national championship journals

As you may be aware, Michigan won the national championship. Brian's said his bit on what this means to him, and now it's everyone else's turn. We're inviting everyone who's contributed to the blog over its existence to write whatever they want about the 2023 football team, and hope to roll out a series of these over the course of the next few months.

Our next writer is Jon Schwartz (@jonlschwartz). Freshmen athletes arrive as the hottest thing in the hometown, and most smack their heads in humiliation on their first encounters with the skill and talent at this level. For me, an award-receiving young journalist who thought he was the next Mitch Albom, that moment was joining the Michigan Daily and staring down four years of competing with Jon Schwartz's pen. As Daily sports editor, he was the thinker you wanted to hear from before formulating your take. Jon has been around the writer's block since then—New Jersey Monthly, Spin, and the New York Yankees, for whom he's the deputy editor of Yankees Magazine. Let him at Michigan again, however, and you're all about see why I fled to Editorial rather than share a depth chart with the five-star of my class.

Previously in this series:

• Business is Finished by Ace Anbender
• You'll Fight and You'll Make It Through by Desmond Was Tripped
• Goodbye, Coach by Jordan Acker

It’s strange that I found it during the week between the Rose Bowl and the National Championship Game, a stretch when I attacked each day with an enthusiasm for Michigan gear unknown to mankind. Packing for Houston, I came upon a navy shirt — purchased from the MGoBlog store — that, instead of Michigan, said “FERGODSAKES.”

It was a silly purchase, the type of faux-ironic shirt choice that you wear while silently begging for the opportunity to explain it. It’s also indicative of what was wrong with the University of Michigan football landscape for so long.

Let’s back up. In January 2011, Brady Hoke — not Jim Harbaugh and not Les Miles — stood before a packed media contingent to accept the job running the winningest college football program in history. He had been a successful enough head coach at Ball State and San Diego State, but — much more importantly around Ann Arbor — he had been an assistant under Gary Moeller and Lloyd Carr.

“I can promise you,” he said, in a quote that wouldn’t end up on any T-shirts, but that would be the first sign of the incredibly poor in-game strategy and behind-the-scenes decision-making that became Hoke’s trademark, “we would have walked to the University of Michigan.”

We can make fun now, a decade later and finally recovered from the dysfunction of the Hoke era, but it’s worth remembering that the coach really did win that introductory press conference. Even Dave Brandon came in for praise at locking up a real Michigan man. “This is an elite job,” said the decidedly not elite coach, confident that he could return the Wolverines to glory both on the field and in the public consciousness. “This will continue to be an elite job. This is Michigan, fergodsakes.”

For a while, that was enough. Like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy, just say it and it’s true. We’re Michigan. Pay no attention to anything you’re seeing.

[After THE JUMP: You'll see what I mean.]

Previously in this series:

• Business is Finished by Ace Anbender
• You'll Fight and You'll Make It Through by Desmond Was Tripped

As you may be aware, Michigan won the national championship. Brian's said his bit on what this means to him, and now it's everyone else's turn. We're inviting everyone who's contributed to the blog over its existence to write whatever they want about the 2023 football team, and hope to roll out a series of these over the course of the next few months.

Next up we are honored to have Jordan Acker, who was once excoriated for a sports take by Brian, and yet somehow survived to become the administration's champion of Michigan athletics. You know him as a University of Michigan regent, one of the students in Dooley's class knows him as "The regent who tweets," and I've known him as a friend since he finally got old enough to not be such a starry eyed little freshman. Jordan also got to work directly with Jim Harbaugh, and recounts the man he got to know once he got over the initial starstruck handshake. –Seth

I remember the day I became a father. March of 2015. I was incredibly exhausted (but not nearly as exhausted as my wife), but I was mostly a glorified errand boy. Clean this bottle, get that diaper changed, hold the baby so I can change the spit up off my clothes. I had no idea what I was doing.

That wasn’t the day I became a dad. That was later in 2015. September 3, 2015, to be exact. That new baby girl had grown a little bit bigger and needed me a little bit more. As a night owl, it was my job to feed her after she went to bed, a literal “dream feed” for both of us.

The problem? That was right during the fourth quarter of Jim Harbaugh’s first game as Michigan’s coach.

[Hit the jump.]

Previously in this series: Business is Finished, by Ace Anbender

As you may be aware, Michigan won the national championship. Brian's said his bit on what this means to him, and now it's everyone else's turn. We're inviting everyone who's contributed to the blog over its existence to write whatever they want about the 2023 football team, and hope to roll out a series of these over the course of the next few months.

Next up is regular diarist/resident Michigan War Dad Desmond Was Tripped, who wrote a journal to accompany a many-drafted revision of the Better Son or Daughter 2009 Hype Video. Yes there are others, but by the powers invested in me in the name blog I name this one, which has an entire fool-hurdling sequence I might add, the official successor to the original. –Seth

The Video (link):

This entry will be a little bit of a departure from my normal content. Sure, I could do “Michigan Basketball at the Battle of Hattin” or “Juwan Howard and the Defense of Singapore”, but I wont. I want to pull the warmth of being National Champions one more time over my body, and say thank you the only way I know how to the man who made this blog. I’ll thank him by taking something he once made, and improving on it just a little bit. Brian thanked everyone in the marathon podcast (including me, I was touched), but I wanted to thank him.

So I convinced a friend of mine with far better technical skills and an enthusiasm unknown to mankind (who really took no convincing at all) to help me update Brian’s 2009 Magnum Opus. He has mentioned the 2009 hype video a lot, and how it opened with the disasters of 2008, but finishes with some optimism: a hope that maybe Michigan would pull itself out of the morass of mediocrity it found itself in.

[After THE JUMP: we will all go down together]