Michigan Football: Your rooting guide for championship week
T-minus one more day (technically not for Conference USA and the PAC-12) until championship day.
For Michigan fans, tomorrow will be unfamiliar territory as Michigan football has never made it to a Big Ten championship game before, so this is definitely a new and welcomed experience for us.
In this article, we’ll break down each championship game that will be played tomorrow, who to root for, and what, if any impact, it has on the Michigan Wolverines. We’ll start in order of the day and time that the games will happen.
Conference USA Championship: Western Kentucky vs. UTSA, Friday, December 3rd, 7:00p.m. EST, CBSSN
The first game of the day today. This game obviously has no impact on Michigan football or the playoff. I don’t know how many people will tune into this game, to be honest.
Western Kentucky does have the nation’s #1 passer in Bailey Zappe (4,968 passing yards, who threw for 488 yards and 3 TDs against Michigan State earlier this year) and the nation’s #2 receiver in Jerreth Sterns (1,539 receiving yards), but obviously, this game isn’t that highly rated.
If you are an absolute football junkie, tune in. It’s still football. Otherwise, most of us will skip this game.
PAC-12 Championship: (10) Oregon vs. (14) Utah, Friday, December 3rd, 8:00p.m. EST, ABC
For the second game of championship week, we turn our attention to later today, an evening tilt of the Oregon Ducks versus the Utah Utes.
These two teams just played each other two weeks ago, in a game that Utah completely controlled, and won 38-7.
To be honest, that result wasn’t really surprising because Utah had been surging lately and Oregon had been playing with fire for a while, a few times barely escaping with victories earlier in the season.
While Michigan fans won’t need to root for any one of these schools to win or lose because it has no impact on Michigan, it should still be a fun game to watch (hopefully).
I expect this game to be a lot closer than the first meeting two weeks ago between these two schools just because of what’s on the line: a PAC-12 title.
We’ll see who wins but I wouldn’t be surprised if Utah wins again. They seem to be on a roll and seem determined to play in that Rose Bowl matchup with Ohio State.