The sentimental impulse to think about the players who could have left but stayed and made their mark on program history is particularly strong for anyone connected to Michigan, and the emotional nadir of the 2020 season only reinforces that. This Michigan team, though, isn’t standing on a podium tonight solely because of the guys who stuck around but instead because of players looking inward and coaches looking at who these players were and what they could be.
This team certainly has that sacrifice-over-selfishness quality, and with that they’ve both drawn from and added to program lore. So many great Michigan teams have crafted the lore, from just about every team from the early 1970s to the early 1990s to the 1997 team and even more recent teams like 2011, when Denard and Van Bergen and Martin and Roh stayed and left champions of a BCS bowl game.
This will certainly reinforce some long-held beliefs, and those beliefs aren’t wrong. They’re a part of what pushed this team over the top (look no further than the “foundation” or the “ones” that Harbaugh has repeatedly mentioned) and it’s been part of the program’s identity for at least half a century. The idea is carved in stone outside the football building and stitched into the inside of the jersey collars.
“Those who stay will be champions” has relevance once again, and a program replete with tradition now has made history tonight to bolster it, to lean on in the future. As Fritz Crisler said, “Tradition is something you can't bottle. You can't buy it at the corner store. But it is there to sustain you when you need it most. I've called upon it time and time again. And so have countless other Michigan athletes and coaches. There is nothing like it. I hope it never dies.”
Their resilience was key, of course. As Harbaugh likes to say, and I’m paraphrasing here, they didn’t fold at the slightest whiff of adversity. What sets this team apart is that they were specifically designed to be what they are today by a coaching staff that looked at the parts and built to fit the players rather than building a system and forcing players to fit their ideas. The players bought in because this team was built for them, not in spite of them.
Imagine getting a box of assorted LEGO pieces. This coaching staff tipped the box over and carefully surveyed the contents, sorting and arranging and finding what they thought could be built from what they had. Imagine if instead they decided what they wanted to build ahead of time and then started cobbling together something from the pieces on the table. If you’re going to build a truck you better hope there are four tires on that table, because if you get midway through the project and there are only two, the task ahead is somewhere between monumentally difficult and impossible.
During the Big Ten Championship Game conference call, Jim Harbaugh was asked about the team moving away from the “speed in space” moniker Josh Gattis emphasized early in his tenure at Michigan. The reporter asked him about moving the team’s offensive style to something more akin to what he ran earlier in his career and even early in his time at Michigan. His answer was telling.
“I think we really have felt all along that we were capable of doing both; 11 personnel, throwing the football, 11 personnel running the football, 12 personnel running the football, 13 personnel running the football, 22 personnel, I mean, we felt like we were capable of being a really good throwing team (and) being a really good running team.
So we just set out on getting good at both. With the type of backs that we knew we had, Hassan and Blake and Donovan coming in, we felt really good knowing that they’d have the opportunity to run behind an offensive line that was also really ascending and we felt had a chance to be extremely good. Coach Moore has done a tremendous job coaching that group.
I told coach I got a great text from John Madden and John Madden said that is as good of an offensive line performance as he’s seen in a football game. I texted that to Sherrone and said ‘Keep that on your phone forever.’ Quarterback, we knew that we’d be good, could really throw the ball. We watched Cade all through spring and training camp and just felt like he was going to be really good throwing the football. Very accurate, makes really good decisions. Our receivers were developing. We knew that they would get better and better and they have. Ronnie Bell, Cornelius Johnson, and then the young guys like Roman Wilson and A. J. Henning. We just kept watching this young guy, Andrel Anthony, making plays. So, we just started building to do both, to be able to run the football and be able to throw it.”
Picking that apart, the first paragraph is pretty standard coachspeak. Of course Michigan would want to do both. The second and third paragraphs have the “why.” This staff looked at their running backs and offensive line, they looked at their quarterbacks and receivers, and they saw that they should be able to run the ball with physicality and have a passing game that would catch up and complement the run game.
Jim Harbaugh and his new coaching staff put their players in position to grow and succeed, and the players pushed themselves and committed everything they had to do so. Now, they’re champions.
