1997 iowa
Feel ya, BVS [Patrick Barron]
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The Question:
Games you remember watching in mortifying fear?
The Responses:
Ace: Before anyone protests, I suggested this because I have Cosmic Comeuppance For The Murderwolf Post, The Ulcer.
Seth: I wouldn't have suggested it because this game didn't for me. Even down 17-0 I figured Michigan would score the next 24 points.
Brian: I can no longer just assume those things. I also feel that ulcer games have to be wins? Is that crazy
Seth: There were a few minutes there when I wouldn't let Demorest's kid talk to me. That was it. The Michigan fans in that stadium were LOUD.
Ace: Yeah, I’ll be honest, I was pretty calm for this one.
Brian: Like the JT Was Short game wasn't an ulcer it was a crippling state of listlessness for months.
Ace: And yeah, ulcer games should be wins. The Horror is a disaster, Akron is an ulcer. Speaking of which, that game.
Seth: The Akron game was on Rosh Hashanah, and the second my brother and I left the stadium everything went alright. Sorry about doing that to everyone but we fixed it.
Brian: Well then how about most Northwestern games
Ace: Man this is gonna be a Lloyd-y list.
The Mathlete: The Halloween Minnesota game
Brian: You're supposed to win, Pat Fitzgerald's head keeps getting bigger, you're not even sure you want credit for the W afterwards. Mathlete, that is a superior choice. The Minnesota game featured Mitch Leidner getting extraordinarily lucky about five times and came down to a goal line stand after Minnesota frittered away two downs from the one.
David: Minnesota 2004 is another one for me. I kept thinking "We can't lose to Minnesota." But then we did...the next year.
Seth: UConn was an ulcer.
Ace: Thank you Desmond Morgan for keeping the damage limited to that. I’m not sure some of these Hoke-era wins count because they didn’t feel very inevitable, though. Like, at all.
Brian: I feel like there are two different categories here. One are games where you are dominating statistically but the scoreboard disagrees, and then there are games where the team is playing like inexplicable ass.
Seth: YES.
Brian: Or, in many cases, fairly explicable ass.
[After THE JUMP: Spleen]
[Ed-Seth: This being the 20th anniversary of the 1997 National Championship, Michigan historian Dr. Sap is taking us game-by-game through it. Previously: Those Who Stayed, The Hit, The Stop, The Captain’s Down, Vengeance]
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October 18, 1997: #5 Michigan 28, #15 Iowa 24
Sara Stillman/The Michigan Daily (via UM Bentley Library)
On the journey to undefeated, there’s always some moment you can point at when it seemed the fun was going to be over. Football seasons are long and weird, and even the greatest teams are more than capable of blowing one to a merely good one. For Michigan in 1997, a team that relied on its defense so much they rarely scored without starting in good field position, that moment came down 21-7 to an excellent Hawkeyes team.
Hayden Fry’s Hawkeyes boasted the #3 scoring offense in the country, as well as the leading rusher in the nation in Tavian Banks. They also had wide receiver/do-it-all athlete Tim Dwight whom Michigan Coach Lloyd Carr said would be the fastest guy on the field.
Fry once again had put together a solid Iowa team and Lloyd knew it. He also knew that in-state rival Michigan State—which had been climbing back to national relevance under Nick Saban—was looming on the UM schedule. Carr wanted his #5-ranked Wolverines to focus on #15 Iowa this week and worry about Michigan State the week after.
"The key to success in anything you do is being focused on the task at hand," Carr said. "We'll find out how good I was at making sure they remained focused. There are a lot of things in coaching that you don't have control over, and you certainly don't have control over what the players think and what they read and what they hear and how much time they spend on those things.
"What you hope as a coach is that they understand in achieving their goals it's very important to take care of today. Because if you don't, we all know what the results are."
It was a nice thought, if completely unheeded.
As for Hayden Fry, he had his own worries. The Head Hawkeye was expecting All-American cornerback Charles Woodson to be covering the dangerous Tim Dwight on almost every play, and in his usual humorous way, had an answer for that possibility.
"I'm hopeful they'll just sic Woodson on Dwight, and then we'll know exactly where he is on every play. If they do that, I'll just have Dwight come over and sit next to me on the bench. Then we won't have to worry about Woodson at all."
Cute. But would cute cut it against Herrmann’s Harassers?
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[Hit THE JUMP]
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