NO reason we don't return to the playoffs and should absolutely be playing for the National Championship.
They key is really going to be moving to more of a 50/50 Run/Pass ratio on offense and not the 60/40 Run/Pass ratio. Also, now we more depth at QB, JJ has got to keep the ball on the Arc Read at least 1 time per quarter to keep the defense honest keying on the RB.
Not sure about this. If we had only prepared for UGA then we would've run JJ all through the 1st half vs TCU b/c that would be the one way that we could've put UGA D off balance. Instead we obviously game-planned to be able to run over a small TCU Dline.
They key is really going to be moving to more of a 50/50 Run/Pass ratio on offense and not the 60/40 Run/Pass ratio.
We absolutely lost to TCU because we threw the ball too much in the first half. Second half we were forced to throw and with halftime adjustments did better but absolutely 100% leaving our proven identity for no good reason is why we lost that game.
I think part of it was looking ahead and part of it was M having both its RBs out/playing hurt.
Michigan’s performance in bowl games is terrible and has not improved under Harbaugh. It is part of a systemic issue that seems to plague the entire athletic department. Since 2010 Michigan has played in a national title game/series/match 8 or 9 times (I can’t remember the exact number) across various sports and Women’s Gymnastics is the only one that could close the deal. (I am not counting individual championships in men’s wrestling or Bri Minor winning it all in women’s tennis singles.)
Men's swimming and diving won in 2013, and men's gymnastics in 2010, 2013 and 2014, but yeah, that and women's gymnastics is it. We've been snakebitten in what I'll call the team sports (where the championship is a game or series of games, as opposed to sports where the "team" championship is a compilation of individual performances). Just off the top of my head, we've lost in the title games of hockey (2011), basketball (2013 and 2018), softball (2015), baseball (2019), and field hockey (2020), not to mention semifinal losses in men's soccer (2010), hockey (2018, 2022, 2023) and football (2021 and 2022)...
Similar question: will Michigan be a legitimate title contender in the next few years? On paper they should be better in 2023 than they were in 2022 so part of me says yes. The M-OSU and OSU-UGA games also give me confidence. But the M-TCU and TCU-UGA games also scream no way.
you appear to be using the transitive property of football, which has been shown to be grossly inaccurate.
Michigan's gifting of the game to TCU, and TCU's dismantling at the hands of UGA, aren't necessarily informative of how a UGA/UM match-up would have gone. imo, of course.
Agree 100% (UM/MSU/OSU in 2021 is a great example). But it’s all you can really do when talking about two teams that don’t play each other.
We also destroyed ohio and they were within one point of taking Georgia to overtime. Flip a coin ten times you can easily get heads 7/10 or 3/10, it's not a statistically significant sample.
Sadly, I think not, and this just happens to be the perfect storm for Michigan with players like JJ, Corum, Edwards, Johnson, Hutch, Moody, etc. They have recruited pretty well, but not elite, and we've seen what a team loaded with elite recruits do in the playoffs. Add that Harbaugh is just waiting for the right NFL job (this feels like his "go out in a blaze of glory year"), and we're back to square one with a new coaching search.
Then it's a whole new game. Can you keep the relationship going with Underwood? Does the offense change? Can you convince some elite WRs to come and play? Can you restock the DEs? The list goes on and on.
I hope I'm wrong, but this run for Michigan feels more like Wisconsin winning the B10 from 2010-2012 rather than Michigan becoming a Bama of the north.
i don't know, man. in retrospect, the TCU game was this perfect storm of sucky randomness. i can easily imagine us putting a 53-14 pounding on those guys. i sure didn't walk away from it thinking we got beat by a better team, unlike when we played georgia in the semifinal. a couple fewer mistakes, maybe one fewer dumb decisions and we're in the final.
and then? whew. i'll say this - i think we were better than the year before, and imho they weren't nearly as good. we would've had a shot.
We would have gone into the game committed to running up the middle against them and waited until late in the second quarter to open up the offense, by which time their defense was able to play back and deny us big plays, so that we would lose by 17 points.
