Jim Harbaugh and the Wolverines have only themselves to blame. Instead of taking control in this game, they gave it away.
It started with a failed Philly Special. It ended with an offensive flurry unlike anything the Fiesta Bowl has ever seen.
But once the fog has lifted for Michigan’s football team, they’ll be left full of regret. Because this was neither the result the Wolverines expected, nor the game they wanted to play.
This was Big 12 football, not the Big Ten’s brand. And this was anything but the Michigan “smash-fest” J.J. McCarthy was talking about almost as soon as this match-up was set nearly a month ago.
This was “something else,” as senior linebacker Michael Barrett said Saturday night, standing in front of his locker and trying to make sense of Michigan’s 51-45 loss to TCU in a wild College Football Playoff semifinal.
It was something else, all right. And for that, Jim Harbaugh and the Wolverines have only themselves to blame. Instead of taking control in this game, they gave it away at the first opportunity. And the second and the third, for that matter.
And once they had, there was no getting it back. Not completely, anyway. Once they’d given the Horned Frog underdogs an early confidence boost Saturday — starting with a bizarre bit of playcalling that you can pin on Harbaugh and his red-zone co-pilot, Matt Weiss — the Wolverines found themselves along for the ride.
On fourth-and-goal from the 2 on the game’s opening drive — a drive that started with a 54-yard run up the middle by Donovan Edwards — the coaches opted for something exotic. But a trick-play reverse to set up freshman tight end Colston Loveland for a pass play to quarterback J.J. McCarthy ended in an 8-yard sack.
“We thought it would work,” Harbaugh said later, when asked to explain it. “I take full responsibility for it not working, and should have had something different called. Put that one on me. They had it wired and they had it well-defended. Sitting here now, definitely wish I would have called a different one.”
Wishing won’t make it so, though. And for a TCU team that clearly wasn’t just happy to be here, as some suggested, that play-call was the first gift from a Michigan team that kept on giving.
