Those Who Leave Get Something, Too

This will be the last time I write about college football, so forgive me if it goes on too long. Maybe pour yourself a glass of something to accompany the story of Michigan winning it all from this one guy's perspective as I hang up my spurs...

Previously, so I don't have to mention what I already mentioned, The Last Battle and A Game for the Generations.

I caught a wonderful bug back in the mid 00s. 

The conflagration of an unhealthy obsession with Michigan football and inspiration from a few very talented people transformed my entire timeline into something different, and dare I say better. You're right. This is getting silly. Let me back up.

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I wasn't born a Michigan fan. Growing up in Chicago, I rooted in general for Big Ten teams, some more than others, though never, ever Ohio State. Some things can be clear even to a little boy with limited skin in the game. But I must have liked Michigan just a bit more than the rest. Because in 5th grade when we had to invent CVs and simulate the job application process, I put that I had graduated from Michigan with a degree in "computers."

That CV proved prophetic, as I would go on to be one of the last people called up to the Michigan academic roster from the waitlist just days away from high school graduation, leading to my immediate decommitment from Illinois. Feeling fortunate, freshman orientation got me incredibly excited for the future. I had a brief moment of pause when they told us the final day's process: you file this paperwork, you go to this office, wait in line for that piece of paper, set up your uniqueid for Wolverine Access, and then you buy your football tickets and you're done. It was odd to me that the buying of tickets was a foregone conclusion. Did we have to do this? I did it, like everyone else, and of course in hindsight this was a privilege, not a burden. But I still wasn't a Michigan fan yet.

The team had finished the previous year undefeated, though bizarrely with three ties. Tyrone Wheatley was a superstar set for his junior season which began with a 31-0 trouncing of WSU. This led to a showdown with Notre Dame, a team I had grown up despising. The moment the Irish scored a touchdown to go up 24-10, it was a knife to my gut. I was suddenly all in. One month later, a trip to East Lansing for a dispiriting defeat poured salt in the wound which cauterized in the form of an undying need for Michigan to be victorious in all things.  My undergrad years passed like that. Teams with all the potential in the world, but with enough stumbles to end up with four losses every year. Individual four-loss seasons had only occurred four total times over the previous 25 years. It was patently clear to all of us that we were unfairly cursed and no undergrad class would ever again suffer like we did.

Off in the real world the next year, and working in Schaumburg, Illinois, I was happy to have several Michigan colleagues in my department. We all agreed that Brian Griese being named starter was an indication that we were in for another rough ride. This notion was proven false early in the 3rd quarter against Colorado, and further refuted every week thereafter. I was fortunate to be only one year out of school, with plenty of friendly sofas to crash on and made it back to nearly every game. The glorious season culminated in a stressful New Years Day morning in Pasadena, frantically trying to find the ticket I'd hunted every day since The Game. I did get one. It turned out to be a fake. But I deftly slid my way into the stadium with it anyway, landing in "my seat" with about 27 other Michigan fans trying to cram into a single specific spot in the Wazzu section. I bounced around for the entire first quarter until I finally found a vacant one, and witnessed what would end up being Michigan's last major triumph for what would prove to be a lot longer than anyone could have imagined.

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I remember how I first arrived at MGoBlog. SI.com had been the sports website uniquely active in linking non-mainstream content, and they noted one of Brian Cook's early posts. I believe something to do with Lloyd Carr's jowls. This find came at the right time for me, as I was hungry for ever more content, and slowly becoming less and less enthused by my day job. It turned out there were even more sources of information and mirth beyond my favorite mainstream writers. My shifting priorities increased with the 2006 season. The blogosphere was growing, and Brian had hit his stride, which raised my connection to the team even further in a season that ratcheted up the intensity with each passing week. 

It all pointed to the ultimate showdown in Columbus, which left so many indelible moments. They still come like flashes... "Bo died," was the group text my friend Aaron sent us the night before. Then, the Game of the Century aka Football Armageddon. The wrong cleats. Mike Hart bringing us back. A late hit out of bounds to extend Ohio State's drive... Some tears. Many nights of lost sleep for many years afterwards. 

I harvested one golden egg from that time. Anyone could start a blog, and around this time Michigan had a ton of 'em. In fact, nearly all the other teams had them, too. And they all shared this rebel spirit. There were enough of them around the country that Brian could run a weekly blogpoll that mirrored the AP version. I soon decided I had to give it a shot.