Someday Harbaugh will go into a big game prepared to start the attack with his passing game, then, once the defense is on its heels, start hitting them with draws and other running plays. God, I wish we had done that against TCU.
Some day.
I think this can be the year Jim does it. He has to know that's where he and the staff went wrong against TCU. Year 3 JJ will probably be his best talent at QB during his tenure, and if he's going to place more trust in any Michigan QB, JJ might be the one. It's set up for him to make the leap to breaking more tendencies from the get go in big games.
Like you, I hope he does that.
Funny. Almost wrote this verbatim before I read the rest of the thread. Kudos and exactly correct.
THIS Georgia team barely got by Ohio State (who got pantsed by Michigan at home)?? Was this all about matchups, or just the randomness that is college football?
It was all about matchups. The key to beating UGA last year was through the air. OSU nearly did it, and may have had Harrison not gotten hurt. But OSU's passing attack was way better than ours, i.e. OSU was set up much better to attack the only relative weakness on that UGA team in a way that our run-first approach would not have been able to.
Also, and maybe this is in part the randomness of college football, but the OSU that played against UGA looked nothing like the OSU that played us. They were balanced, played loose, and were firing on all cylinders. Now maybe we caused some of that difference (though if so, I'd have to think it was mental), but I have zero confidence that we beat OSU if they played us like they played against UGA.
This, plus OSU had a completely different gameplan. Stroud was moving around, throwing off-platform and generally looking like a guy who wasn't modeling his game off Michael Vick and being cold sometimes. Also, Georgia looked a bit overwhelmed in a way that they may not against UM, though Stetson Bennet playing like a first-rounder for a game certainly didn't hurt.
IDK, man. OSU's defense still couldn't have held up against our run game or passing game.
True, but what played the bigger role in OSU's loss to us: their defense, or their offense only putting up 3(!) points in the second half? I'd argue it was the latter.
Both the 2021 and 2022 games felt closer than their 15 and 22 point final margins. Some of that might be BPONE, but much of it undoubtedly was due to the fact that these were tight, back and forth games into the fourth quarter, and both felt like they were going to go down to the wire, until all of a sudden they didn't.
I don't think we take it to the wire like OSU managed, but we probably would have done much better than TCU. If we were in that situation and had some really ingenious J.J. options up our collective sleeve, we would probably have been in it for perhaps a half at least, IMHO.
This is, of course, speculation unsupported by anything, so take it for what it is worth, which isn't much.
They'd probably have lost but would have played better than TCU, who clearly ran out of gas when their high-leverage luck ran out.
The end.
Better than the 2021 CFP final, for sure. That's a game that I look back on and say I don't think Michigan could've done much differently. They could've made the game closer, but that was all Georgia, all the way.
I think if Michigan played a clean game (basically how it played against OSU) they would've had at least a puncher's chance against Georgia. But I still think a lot of things would've had to go right. JJ would've had to have been even better against Georgia than he was against OSU, and Georgia, unlike OSU, is built to stop the run. I don't think Michigan would've been able to run the ball in the second half the way it was against OSU. That game would've come down to putting the ball almost exclusively in JJ's hands and telling him "you need to be the guy tonight."
There are scenarios where Michigan wins that game, but my guess? Michigan keeps it relatively close in the first half, maybe even going into the half tied, riding off of emotion from wanting to avenge last year, but I think Georgia eventually just starts to pull away and wins by 10-14.
My final guess at a score would be something like 20-17 Georgia at the half, and then 41-31 to end the game. Michigan acquits itself well and really pushes Georgia at times, but there is still a clear line in the sand that they are not on Georgia's level.
Transitive property in college football is dangerous, though, because teams can be so different week-to-week. Just because we waxed OSU does not mean we would've beaten Georgia convincingly.
I think it also has to do with matchups. Michigan is built to take advantage of things OSU does not do well, and by the same token, OSU is one of maybe two to three other programs in America that can go toe-to-toe with Georgia and have the same rough talent level across the board. OSU had offensive talent that Georgia had not seen anything close to all year, and they could attack Georgia in ways that almost no one else could. Georgia had no answer for Marvin Harrison Jr, and if he doesn't get taken out, Georgia may very well lose that game.
