ANN ARBOR, Mich. — There’s a problem when a team is coronated to win a big game before playing in it — sometimes the other team has something to say about it.
That was the case for the Michigan Wolverines against the TCU Horned Frogs in the College Football Playoff semifinal in the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl — the maize and blue were far and away the favorites. And when Donovan Edwards ripped off a big run on the opening offensive play, it looked all but ordained that Michigan would emerge the victor.
However, they play games for a reason, and after two J.J. McCarthy pick-sixes, two missed scoring opportunities on the goal line, a handful of missed tackles that resulted in TCU touchdowns, the Wolverines were heading back to Ann Arbor while the Horned Frogs went to LA to play Georgia in the national championship game.
Now that the Wolverines are in spring ball and preparing for another season where they’ll likely be prohibitive favorites to at least play in the championship game, many of the players are going back and reflecting on what happened in late December, knowing that he who forgets the past is doomed to repeat it.
“There’s a lot of things that we did wrong. We just didn’t play our best ball but — it sucks,” fifth-year tackle Karsen Barnhart said. “But I mean it is what it is and it’s only gonna fire us up more to get ready to do we got to do the coming up season.
“Like, I mean, we watched it and then you start to like have in the back of your mind that that happened. But I mean, you’ve just got to move forward and we’re moving forward now in the right direction with the 2023 season. Just got to ball out.”
Senior edge rusher Braiden McGregor didn’t just rewatch Michigan’s loss to TCU, but he watched the other playoff game featuring Ohio State and Georgia, as well as Georgia’s romp over TCU. Seeing how close OSU came to taking down the Bulldogs, he couldn’t help but wonder what might have been had Michigan taken care of business as expected in its own College Football Playoff game.
“Yeah, I watched it. And it’s just — it wasn’t great to watch because, you’re watching it, like, we should have gotten there,” McGregor said. “I feel like we had a lot of mistakes that game, we kind of beat ourselves. And, you watch the other semifinal game, and I was like, OK, (Ohio State) hung with them, and they’d had a good game, maybe should have won, you know? Speculation and everything. But it was like — we handled them and you see what happened in the final game, you’re like, ‘Man, that should have been us.’
“The biggest takeaway, we get to that time this year, shot ourselves in the foot two years — not prepared first year, and then this year being prepared, and it was like, we just got to get there. And just, when adversity hits, we just got to say, whatever, you just got to keep going. Because I feel like that was the biggest thing of like — we didn’t lose a game, and it really wasn’t a lot of games where there was adversity. So I think when that happened, it was a little tough for us. But I think we’ll be prepared this year for sure.”
Being more prepared was the mindset heading into last year’s CFP game, but now these Wolverines have to take that mentality and push it forward into 2023.
Junior linebacker Junior Colson admits he’s gone back and watched the game multiple times, but now is not a time to lament. It’s more so fuel to push he and his teammates to the point where they can go back to the playoff and actually win.
“Watched it quite a bit, watched it quite a bit,” Colson said. “But I’ve been trying to move on. There’s a lot of things, a lot of plays didn’t go our way — a lot of things. And just trying to get back to that spot and just further, in a way, because two times now we’ve gotten to that spot, that’s where our end has come.”
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