I started writing concert reviews, and then goofy takes on Arnold Schwarzenegger movies, and then whatever the hell I wanted. It was much more fun than my day job. And some people liked what I was writing. All the while my obsession with football intensified further. If MGoBlog could do all this, maybe I could, too. So I quit my job and drove around the country, met people, went to football games, and wrote about it. That blogging community was thriving, and they were waiting for me with open arms at every stop. It was going to cost me one season of Michigan games, but what was the worst that could happen?

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Since that season was 2007, it turns out the answer was quite a lot. So it was that on the first Saturday of the season I found myself in South Bend, interviewing friendly and engaging fans who loved Notre Dame in almost the exact same way I loved my team. Many of them took a moment to inform me that Michigan was having trouble with Appalachian State. I wasn't worried. Michigan teams had played with their food in these early non-conference games before. We would be fine. 

We were not fine. I had to hear the unfathomable final score from the Notre Dame stadium announcer. This resulted in the loudest cheer of the day as the Irish would proceed to lose 33-3 to Georgia Tech. Small solace, that. I felt like it was all somehow my fault. I had abandoned my team in its time of need, and this was my penance. A week later in Baton Rouge, LSU fans' friendly taunting as we got depantsed by Oregon didn't help matters. 

It wasn't such a horrible season in the end, and I still had some Michigan moments from afar and up close, most notably watching Mario Manningham break Sparty's heart from a Columbus hotel bar. A close second was seeing all of my friends back in Ann Arbor for The Game, despite the morose outcome on the field, what with our injured backfield. What we didn't yet realize at the time, was that we were not Michigan anymore. And we wouldn't be for a very long time.

That trip changed me in ways I did not expect. I shook off my shy introversion and had more belief in myself. If I could do all that, meet all those people, get halfway decent at writing that quickly, what could be next? 

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I moved to Buenos Aires at the start of the next season, on a two-year work plan. Seeing games there was not easy. There was one bar, El Alamo,  that showed college football. They had one slingbox connected to a cable box in the US. But you had to cajole the bartender into putting your game on, at the expense of everyone else who wanted to watch a different game. For non-marquee opponents, there was no point in even going. Having to follow games via the online play-by-play tracker is no way to live. This is how I "saw" Michigan football lose at home to Toledo, when instead of displaying a made game-tying field goal, that tiny football icon indicating possession flipped from the good guys to the other guys, with no change to the score. We were definitely not fine. After that loss, I posed the question: "Has any college football fan base been through more torture over the past four seasons?" 

People often asked me what I missed from home, and aside from friends and family, Michigan football was top of the list. Nobody around me cared, or even really understood the game. And when I was unable to watch, gaining the fan understanding through the Michigan blogosphere, MGoBlog in particular, made it all very bearable.

I stayed in Argentina longer to get married, having met my beautiful wife thanks in no small part to the crazy roadtrip that never would have happened without this blogging endeavor, and then moved to Switzerland where I still am today. 

Michigan continued to flounder. The memories of the RichRod and Hoke eras that remain, aside from Denard Robinson's considerable sparkle, are dreary at best. Enduring a Michigan and PSU 3OT blunt instrument duel that ended at way-too-damn-late European time should have been enough to finally beat the fandom out of me. But I hung in there.

From 1993 to 1996 we thought we were cursed, even though we beat Ohio State three out of four years. And after losing to Toledo in 2008, we didn't think it could possibly get any worse. Wrong; wrong! At long last we trudged onward into the Harbaugh era but the suffering continued, even as things improved. Each year ended in devastation. 

Still living abroad, I rarely had anyone to talk about this stuff with. Technology improved and watching some games became easier. Watching The Game became tougher as Fox strangled most forms of international leakage. It became an annual tradition to watch over skype thanks to my friend Mike pointing his laptop at his TV. These sessions always ended in sadness and hatred at the throngs of jolly Buckeye fans plastered across the screen, regardless of whether the game was in their stadium or ours.

