Michigan footballs strong start, lofty expectations lead to restlessness and hope
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The maize-clad Michigan football fans sang in unison beneath a sea of waving pompoms as they packed the Big House to watch their Wolverines dispatch Washington with ease. They celebrated with enthusiasm that, for these few hours, neglected the nagging worries that they could ultimately fall short.
Just before kickoff, a montage on the massive video boards highlighted the tradition here — not that these fans need reminders. Headlines from title-winning performances and victories over Ohio State accompany clips from the best moments and the star players who built this program into a perennial challenger measured by those standards.
This past is an undeniable factor in how the present is perceived. The way Michigan cruised to a 31-10 win over the Huskies supplied a dose of satisfaction, thanks to a relentless running game and a rejuvenated defense. But it’ll take the next few months to find out where this team stands in the Big Ten and whether its losing streak against Ohio State will finally end. Those answers will define the season.
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“We’ve got more to prove,” running back Blake Corum said after he gashed Washington’s defense all evening. “And I can’t wait to see how far we go because it’s going to be far.”
This might not be a vintage Washington team. The Huskies lost their opener to Montana, a Football Championship Subdivision program, so tougher challenges are ahead for the Wolverines. But Michigan Coach Jim Harbaugh has started this season with a pair of victories — the first came in another dominant, run-heavy outing against Western Michigan — and that helps push the disappointing 2-4 campaign during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season further into the past.
Beyond last year, Harbaugh’s squads have always finished with at least eight wins, and they’ve hit the 10-win benchmark three times. Yet the hope of fans is tempered by skepticism. Lofty expectations lead to disappointment — all against the backdrop of their rival, Ohio State, consistently dominating. The Wolverines haven’t won a Big Ten title since 2004. They haven’t beaten Ohio State since 2011 and have done so only three times since the turn of the century. So this fan base remains “cautiously optimistic, heavy on the caution,” said John U. Bacon, who has written multiple books on Michigan football.
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Harbaugh is 51-17 against teams not named Ohio State, with those losses rarely coming at home. But he’s 0-5 against the archrival, which stands in the way of the Wolverines making it to the Big Ten title game and beyond. Those accomplishments, more so than the 51 wins, are the measures of success.
“That’s what we want to do,” Harbaugh said this summer. “And we’re going to do it or die trying.”
Harbaugh’s 69 percent winning clip from 2015 to 2020 is the best of any six-year Michigan stretch since 2007, but before that the Wolverines never recorded a mark so low in nearly four decades. Fans are left grappling with whether they should appreciate the improvement from the previous coaches, Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke, or if they should lament that the program isn’t quite on the tier it once was.
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“I feel like I’m in football purgatory,” said Jeff Holzhausen, a 47-year-old from Chelsea, Mich., who hasn’t missed a home game since 1985, when Harbaugh was quarterbacking his favorite team. Holzhausen, like many others who will pile into Michigan Stadium this season, grew up in an era when Big Ten titles and victories over the Buckeyes were abundant.
“We led sort of a charmed existence as Michigan fans during the ’90s,” said Andrew Fine, 41, whose dad was a team manager in the 1970s, “because we transitioned from three different coaches, from Bo Schembechler to Gary Moeller to Lloyd Carr, and we didn’t really miss a beat.”
The school touts that it’s the winningest program in college football. Michigan has more Big Ten titles than anyone else, even if the most recent one came when the current players were toddlers. Those are the expectations around Ann Arbor that give the Wolverines pride in their past but make unbridled joy hard to find.
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Harbaugh “hasn’t been bad — at all,” said Mike Dalessandro, a 78-year-old who has had season tickets for nearly 40 years. “But he hasn’t been what we want. The dream that we had, he hasn’t matched that.”
Dalessandro has adjusted his goals. He wants to take his first trip to the Rose Bowl, and Michigan hasn’t played in the marquee game since January 2007. The demoralizing home loss against a struggling Michigan State team bothered him last season, but he’s content with beating Ohio State just once every few years.
This is what Michael Spath — who previously covered Michigan for Rivals, a recruiting website, and now teaches a class about college sports at his alma mater — describes as the “inner turmoil” fans are navigating: What are the realistic goals on which to hinge your happiness?
“If I can recalibrate, I’m in a great place,” Spath said. “If I can’t recalibrate and I still need 10 wins and I still need Big Ten championships and I still need to beat Ohio State on a regular basis and I need to compete for a national championship, then you’re in for a world of hurt right now.”
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But eternal hope, not rational thinking, is inherent to sports fandom. Look around Michigan Stadium, and you’ll spot reasons to believe. The defense, led by new coordinator Mike Macdonald, stifled Washington’s floundering offense and kept the Huskies out of the end zone until the fourth quarter. Washington had no answers for Michigan’s rushing attack, which has accumulated nearly 700 yards through two games but leaves questions about the passing game. Corum scored three times, and he and Hassan Haskins finished with more than 150 yards apiece.
“That warms the cockles of the heart,” Harbaugh said of his ground game.
Before the win over Washington, televisions in Ann Arbor parking lots showed Oregon take down Ohio State. That offers more optimism for a Michigan fan base desperate to be the better of the two.
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As each season approaches, “you can find pieces of evidence that justify your high expectations,” said Daniel L. Wann, a professor of psychology at Murray State whose research centers on sports fandom. “And then you set yourself up for a rough road.”
Research shows that fans practice “proactive pessimism,” Wann said, meaning they mentally prepare for their team to fall short. Perhaps that’s why Bill Wenzell, a longtime Michigan supporter, has noticed more reservation among his fellow fanatics this year. They have taken a “wait-and-see approach,” Wenzell said, “because we always get sky-high with expectations and get our hearts broken.”
Yet no matter the kickoff time, Wenzell wakes up at 4 a.m. on game day, heads to Ann Arbor and starts his morning reading the newspaper at a coffee shop. He wants the day to last as long as possible because it seems like a holiday anytime Michigan plays. Wenzell said he feels “overwhelmed with enthusiasm” that builds until the game begins. Dalessandro wears his 1997 national championship T-shirt that he doesn’t wash between wins, and he always enters the stadium with hope.
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But the regular season finale against Ohio State looms, and for some, it dulls enjoyment of the season. “At this point,” Holzhausen said, “I’m just waiting for the beatdown at the end of November.”
Ohio State has turned into a roadblock to everything these fans want. The Buckeyes’ loss to Oregon was only Ohio State’s sixth regular season defeat since 2015, the year Harbaugh took over at Michigan, so he’s hardly alone in his trouble. But the Wolverines’ performance in the rivalry matchup, now 11 weeks away, is still the litmus test of success.
When Jon Falk, who was Michigan’s equipment manager for four decades and then served as an adviser to Harbaugh before retiring last year, finds coins on the ground, he checks the year to see if Michigan beat the Buckeyes that season. He has an encyclopedic memory of these rivalry games, because that’s how it goes in Ann Arbor.
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“Every Ohio State game,” Falk says, “lives in your heart.”
These early wins are important markers of progress, but if everything goes well, they won’t define the season. Michigan fans will gather here again Saturday, ready to cheer their way through another matchup on the way toward what they truly want. The grand expectations entrenched in this program won’t waver, so this fan base holds on to hope, knowing firsthand it might fade into disappointment again.
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