Michigan Football: Loss to Michigan State Doesn’t Derail Season
With all this talk about how much Saturday’s game means for Michigan football, I don’t want to forget about the possibility of the Wolverines losing to Michigan State and having to deal with that through a bye week. The good news though is that even if that happens, Michigan’s still in good shape.
Michigan Wolverines
Think back to about two months ago. This game was almost an automatic loss anyway, right?
The Spartans play defense and typically have a powerful running game. Couple that with an improving Connor Cook and this thing should have only been a formality.
But here we are on State week and it’s not so cut and dry anymore.
That’s because we’ve seen the holiest of resurgences, sparked by the wrath of one Jim Harbaugh.
Michigan opened as a 3-point favorite over the Spartans and has since moved to a 6 1/2-point favorite. You couldn’t have legitimately predicted this stuff preseason.
Better yet, the Wolverines have the fourth-best odds at 10-1 to win a national championship.
This success Michigan is enjoying right now is certainly sustainable—and for a number of reasons—but we can’t just ignore 50 percent of the equation this weekend.
Michigan might very well lose on Saturday to Michigan State for the third straight meeting. It’d be the seventh loss suffered since 2008.
I’m a believer in smaller victories within losses—what they call “moral victories”—but only in some situations. There will be no such thing if Michigan falls to the hands of its in-state rival.
So though it may feel like a loss on Saturday would mean the demise of a season, it would actually just be a whiffed-upon curveball in the middle of an at-bat. Not even a strikeout.
And that’s for a couple reasons.
For one, the old cliche applies here. “You win some and lose some.” (If you started singing, “I heard that my whole life,” I applaud you. If you don’t get the reference, you can just ignore this.)
But really, there’s this idea that a Harbaugh team is only a Harbaugh team if it’s perfect. Not true. A Harbaugh team is a Harbaugh team when it gets a fire in its belly and then responds like someone whose mother was just bad-mouthed.
It’s a whereabouts of 60 percent results, 40 percent process.
Secondly, a loss to Michigan State, no matter how bad, wouldn’t erase what the Wolverines have already done up to this point. Do we need much more to prove this is a heck of a team? Not really. We’ve seen just about every necessary component in the judgement of the best, and Michigan is passing with flying colors.
A loss changes none of that.
The hype being put on this game is 100 percent warranted; I’m not going to argue that. But in the process it seems like we’ve forgotten losing is a possibility. Therefore, in the aftermath of this hypothetical loss, I can just imagine all hell breaking loose.
Obviously not to the point where we’re questioning Harbaugh—I think The Bible calls that blasphemy—but to the point where we’re questioning if Michigan was just on a fluke run.
Now way, don’t do that.
Friends don’t let friends have diluted thoughts because their short-term expectations fall short.
Keep that in mind, and have a happy Tuesday.