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The Game in 2021 seemed to be just another setup for disaster. There was no sensible reason to believe we could win. Long-term negativity had taken hold of me and almost everyone I knew. We felt like we were in a "bad relationship" with Michigan football, even as that season went along. Mike told me he thought we were going to win. Mike who was standing right next me as we planned our Rose Bowl trip during the Colorado game in '94, mere minutes before, yes, that. For some reason I didn't trust him. On an early Hassan Haskins run up the gut for 12 yards, I said to Mike "this is some Biakabatuka stuff right here..." Hope surged. So did the O-Line. Buckeye souls were broken. Goliath was slain. So much joy in Mudville.

In 2022, at the exact same time as The Game, Argentina was playing a do-or-die group game against Mexico in Qatar. My passionate wife watched that on the TV in the other room. My kids bounced back and forth between broadcasts, and my daughter jotted down a lot of new vocabulary in multiple languages as our usual parental filters were on the fritz. Michigan of course was not favored, but dominated anyway. To win that game, even without Blake Corum available, indicated that we truly had the better program. Onwards and upwards. Argentina would go on to win the World Cup in glorious fashion, and I started to believe it would all come together for both my teams. Which made the TCU game all the more heartbreaking. Even after our most joyous season in 25 years, it ended with a very bitter taste in our mouths.

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But the hope didn't fade. I told my supportive wife at the outset of the 2023 season, "We are going to be really good this year. Really good." This was in part marking my territory for the coming Saturdays, but also indicative of a new mentality for Michigan fans. She came on board only in 2008, when we met. Her understanding of our program was that we were destined for misery and always ever choking away winnable games. I was trying to convey that this year could be different. 

There were the silly suspensions at the outset that had nobody the least bit worried. No big deal. The first significant play of the season featured Mikey Sainristil intercepting a pass from a purple team, and we were off and running. They stomped everyone they faced. Nearly every game was over by halftime, and hardly any opponent scored more than once. The most hilarious play of the season happened against Rutgers when Mikey Sainristil picked off a 4th down pass, tackled teammate Junior Colson, and took it to the house, 30 seconds before my son's bedtime. Sweet dreams for all.

The season already had a now-or-never vibe. If we could not get over the hump with this group, with this schedule, with The Game at home, with Harbaugh's regime now firing on all cylinders, maybe it was never gonna happen. The narrative went crazy when the Sign Stealing Scandal* took root. It became clear relatively early on that this was a crazy rogue actor who was not giving Michigan much of any added advantage whatsoever. Still, I became frequently distracted and even found myself arguing with goobers on random internet message boards. Yes, I am 49 years old...

*the fact that it was called Michigan's "sign stealing scandal" is already a self-indictment of said scandal since sign stealing was not only legal but encouraged by the NCAA! But anyway it doesn't matter now, ya goober!

So it was that Michigan was living in Jake Taylor's locker room speech the rest of the season. With their head coach absurdly suspended en route to their biggest road game of the season, the pressure on the players and coaches was not something we can comprehend. They responded with "Bet." Us olds learned some new slang. 

Michigan had a lot of things nobody else had, but above all they had Blake Corum, human cheat code. Time and time again, he had cut the heart out of opponents with devastating daggers at the most impactful of times. In 2021, he scored a late 29 yard TD in Lincoln that he followed up miming corn on the cob. Still gimpy against Ohio State, he busted a 55-yarder that set up Michigan's 3rd TD. In 2022, two long TD runs against Maryland, one of which was on 4th down. 20 yards for a TD against Iowa in the 4th quarter, dusting their all-american linebacker. 2 TDs vs Sparty including a short one in the 4th quarter to slam the door. But in 2023, heroics had thus far not been needed. Now, without their head coach, and against tougher competition, they would be. With MIchigan up only one score well into the 4th quarter at Penn State in a battle of attrition, he delivered el último clavo del ataúd and expertly trolled Manny Diaz in the endzone. And of course, there is the biggest play in Michigan football history, complete with the immediate salute to Zak Zinter.

Damn right this was an emotional time. Tell me you didn't well up at Sherrone Moore's on-field interview in Happy Valley, and I'll question if you have a heart. Tell me you never had the tears flow upon seeing the players' in-the-moment reaction to Zak Zinter's injury, followed immediately by Corum's heroics, and I will call you a liar. After all the ridiculous drama inflicted upon them, these young men took the weight of the world on their shoulders and delivered. Bet, indeed.

