Forgive me while I pick myself off the floor from laughter.
In case you missed it, there was some hilarity coming out of the Michigan football program Thursday — at least from a former player that has been on the receiving end of a few public flogging at the hands of Ohio State.
If you follow college football, or at least the OSU vs. Michigan rivalry, we’re sure you know who Nico Collins is. Collins spent three years in Ann Arbor as one of the Wolverines’ top wide receivers before opting out in 2020. He’s been known to be outspoken, but he just made a claim that someone watching Ohio State and Michigan from the moon without a telescope wouldn’t make.
In a press conference on Wednesday, Collins went as far as suggesting not only that Michigan has had as much talent as OSU over the last few years, but that the players wearing the maize and blue were more talented in some cases than those wearing scarlet and gray. Here is his quote as transcribed by Wolverines Wire.
“It’s way closer,” Collins said. “I’d say the talent is the same kind of talent. I would say there’s not a difference between the two. Every time we play O-State, we know what kind of game it’s gonna be – it’s gonna be all four quarters. With the athletes they got and we got, I’d say we match up. They don’t have more athletes than we got. I feel like it’s pretty much equal or we pretty much have more than them. That’s it, man. Talent-wise, I’d say it’s pretty much equal. There wasn’t no advantage with them – none at all.”
Give me a moment while I wipe up the Diet Cherry Dr. Pepper in my Yeti cup that I just spewed all over the floor. What!? He said what?
https://twitter.com/wolverineswire/status/1374796077958889480?s=20
OK. I’ll give every dollar I’ve got if I can walk out on the street in almost every American city in this great country of ours (including Ann Arbor, Michigan) and find five people that believe that notion. If so, there’s a lot of explaining to do because Jim Harbaugh is still slipping khakis on every day and going to work in the shadow of the Big House despite underutilizing all that NFL talent up in Michigan.
Look, you could actually, kind of argue that 2016 was a year in which the talent between the two programs was equal (J.T got the first down), but since then, it’s been a house of cards at TTUN. In Collins’ first year in 2017, Ohio State won the game 31-20. That’s respectable. However, when Collins became an even bigger part of the team in 2018 and 2019, the scores looked like me playing Madden against my six-year-old cousin. The Buckeyes won 62-39 in 2018, and 56-27 in 2019.
If Collins was trying to make waves with his statements, he definitely did that. I’m sure his two catches for 32 yards in the 2019 game more than backup his comments.
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