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Records are meant to be broken. Some records, though, when broken, aren’t a good sign for things to come. For the most part, creating history is something to be looked at as a positive, and when they are broken, good things come out of it. For Michigan football and the year 2020, it has a chance to do something no other team has ever done in program history, lose every home game. Since 1883, when the Wolverines started playing in Ann Arbor, they have won at least one home game, and now that has a chance to be erased.
The 2020 season has been far from what anybody expected from the Michigan football program. After losing 27-17 to a winless Penn State team today, Michigan has fallen to 2-4 on the year with just three games left on its schedule. Michigan only hasn’t lost all of its home games this year; it has been on the losing end of them embarrassingly, to a 1-3 Michigan State group, an 0-5 Penn State team, and to a 2-1 Wisconsin squad that was dominant from beginning to end.
There is only one home game left guaranteed for the Wolverines, as they play the Maryland Terrapins next Saturday. The week after, Michigan takes on Ohio State on the road. The final game against an undecided opponent could give it a chance for one more home game, but Maryland is the home season finale if the last game is on the road.
2020 has already been a horrendous year for the Wolverines, and never winning a home game for the first time in program history could be the cherry on top of the worst year the program has seen in over a decade. Head coach Jim Harbaugh has already been under fire in years past for not beating Ohio State, having trouble with Michigan State, struggling to beat ranked opponents, and adding this only makes the argument against him even louder.
Michigan football is at a crossroads nobody expected coming this soon under Harbaugh. The 2020 season wasn’t going to be a championship season for the Wolverines, but having a 2-4 record and losing every home game, those two things were far from the expectations that Harbaugh and his coaches set for the team. The players have a part in the team’s failures, but it all goes back to Harbaugh himself. He came back to fix what was wrong with Michigan, and now things have taken a turn for the worst.
If Harbaugh isn’t able to get a victory next week against Maryland, what does it say about the program itself? Could the issues be with the COVID-19 prep and the challenges it brought? If things were back to normal, would the Wolverines be struggling this much? The answers are unknown, but one thing for sure is if you are on the wrong side of history in Ann Arbor while running the show, something must change as soon as possible, or else those flames will continue to be too big to put out.