But you know we weren't done. There was so much more to come. I watched the Rose Bowl with Mike over skype again. My unbridled roar as Jalen Milroe was taken down (roughly 3am local time) woke up my understanding wife at the other end of the house; she didn't dare come and ask if it was a good shout or a bad one. Of course it was the best one. I found a local German-language broadcast so I could actually watch the final in true HD. The first game I'd been able to see like that in forever. I was alone in my living room. The last significant play of the season occurred when Mikey Sainristil intercepted a purple team on 4th down and took it back 81 yards, nearly to the house. Everyone went crazy. I was no exception, leaping up and uncontrollably whirling my arm around like a 3rd base coach, wild grin plastered across my face. Just like every Michigan fan in the world.

What a ride. What a rush. What an incomparable season. My God did we deserve this. All the hits along the way, all the suffering year after year. The good times always ending in bad times. I can't claim any kind of badge of honor. I haven't been flying across the ocean to attend games, suffering the red-hat commercial breaks, the bad weather, Neil Diamond, the drudgery of it all. The constant complaining, the obnoxious rival fans, the overblown coverage. One of the perks of living abroad is you never have to hear someone bring up something they saw on Sportscenter last night. But even from afar, I can say we've done hard time in the decades leading up to this moment. 

After the confetti settled a little before sunrise here, and I had connected with as many friends as I could, I couldn't help but reflect on my own journey and those that helped make it happen. I dropped everything to make following this sport my life, and that was meant to continue in perpetuity. Other plans came up and changed those plans, but most of the good things that happened to me have their origin with that crazy decision. I've stated that 2023 was to be the last year of college football, and every bit of news since then only makes it feel truer. I'll still follow Michigan. But the shine will be off. I'll step it down a notch now. Life is too complicated to let this be an obsession any longer.

Michigan fans get to relive this season for the rest of our lives. It will always feel like a great dam breaking to wash away all of the frustration. For instance, "trouble with the snap" carries zero significance now, right? Who cares! That poor guy in the yellow hoodie is just ecstatic now. So am I. So are all of us! 

I'll end this Michigan reflection with one last thought about the Blake Corum's checkmate touchdown in the championship game. Check out Harbaugh's reaction to that play. He lets a great exhale out through puffed cheeks and quickly switches to a double-fist-pump. If we permit ourselves to overanalyze a split-second caught on camera, it feels like a quick letting-go of all the pressure and an explosion of pure elation. This is how I'll always remember the season ending. All of the glory and joy for a team that had gone through hell to get there and truly deserved it. Nobody's going to take that away, ever. 

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I had always thought that my unfinished book, notes now gathering dust for 17 years, would be possible to complete in the future. I had such an amazing experience researching it. I could always go back and do it again. Why not hit the road, reconnect with those same fans and see how people have changed? See what they think about the sport today?

After that trip I left the country and have been living the ex-pat life ever since. I can tell you that there is nothing like college football anywhere else in the world. It is perhaps the most American thing there is. I started that trip longing to know my country better. To see what can unite us across differing factions. That there are some deeper truths to our culture that can ultimately bring us together more.

It took me many years to figure out what it all meant. Why the hell I even did it in the first place, which was inherently tied up in why the hell I and so many others care so much about this sport. Why do people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on custom-detailed RVs? Why do we distract ourselves throughout the week and devote entire Saturdays to it for four straight months? Especially when most seasons end in heartbreak and anguish? 

There are many answers to these questions, but I think a huge part of it comes back to the fact that, for most people, college is the best time of your life. You leave home, find out who you are and who you want to be. You meet friends that are going to be among your closest until the day you die. So on those Saturdays in the fall, we get to feel like we're there again. Sharing a special camaraderie not only with our friends and fellow fans, but with the memories that grew us up. 

The sport has changed dramatically since January. A massive 12-team playoff ruins the intensity of the regular season that made it most special on the field. Massive, incoherent conferences file down what made it most special off the field. The country has changed even more dramatically over the years since I left town. I did see that divides between regions and political views were deeper than I had hoped or imagined in 2007. Just look at us now.

So that's it for me and this avocation. I can't care about my favorite sport like I used to. And my perhaps quixotic ambitions that it was somehow a window into a better way forward for America look laughable now. This is the end of the journey. But I'm grateful to Michigan for giving me the gift of going out on top.

I will forever remember those of you I met along the way. I got the rare chance to "go to college" a second time, and you gave me a whole new round of memories to hold onto. It's meant more to me than you will ever realize.