INDIANAPOLIS — It has been said the 2023 season for Michigan football is “championship or bust,” but that’s not the mentality inside of Schembechler Hall.
That’s not to say the Wolverines aren’t striving for more, but Jim Harbaugh and his team are working toward the same goals they worked for a year ago — they just came short in the College Football Playoff.
As far as Harbaugh sees it, the goals are indeed the same — and the national championship is among them.
“Championship or bust? What does that mean? That doesn’t mean anything to me,” Harbaugh said. “Same as we always are, the way we go into every year — our goals are to win the (Big Ten) championship, win the national championship, to beat Michigan State, to beat Ohio State, to beat Penn State. I mean, we have so many good teams that we play, so many football fights.
“I haven’t heard one football player (say), ‘It’s championship or bust.’ I know I’ve heard that media-driven slogan but that means nothing, that word bust.”
For team captain Mike Sainristil, it’s more of achieving those goals daily rather than looking toward one overarching achievement.
As Sainristil notes, this team doesn’t know what it’s like to win a national championship — it’s something it has to learn to do. Thus, the process, in turn, is the goal more so than the trophy. Should the Wolverines achieve their day-to-day goals, then a championship will work itself out.
“Personally, I don’t think that winning the national championship this year not determines the future of this program,” Sainristil said. “I think the most important thing that we need to understand is we don’t know what a national championship looks like. So our focus shouldn’t be the national championship is the only thing that we’re focused on, because we have to focus on the day-to-day process, what’s going to get us to a national championship — what haven’t we done in the past two years that didn’t get us over that hump. So we have to figure out, OK, from Week 1 to Week 2, what adjustments do we need to make Week 2-3, Week 3-4, so on and so forth to help us get over that hump?”
Michigan has twice made it as far as the College Football Playoff semifinal, but as been ousted in that first round. While the Wolverines claim “championship or bust” is not the ideal within Schembechler Hall, they’ve also instituted a “beat Georgia” drill, with an insistence on being more physical in the case that the team does match up against the Bulldogs in the postseason.
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