Michigan does not have a receiver like that on its roster. It just doesn't.
Would've lost the 1st half and won the 2nd half.
Michigan is built to beat our 3 OOC patsies, rollover lesser big ten teams, and beat OSU with rivalry passion and coaching.
Bama and Georgia have the beef and talent to lock down our run game and there is no rivalry motivation to give us a boost. People make light of the recruiting rankings but coaching cant make up for playing OSU, Georgia or Bama every year to finish the season. Its not recruiting rankings that matter its that they are fielding 15+ players our coaches would pick first given the choice of starters. Im not complaining about winning 12 games and winning the BigTen its just that there is a very established ceiling for us and playoff wins seem to be it.
We are super Wisconsin/MSU from their best seasons. It wont be 35-0 in the playoffs but we are still a few scores away from Bama and Georgia.
Georgia barely beat a depleted OSU.I believe Michigan was a victim of poor officiating and poor play calling vs TCU.Georgia vs Michigan should have been a classic,but we will never know.Looking forward to 12 team playoff with first round games played on campus.(if I’m not mistaken)
Not great, that's why I don't think they will win a NC title this year. I'll get negged for this but I don't care, Michigan isn't as good as Georgia or Bama. Yes they have beaten OSU the last 2 years, and I think they will this year, but Georgia and Bama both have as good if not better talent than OSU and more importantly better coaching than OSU. I think if Michigan plays either in the playoff then I'm putting my money on UG or Bama
I haven't studied AL or GA at all, but I believe they lost 1/4 to 1/3 of their players to graduation and/or the NFL. We lost some dudes, but we're getting most of our team back plus some solid transfers and recruits. If we don't get caught looking past OSU this is our year. Quit talking scared...
Talking scared? So you are telling me if you had to bet your house you are taking Michigan over UG and Bama?? Smh fool
M isnt as good as UGA or Bama but all it takes is that one game to do just enough to win like TCU did.
In any hypothetical Michigan wins. cuz why not?
Had we played Georgia in the first round I think we would have given them a hell of a game and according to my rule we would have won. In the second round I still think we would have given them a hell of a game and according to rule beat them.
We got caught looking past TCU. TCU was hung over against Georgia. They beat us by the skin of their teeth and their lucky breaks were gone.
I would take issue with your characterization of "put up 51" and "forced 3 turnovers".
that aside, i think UGA still would have won the championship, but I think Michigan would have made them work for it. Styles make fights, and UGA/Michigan would have been a good fight, even if the outcome likely would not have been in doubt by the 4th quarter.
Better than TCU, thats for sure! In all seriousness, I think that UM would have been driven by the 2021 loss to give UGA a game (at least for a while). TCU used up all of their mojo to beat us, they were never going to stand a chance in the NC game
Agreed. Michigan was TCUs NC game.
Michigan has cleared lots of prior program hurdles (winning a tough road game, beating OSU, beating OSU in columbus) but the 'we suck in the post season' still lingers over the program. Still gotta climb that mountain. Nobody would've thought we'd look as terrible as we did vs TCU but we did. Probably would've been UGA 42-18 that didn't feel as close as the score indicated
We couldn't stop TCUs offense, Georgia coaches actually watch the tape on opposing teams in the playoff. They would've done the same thing if not worse
It would have looked like the year before. Georgia is a terrible matchup for Michigan because they are just a more talented version of the same team. We wouldn’t be able to run it up the the middle on them so the offense would have failed and we wouldn’t have been able to stop their tight ends and interior running game so would have given up lots of long drives
We had an awful gameplan against TCU, worst gameplan of the season for us (although a few players stepped up, not the worst game all season for the players.)
We decided to try playing Big12 football for the first time all season against the Big12 champs in a win-or-die game.
In all likelihood, we revert to the mean and would have done okay against Georgia in a hypothetical matchup. Probably like -300, a decent shot of winning if everyone brings their A game.
But you cant take the worst game we pretty much played(coached?) all season and extrapolate from that. You can go the other way too, they beat ohio by a point and we beat ohio by four scores
Point of order, TCU was not the Big 12 champ, Kansas State was.