In its College Football Playoff debut Michigan was rocked by an SEC team just like Michigan State was in 2015.
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. – Gemon Green dropped his head, and the Michigan football cornerback shook it ever so slightly as he glanced briefly at the celebration unfolding in the painted red end zone at Hard Rock Stadium. James Cook had just slipped out of the backfield, cruised past th e Wolverines’ last line of defense and scored on a 39-yard touchdown reception that accounted for Georgia’s last points in its 34-11 romp Friday. A party started on New Year’s Eve and the College Football Playoff’s lone Big Ten representative wasn’t invited. “Sucks it’s got to end this way,” Michigan’s star pass rusher, Aidan Hutchinson, said afterward. MICHIGAN GRADES: Offense, defense, coaching thoroughly outclassed by Georgia COLUMN: Michigan doesn’t belong on sport’s top shelf, but loss won’t spoil monumental year Indeed it does. Six years before, on the very same night, Michigan State experienced the same cold rejection. Making its debut in the CFP, the Spartans were shut out literally and figuratively by a different SEC behemoth. Alabama exerted its supremacy during a 38-0 slaughter that reverberated long after the final whistle. In the coming years, the plucky program Mark Dantonio built into a regional stronghold disintegrated, and as it did some wondered if that resounding defeat to the Crimson Tide triggered the decline. Here in South Florida the Wolverines are confident they won’t endure a similar downturn after they were wrecked by Georgia. Instead, they proclaimed they’re built to last. “Ton of resolve with this team,” head coach Jim Harbaugh said. “To me it feels like a start.
