Title a perfect representation of Harbaugh
HOUSTON – He won the way he has always won, everywhere he has been, and no matter how much football changes, Jim Harbaugh always believed in the kind of football his team just played to win the national championship, beating Washington 34-13.
It just took him a while to show it at Michigan, show that defense and a ground game is as lethal a combo as ever, and when a team has the best defense and a bulldozing ground game?
There is no rung of football that can’t be conquered.
It’s not that Harbaugh is a purist in this way, or stubbornly stuck in the past. No, it’s more subtle than that, and for him, more existential: Football reveals character, yes, but something more fundamental to Harbaugh – the American spirit.
He has talked about it for years, about what happens when 11 players line up on a field, or 100 of them gather in a locker room. About the alchemy that comes out of sacrifice and pain, brotherhood and camaraderie.
Harbaugh is an idealist this way, and while he has chased championships for years, both as a player at Michigan and in the NFL, and as a coach at three previous stops before Ann Arbor, his pursuit of a title has always been layered with his view of the world, that a title isn’t its own end, but a representation of something deeper.
Whatever else you think of his view, and his musings and even, at times, quirky philosophizing over the years, he’s consistent in his beliefs.
It’s complicated, certainly, and his journey, especially this season, hasn’t been without controversy. But to watch his Wolverines this season – and the title game was no different – was to watch the kind of collective spirit and mental toughness that doesn’t come around every year.
All champions are together, certainly, but some champs are just so much more talented than everyone else, and they’ve won with a wide margin for error. And while Harbaugh has been clear since August that this is his most gifted roster, he still didn’t have the most “talent” in college football.
He definitely had the best team. No, I’m not gonna quote Harbaugh’s
college coach here and his famous mantra. Harbaugh took Bo Schembechler’s phrase, though, and made it his own: “This is the team.”
He said it all year. Yes, football is about the team. But not all teams are “the team.”
These Wolverines proved it from the jump here in Houston, just as they proved it in overtime last week in Pasadena, California, and a few weeks before in Indianapolis, and every week before that. If last week was about taking down the sports’ north star – or should we say Death Star – then this week was about taking down the sport’s upstart.
Or at least its most stylish, and formidable, offense.
To which the Wolverines said:
You’ve got three future NFL receivers and the Heisman Trophy runner-up at quarterback? How’s that going to work when the receivers can’t get open and the quarterback doesn’t have time to throw?
The Huskies brought in the sport’s best passing game and couldn’t pass. They ran the ball well, too, but couldn’t run.
They scored 13 points, managed 301 yards, the last chunk of them during desperation time late, and were generally
overwhelmed by the sport’s best defense.
Even when the game was tight in the second half, when a single touchdown separated the teams, the Wolverines kept flummoxing the Huskies.
Series after series, the defense found a way, made a play, and even when Michael Penix Jr. seemed to make a play, he didn’t, because a defensive lineman drew a holding call, say, or an offensive lineman jumped off sides, jumpy from trying to slow the Wolverines’ relentless pressure.
Where the defensive line dominated in the Rose Bowl against Alabama, every level of the defense made plays against Washington, and they had to, as the Huskies spread out and attack everywhere, or at least try to.
Whether Mike Sainristil, the senior captain and do-everything defensive back, who famously switched from receiver and found his voice as the soul of the defense, was yanking bigger receivers to the ground in the open field, or Junior Colson was running down tight ends before the sticks, or Will Johnson was diving for an interception and securing it after a bobble just before he hit the ground, U-M’s defense swarmed from every patch of turf.
The offense, meanwhile, jumped out early and held on late, buoyed by a couple of Donovan Edwards touchdown runs, sealed by a Blake Corum touchdown run, propelled, just enough, by J.J. McCarthy’s legs and a few throws on the run.
Edwards hit the line, saw bodies, scooted outside and ripped up the left side for 41 yards and a touchdown. On the next series, he saw a similar roadblock in the trenches, jump cut to his right, and raced up the right side for 46 yards.
And with two minutes left in the first, U-M led by 11. The defense forced a punt. Then it was Corum’s turn. He took off up the middle, slipped outside, and sprinted 59 yards down the sideline. His run was the last play of the first quarter.
The Wolverines rushing total? Two-hundred twenty-nine yards. Almost unfathomable. But hardly sustainable, right?
The Huskies cleaned up their gap fits in the second quarter. Continued through the third until McCarthy found a sliver of green as he was being pressured and tore up the middle for 22 yards on third-and-long. On the next play, he ran to the left on a designed run for another first down.
But then those runs weren’t because of ill fits by Washington as much as play making from McCarthy. Harbaugh and offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore were cautious with their quarterback. They didn’t roll him out much and didn’t call for him to run until late in the third.
They wanted to protect him, obviously, but McCarthy often throws better on the run, when he doesn’t have to diagnose the defense or think too much about a throw. He can struggle to figure out where the ball needs to go.
But he can also make the throws when he absolutely must, as he did against Alabama, as he did to help jump-start the offense late, when he found Colston Loveland on a crosser that help set up the touchdown drive that essentially won the game.
McCarthy didn’t need to be perfect. No player did. No player can.
But a team can, and these Wolverines are, and that’s always been Harbaugh’s larger point, about what happens when so many look to the person next to them before they look inward.