GUEST COLUMN: A new day is upon us

Like most, my phone is a virtual sports bar during Michigan games, with a host of ongoing chats discussing developments in real-time with my closest Wolverine brethren.

In the wake of the Illinois scare, two of my smartest Michigan consiglieres and I were searching for answers after weeks of the concerning exercise of trying to make sense of a lifeless and stuttering pass attack. As JJ McCarthy increasingly struggled as the season wore on, as his receivers dropped balls and ran the wrong routes, and as the offense plodded its way through an array of seemingly un-imaginative horizontal passes and out-routes that defenses were starting to squat on… I mused, half-seriously:

“What if we showed this nonsense all season just so we could flip the switch and start chucking it down the field in Columbus? That would be the greatest rope-a-dope ever.”

About the time Cornelius Johnson found himself alone in an open expanse of green like the Washington Monument on the National Mall, it became clear that Harbaugh and his offensive staff had orchestrated the type of long game not seen since Bobby Fischer emerged from 17 years in seclusion to re-take his chess title from Boris Spassky in 1992.

In the grandest of all college football rivalries, the 21st has been the Buckeye Century, with Ohio State winning 17 of 20 from 2000-2019. But if you listen closely, the gentle, lapping ripples of a sea change have swelled into a rolling surf on which Jim Harbaugh is now hanging ten.

It’s not just that Harbaugh’s boys have won back-to-back editions of this rivalry for the first time since the Tom Brady-led 1999 and Drew Henson-led 2000 teams ended the John Cooper Era in Columbus.

It’s that they left no doubt.

Even the most maize-bespectacled homer optimist could not have imagined a three-touchdown win on the road against the nation’s undefeated and second-ranked team, especially without Heisman candidate running back Blake Corum. That would’ve been a ludicrous notion, like the USA outplaying mighty England in the World Cup or something crazy like that. They could never.

The only doubts now are in the halls of power in Columbus, where Ryan Day spent a whole season with revenge on his mind, determined to reverse the mauling his team was subjected to a year ago… only to have it happen again, even more decisively, and on their home field to boot.

Day surely knows that if he still wants to be coaching Ohio State come New Year’s Day 2024, he must solve Michigan in Ann Arbor when next these two meet. And he had better spend the next 365 days working out how to get himself to third base by then. Because as one of my aforementioned consiglieres said: it sure appears as though Ohio State has lost its toughness under Day. They’re flat-track bullies, rollicking when punching down and folding like an origami buckeye leaf when someone their own size actually punches back.

CJ Stroud will now depart Ohio State with a distinction not shared by his 8 predecessors. Justin Fields, Dwayne Haskins, JT Barrett, Braxton Miller, Terrelle Pryor, Todd Boeckman, Troy Smith and Craig Krenzel all QB’d the Buckeyes to at least one win over that team up north. The last OSU starting quarterback to leave without a win over Michigan on his CV was Steve Bellisari, who was out-dueled by Brady in ’99 and Henson in ’00.

Meanwhile, inside the Big Ten West circus, Purdue, offering themselves up as the final remaining speed bump on the road to a second consecutive College Football Playoff appearance, Michigan exudes the presence of a team that this time won’t still be reveling in the relief of getting the Ohio State monkey off their collective back.

They’re heading into the conference championship and presumably the Playoff with a quarterback who took a star turn on the biggest stage in Columbus, announcing himself as a 2023 Heisman short-lister in the finale of a regular season in which he accounted for 21 passing and rushing touchdowns against only 2 turnovers… and that includes a series of several games where the offense, we can now see, was plainly sandbagging for The Game.

They’re heading into this postseason having allowed a mere 5 second-half points per game in the regular season and having conceded a second-half touchdown in only 3 of 9 Big Ten contests. But in the bright Columbus sunshine on Saturday, they also demonstrated, in limiting one of the nation’s most explosive offenses to only 23 points (a paltry 3 in the second half) that the previous 11 games were not mere stat-padding against offensively turgid competition. Find a building on campus to name after Jesse Minter, because his unit, even without a fearsome pass rush, is legit.

Buckle up, Michigan faithful. There’s a new big dog in the schoolyard. And meaningful December football is on tap.