There’s some good and vastly under-reported news regarding Jim Harbaugh’s football team. It’s in the College Football Playoff.
For all practical purposes, the Wolverines are there. It’s just that the opening rounds are unofficial.
Lose to Indiana, you’re out of the playoff. Drop one in Columbus, and playoff chances are dead. Fail in a potential rematch against Northwestern in the Big Ten championship game, and playoff action becomes a TV show.
Harbaugh’s players love the position they’re in. At the same time, they know big chunks of their dreams can be demolished any time they take the field.
So it’s playoff football, from here on out.
The concept alone compels Michigan seniors, steaming toward their last game ever at The Big House. They know where they’ve been, and they’re amazed and deeply gratified over where they might yet go.
“I remember my freshman year,” recalled fifth-year senior defensive tackle Lawrence Marshall. “We didn’t go to a bowl game, and we were like, ‘Man!’ Now we’ve got a chance to go to the Big Ten championship. We’ve come a long way …
“Not going to a bowl game, that’s for sure rock bottom.”
Fifth-year senior running back Joe Hewlett felt the same low-tide scrape back in 2014.
“The fifth-year guys, we came in at 5-7,” Hewlett said. “That was our first year. Looking back on that, and being in the position we’re in now … we’ve really been through the ups and downs of playing big-time football here.”
These are the ups. It’s up, and up, and up, unless someone can bring them down.
Some of them might not have experienced this final ride at all. Fifth-year senior defensive end Chase Winovich pondered a move to the NFL, after Michigan’s 2017 defense withered while tied to an offense that couldn’t move.
He came back in no small measure due to the potential of a junior transfer quarterback out of Ole Miss. Shea Patterson has connected on 67 percent of his passes, throwing 17 TD tosses against three interceptions, for an offense averaging 37.2 points per game.
Given that intuition, Winovich should be investing in his own stock picks.
Marshall also thought about leaving. Defensive line coach Greg Mattison gave him a gut-level reason to stay.
Mattison walked that road once. He left Michigan after his first Ann Arbor tour of duty, heading for Notre Dame after the ’96 season.
He missed Michigan football, 1997.
“He told me that story and said, ‘Lawrence, you don’t want to feel that way, leaving and Michigan winning the national championship. You’d have left at the wrong time,’” Marshall recalled. “I was like, ‘I don’t want to be that person.’”
These Wolverines want to be the people who take it as far as they can possibly go. Patterson has been better than any Michigan fan could have imagined and as good as any Michigan hater might have feared.
The junior QB turns those thoughts around, insisting his Michigan experience has matched and exceeded anything he dreamed while pondering his escape to the north from Ole Miss.
Playing for Harbaugh? As advertised, Patterson praised.
“His love and passion for the game is contagious,” Patterson said. “Not only does it spread to me, it spreads to the whole team. He’s just easy to follow, one you definitely want to play for. I’m just proud to be a quarterback on his team.”
Pride isn’t coming before a fall, if Patterson and his teammates can help it. There wasn’t any Senior Day when Harbaugh took to the Michigan Stadium turf for his final home game.
There wasn’t a win, either. He’s not talking about it publicly, but the 20-17 loss to Minnesota in 1986 by the No. 2-ranked Wolverines must still smolder in the deep recesses of his memory.
Thirty-two years later, there’s an opportunity for Harbaugh, for his seniors, for his entire team.
It’s playoff time.
“We want to make the most of it,” Hewlett stressed. “We’re enjoying every practice and every meeting we have, we’re focused. We know there are big games down the stretch, but there’s nothing bigger than the one we have on Saturday against Indiana.”
“The goal never was to win nine games,” Marshall added. “The goal was to win the Big Ten championship and win the national championship. We’re not satisfied right now.”
There’s no reason to be. The Wolverines feature an elite defense and a top-shelf quarterback in a dramatically revived offense — all saturated with motivation, from the top down.
But they’re one slip, one crooked spot of the football, one bad afternoon away from playoff elimination. They know it, and intend to do something about it.
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