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9/24/2019 4:19:40 PM

M

ichigan won’t make the 
College Football Playoff 
this year. It hasn’t been 
statistically eliminated from the Big 
Ten, but for now, its chances of a 
conference title 
reside on tech-
nicalities and 
blind hope.
Those were 
the goals the 
Wolverines har-
bored before the 
season started, 
the goals they 
kept clinging 
onto after Wis-
consin blitzed them in Madison last 
month.
“We know that we’re gonna see 
them again in my hometown, for the 
Big Ten championship,” said redshirt 
freshman linebacker Cam McGrone 
a week after that loss. “I don’t really 
mind hearing it, cause I know when 
we see them again, we’re gonna 
smack ‘em in the mouth.”
Barring an unforeseen charge by 
Michigan and multiple slip-ups from 
Ohio State and Penn State, that’s not 
going to happen. 
“Win our next game,” Jim Har-
baugh said this week when asked 
what would make a successful sea-

son. “That’s our goal.”
There’s not much else to say at this 
point. There is no big-picture goal 
because all of those evaporated into 
the State College night last Saturday. 
As far as front-facing public declara-
tions go, brash statements have been 
beaten out of the Wolverines.
That doesn’t mean there’s nothing 
to salvage for the season. The gulf 
between 7-5 and 10-2 is still wide, 
both in terms of public perception 
and of what this season will mean 
to those inside Schembechler Hall. 
Michigan, in many ways, is playing 
only for itself at this point. That’s not 
nothing.
Much as everything with this 
program centers around Harbaugh’s 
record on the road against ranked 
teams — the record that ultimately 
brought down his team this year — 
he still has the opportunity to notch 
wins against Michigan’s rivals. He 
has yet to beat Ohio State in four 
tries. He lost in his first matchup 
against Notre Dame last year. He has 
yet to beat Michigan State at home, 
with a lackluster 2-2 record against 
the Spartans.
That adds up to a 2-7 record 
against Michigan’s biggest rivals, 
despite the Wolverines being favored 
in six of those nine games. As far as 

reversing narratives go, there’s still a 
pretty big one staring Harbaugh, and 
Michigan, in the face.
Much as the Wolverines have 
disappointed this year, all three of 
those games are at home. Winning 
all of them is a tall order, especially 
with Ohio State looking like one of 
the best teams in the country. Notre 
Dame and the Buckeyes are both top-
10 teams. But beat them and nobody 
will go into the offseason feeling 
apprehensive about Josh Gattis as 
offensive coordinator, and nobody 
will feel anything but good about 
2020. Do that and Michigan can claw 
its way to a New Year’s Six bowl, 
giving way to unfounded optimism 
around the program.
If the Wolverines take moral 
victories against those three teams, 
they’ll have their worst season since 
2014, when they went 5-7, missed a 
bowl game and fired Brady Hoke. 
That’s what these next six weeks 
mean. 
No equivocating. Not if Michigan 
wants to be considered a top-tier 
program.
“Do you define struggling as, 
are you winning the games? If you 
look at it in terms of winning, yeah, 
I guess our record doesn’t really 
reflect everything that goes into it,” 

said Carlo Kemp when asked about 
struggles against top-10 teams this 
week. “... But we fought (against Penn 
State). We fought our way all the way 
back to present ourselves with an 
opportunity to win the game. And 
the score of the game and the records 
of those ranked matchups that you’re 
talking about, they don’t reflect that. 
And it’s a curse and it’s a blessing. It 
doesn’t reflect everything that goes 
into those games and the preparation 
and how they’ve been on your mind 
since the last time you played them 
or the last time you lost to them. 
“Sometimes, they don’t go your 
way. But you don’t document the 
fight or the good plays and the posi-
tives of those games. The only thing 
that gets reported is the score and 
the record.”
It might be wrong to say that 
Michigan struggled at Penn State 
when it had a chance to tie the game 
at the 3-yard line and force overtime. 
But there is no doubt that Michigan 
has struggled to win these kinds of 
games. Fair or not, that’s what mat-
ters in the end.
Most of Michigan’s players and 
coaches fell into Harbaugh’s rheto-
ric — “win our next game” — when 
asked about bigger-picture goals this 
week. It fell to senior quarterback 

Shea Patterson to expand on that.
“We have an opportunity,” Pat-
terson said. “We have a decision 
to make. Our goal is to win every 
game the rest of the season. I love 
this team. We’re all so close, and we 
trust each other, and we love playing 
together. I don’t think there is any 
other goal than to just win.”
Do that, and this season will feel 
a whole lot different at the end of 
November than it does right now.

Sears can be reached at searseth@

umich.edu or on Twitter @ethan_sears.

What’s left to play for?

ETHAN
SEARS

ALEXIS RANKIN/Daily

Jim Harbaugh has struggled against Michigan’s rivals.

