Wolverine Watch: The Near-Miss Blues

Talk to any Michigan football player who arrived in 1992 and left in 1996, and they’ll express a mix of anger and astonishment that they didn’t win a Big Ten championship on the field.

Yes, the Wolverines captured the 1992 title, but the newly arrived class was, for the most part, standing on the sidelines, watching it happen.

They featured some supremely talented players. All-American Rod Payne, Jarrett Irons, Mercury Hayes, and more, supplemented in later years by Charles Woodson, Brian Griese and others who made it all come together in 1997.

Thomas Guynes pulled on the winged helmet in the fall of ’92. The Chicago-area kid saw nothing standing in Michigan’s way, and for good reason. At the end of his redshirt freshman year, they’d won five straight Big Ten titles, owning the conference like great white sharks own wherever they want to swim.

“We had some beasts,” Guynes assured. “We were the class right after the Fab Five, so when we came in, we were calling ourselves the Fab 25. We were cocky.

“We had a lot of talent on those teams, but we had a lot of individualism. In ’97, they found a way to start playing for each other.”

Guynes stands 6-5, still topping 300 pounds. The Washtenaw County Sheriff’s Deputy serves as a school resource officer for several districts near Ann Arbor, including Ypsilanti High.

He’s not someone to challenge — unless, of course, you’re Gary Moeller or Lloyd Carr. Guynes played in the transition between those two coaches, and affectionately imitates both, like many players of his era.

With Carr, it’s always the jerky, over-emphasized cadence, a faux Bo that several coaches at that time adopted when speaking to their players.

Guynes falls into it easily.

“Hey, hey, hey, Guynes, come here! How you DOIN’, son!

“He would backhand you in the gut. You just had to stay tight around them, because they were always hitting you in the gut.

“Guynes … are you overweight, son?”

Guynes was fine, but Michigan wasn’t, at least in the championship sense. The Wolverines spent his four seasons on the field losing games they shouldn’t have lost, winding up with four losses in four straight years.

Back then, it was Armageddon. Now, four years without a Big Ten championship doesn’t sound like much.

It all could have come together in ’96, evidenced by the fact that it did a year later. But the Wolverines kept stumbling, just shy.

They lost at Northwestern, 17-16, in a game that so infuriated Carr, he stomped in front of a small group of media afterwards in a makeshift press area underneath the stands in Evanston.

“Questions!” he barked.

In the slightest of pauses following the command, he took the out.

“Okay,” he said, stalking off.

More disappointments were on the way. The Wolverines lost at Purdue, 9-3, lowlighted by 300-pound defensive lineman Will Carr’s regrettable debut at fullback. Carr fumbled inside the Boilermakers’ 10, on U-M’s best chance to score.

Still reeling from that disappointment, the Wolverines lost at home the following week to Big Ten newcomer Penn State. They wouldn’t lose another to the Nittany Lions for a dozen years.

They underscored what might have been in the final game of the season, at Ohio State. They took down the No. 2 Buckeyes, 13-9, after falling behind 9-0 at the half.

The 17-point underdogs rallied, quarterback Brian Griese taking over for the injured Scott Dreisbach. Griese’s 68-yard touchdown pass to Tai Streets is the play they all remember — except for the offensive linemen.

The big blue uglies recall putting the game away on the ground, the Buckeyes helpless to stop them.

“We ran counter trey, which is THE best football play ever created, because I got to pull,” Guynes recalled, the grin spreading over his face. “It was called Chrysler, and Drive was to the right, Plymouth was to the left. We come out, call it, Chris Howard’s the back, boom!

“We’re getting six, eight, 10 yards a pop on this. We just alternated, and that’s all we ran. That’s how we finished out the game. For an offensive lineman to finish it out that way — no trickery, no pass, mano-y-mano — that was the most satisfying thing to me.”

The following year, the Wolverines knew satisfaction from start to finish.

Their 2018 brothers have yet to feel it. No Michigan player has slipped on a Big Ten championship ring since Chad Henne, Mike Hart and their teammates did so in 2004.

Thirteen years. Stunning.

They’ve come close. They’ve been a play (or a call) away from the Big Ten title game. But two failed post-Carr coaching regimes and the recent near misses easily eclipse the angst of the mid-‘90s.

It’s past time.

“I loved playing at the ‘Shoe,” Guynes wistfully recalled. “It was such an adversarial environment, you had no choice, if you wanted to survive that, you had no choice but to come together as a team.”

If the 2018 Wolverines want to survive a brutal schedule that leads to the ‘Shoe, they have no choice as well. They’ve got talent to burn. Whether they singe themselves or others remains to be seen.

(For much more on Thomas Guynes and the teams leading up to Michigan’s 1997 national championship, pick up the June-July issue of The Wolverine, available in early May. To subscribe, call 800-421-7751).