Question about the 1979 Michigan-Indiana game

since I'm working now, unless others have made the same points as I would.

I'm the same age as you so I can't help much but I wanted to ask a Carter-related question to the MGoCommunity.  It probably doesn't need its own thread so I'll post it here.

Is it common knowledge that AC quit the team for a few days his freshman year?  I just finished reading "Bo" and Bo talked about sending his coaches to the airport in "FBI!  STOP THAT PLANE!" fashion to try and prevent him from leaving?  I guess he did end up going home for several days before changing his mind.  Is this common knowledge for you older (than me) guys?

Well, IU sucked and Michigan was having a decent season and was pissing this game away. UM was down I believe by 4 or 5 points and needed the TD to win. The season ended with a Gator Bowl victory if I remember right, but in 1980, we won the Big Ten and Bo got his first Rose Bowl victory on 1/1/1981!

Tell your mom and dad that the most awesome performance I have ever seen in Michigan Stadium by an opposing player was George Rogers of South Carolina the following season, in 1980.  I forget what his total yardage was for the day; it wasn't a lot, on paper.  But I remember watching him, against a really great Michigan defense, and it looked like a 12th grader, playing against 7th graders.  In truth, I think Rogers was about 22 or 23 years old as a Gamecock senior, and he probably should have been playing in the NFL.

At the end of the year, we found out how good he was.  They gave him the Heisman.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgBqJtlsyEg

I think that it was less an important game to win (although they're all important in the B10, uh, B11--er, B12) as the avoidance of a bad loss [EDIT: I mean tie]. IU was 4th in the conference that year, the Wikipedias tell me, but it was Homecoming against a perennial tomato can, so it would have been semi-humiliating.

Michigan was 6-1 going into that game, BTW (with the loss being a stomach punch 12-10 loss to ND). UM finished the season with three straight losses, at Purdue, home against OSU, and in the Gator Bowl against UNC (who featured a fella you may have heard of goes by the moniker LT).

One of my reasons why for me is this sound clip.  It shows the passion that UM Football can be.  I can still remember watching and listening to this play with my dad and grandfather.  Brings back so many memories.

Click me with your sound on

I was there (my junior year). That was a very disaappointing season (I think we went 8-4 ) largely becasue we couldn't kick field goals or extra points and couldn't prevent punts from being blocked. So it wan't really significant in terms of the play saving a great season. However, other than the sheer joy of winning the game on a 45 yard pass play on the last play of the game, I would say three things stand out.

1. You could already tell that Carter was special. But this was the play where you had a sense of how great he really was. And I have read opinions (not just from M fans) that he was one of the very (meaning top five) greatest receivers in college football history.
2. On the next to the last play of the game, Wangler threw the ball to L. P. Reid, the fullback. Reid made an incredible, albeit most likely blatantly illegal, play. He knew time was going to run out so he stopped in the middle of the field and tossed the ball out of bounds. To the Indiana sideline. Toward their coach. Who was none other than Lee Corso. Thought he would have an aneurysm. It was beyond priceless.
3. The other priceless moment, beyond the obvious miracle, was Ufer's call which I didn't hear until Michigan Replay the next day. It went something like, "They're storming the field! We won't be able to kick the extra point! Who the hell cares!"

I've been told the game itself was nothing memorable other than the last 2 plays.  There was 100,000 Michigan fans extremely pissed off that Indiana was playing them so close beforehand.  Still, Wangler to Carter was epic. 

There was no significance to the game, at least not any more than any other Big Ten game before the last week of the year.

The play == spectacular against any opponent.

The play + Ufer's call == Pantheon

It was homecoming against a slightly better than normal but still crappy Indiana team coached by Lee Corso. Winning it wasn't any more or less significant than, say, Northwestern apart from homecoming.

If we had scored the touchdown with 2 minutes to go and just stopped Indiana on their last drive, we probably wouldn't remember it. We'd know about it thanks to WolverineHistorian, but it wouldn't be what it is to us today. In hindsight though, I believe that is still a part of our streak of Big Ten home openers, and we didn't end up giving a moral victory to Corso in his tenure at Indiana (Rumor has it he had his picture taken with the scoreboard just before he ended up losing it. No idea if its true, but I've never found the picture, FWIW).

Its funny, because without that brilliant catch by Corso, we wouldn't have won. Good thing his interception was out of bounds.

I get that it was the last play of the game.  I get that the play was AC's grandest to date.  (So I hear, anyway...)  I get that Ufer screamed memorably (and that he was generally memorable).

But, I really don't understand the significance attached to it.  If my sources are correct, IU went 5-3 that year, which has to be one of their better years in the modern era.  Still, I'll bet Michigan was expected to win the game handily (at home and all).  Also, it was *tied* when the play occurred.  I think even John Wangler is fuzzy on that detail.

