Well, Michigan has had an interesting last few weeks, now, hasn’t it?
“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” quoted Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities back in 1859, probably without the slightest hint of college football on his mind. After all, we were still 10 years from Rutgers birthing the sport.
Michigan won in stunning fashion over Minnesota, by three, beneficiaries of some combination of luck, the foe self-immolating, and its own doing on Saturday night.
You’d be hard pressed in the history of college football to find back-to-back games with such emotional roller coaster-ing as Michigan has felt. Two weeks ago, it dropped a sure win against rival Michigan State in the form of a punt snap bobbled and returned for a touchdown with no time left.
This time, it was Minnesota who felt the pain, and in it, reminded us all about the angst of losing in the last moments, winning in the last moments, and thinking you lost the game you won in the last moments.
For the Gophers’ part, they were a willing sacrifice, the rabbit walking in the foxhole to get out of the rain, somehow thinking that was a good idea. On an emotional night, when it seemed Minnesota couldn’t lose the game if it tried, the Gophers somehow did.
In it was an internal response for Michigan that, while not totally erasing the burn of the loss to MSU, probably reminded the team that sometimes you’re on the right side of the ledger, and sometimes you’re not.
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With 19 seconds left, Minnesota thought it had a touchdown. In reality, as replay clearly showed, the Gophers were one yard shy on the catch. Not recognizing the moment, quarterback Mitch Leidner all but wasted the remaining time snapping the ball and throwing an incompletion.
Down three with only two seconds left, the easy play was the field goal. This was similar to two weeks ago, when the easy play for Michigan was to simply get a punt off and win. Minnesota had inexplicably carved apart the nation’s top-rated defense all night long, and Michigan would go into overtime with backup quarterback Wilton Speight as its main option under center, on the road.
Minnesota wasn’t interested in the easy play, opting to go for the safest of calls, the quarterback sneak, only to be stuffed. In a five-minute span (real time), Michigan went from thinking it had lost again in impossible fashion (though playing like straight rubbish) to winning at the witching hour with only one yard to spare.
There’s nothing otherworldly about sports, even though we sometimes pretend there is. Karma probably exists, but there are a whole hell of a lot of guys on a football team to suggest it exists in the vacuum of “if Team X wins, it deserved it, while Team Y deserved to lose.”
Sports, in general, so long as both teams are reasonably in the same stratosphere on a given night, come down to one or two plays or decisions. Minnesota played the last play like it was lucky to be in it when in reality, the Gophers weren’t.
Michigan got the chance to feel what MSU must have felt in Ann Arbor two weeks ago, winning a game it had no business winning, in large part due to the foe willing to show up to the shootout with a knife and a few band-aids.
The emotions of the night were palpable for Minnesota, both the artificial crowd fervor that comes along with a night game (not to mention on Halloween), and the passions stirred by the sadness of the recent departure of coach Jerry Kill for health reasons, against his personal desires.
They didn’t “deserve” to lose any more than Michigan did two weeks prior. In the end, the final result is what it is. The record books don’t have pages for nuance, just numbers.
Michigan is bowl eligible, and while the improvement under Jim Harbaugh and staff in year one was obvious, the tangible proof of that was going to be winning more games than last year, which the Wolverines now have done before November even hit.
If you can convince yourself that you’re never up or down for too long, you’ll usually be even keeled when you’re one or the other in the moment it happens. There is no karma other than what we pretend there is when it comes to these things.
Minnesota will win its close game at some point. That’s how the ebb and flow goes.
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