Seriously, to hear some Old Blues tell it, undefeated Michigan was down, um, five points to um, undefeated USC (yeah) in the um, Rose Bowl with, um, the national championship on the line.

To put it another way, I don't fully get it.  On many points, the Brabbs field goal against Washington, Mario's touchdown against Penn State, and last year's Notre Dame finish all outrank it.  I don't think it's just because they're recent events, either.

perhaps this particular game and this particular play came to best symbolize the sort of clash of the worlds between Bo's "three yards" mantra and the flamboyant floridian reciever.

Can you imagine being 14 years old and THAT being your first trip to the Big House? It was for me.

There I sat, disconsolate, right before the last play -- feeling I was the jinx of Michigan football.

Then ... pandemonium. Eurphoria. I remember people's jaws wide open -- they just couldn't believe that a Bo team could complete such a long bomb on the last play of a game to win it. And, probably, couldn't believe that AC kept his balance.

Was in Section 36 or 37, up high. AC really nearly went down on his turn upfield.

My Dad, bless him, knew I was ruined just before that play and never once tried to nudge me out before the very last second ticked off the clock. I think he was more happy than me that my first game was so monumental.

Was the game pedestrian. Boring? Maybe. Not for me on my first visit, at age 14.

Five things stick out for me:

1.  It was the 100th anniversary of Michigan football. Every game there was something to commemorate it, but that one was Homecoming. So. Every single living Michigan All-American -- back to Ernie Vick from the early '20s -- who could make it was there that day. Dozens were all paraded out at halftime. Including the most recent one, my idol Rick Leach. Also Harmon, Chappuis, all three Wisterts. Plus Crisler, Oosterbaan were in attendance.... all those Michigan icons. And they all witnessed that play, on the 100th anniversary of Michigan football. The combined magic....

2. Indiana needed a bomb in the waning minute or two, down 21-14, and amazingly got it. Bo always played pass prevent in those days, but it wasn't good enough. Long pass from IU QB Tim Clifford down to about the 5 set up the tying score. Place was SILENT.

3. Huge cheer went up when QB John Wangler went in for an injured, and struggling, BJ Dickey earlier in the second half. Dickey never started another game. Wangler had passed UM right down the field to set up the eventual blocked FG vs ND in Week 2, so I inferred from that cheer that they wanted to see more of him after that game but didn't till then. Ahhhhh, the backup QB at Michigan!

4. Anthony Carter the next day on Michigan Replay was interviewed afterward in his almost unintelligible Florida drawl, saying something like, "All the players kept jumping on me, and I said, 'I can't bree! I can't bree!'" That was a catchphrase for my buddy and I for years after that. "I can't bree!! I can't bree!"

5. Urging my Dad and brother back to our car as quickly as possible afterward, so I could hear Ufer's call of the last play when, after the regular broadcast ended, I knew they always then played the highlights off Ufer's calls. I still tear up when I hear it. Moreso than ever now at age 45.

What a day. What an experience.

GOD, I love being in that stadium during such seminal moments, like ND last year. As a kid and young man, I just went, as Ufer said, "Stark raving bananas!!" Now I weep. 

My father was in Grad School at the School of Dentistry so we were living in Ann Arbor at the time, and I didn't even know English all that well, let alone football. That game turned me into the fan I am today, of Michigan Football, above all else in all of sports.

Significance? I do believe a lot was riding on that game, in the sense that Michigan needed to keep up with Ohio State, who was undefeated (and ended up going to the Rose Bowl with an 11-0-0 record). Michigan only had that lost to Notre Dame. A tie would have already kept Michigan out of the Rose Bowl, unless Ohio State lost at some point.

Only Nonnair has pointed this out.

Michigan's first football game was played in 1879, and the Homecoming game against Indiana is the day Michigan chose for the official celebration of the 100th anniversary of Michigan Football.  They even had a quick "re-enactment" of our first-ever game (a 1-0 win against Racine College in Chicago on May 30, 1879).

If you listen to Ufer's famous call of the play, he mentions that "...Johnny Wangler to Anthony Carter will be heard until another 100 years of Michigan Football is played!"

I can remember huddling with other strangers, listening to Ufer's afterglow on a radio at Elbel after the game ended.

Now, when even the fourth-best Sun Belt game of the week is televised, we get to see a lot more amazing finishes.  The play itself, weaving through tacklers to score as time expired, still holds up as something you just do not see.  All praise due to Lee Corso for the defense he called.

More than anything, these 15 seconds will tell you how powerful it was to see at the time:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEF6edfexco#t=1m46s

Also, WolverineHistorian has the whole drive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yWT2pzvzals