• Hoisting A Legend

    Author Bill Roose was kind enough to send along an excerpt from his new book on Desmond Howard titled, “I Wore 21: The Legend of Desmond Howard”.  The book is dropping this week around Ann Arbor and will be available at the game on Saturday. While we’ve all seen the famous photo of Desmond making ‘The Catch’, how about this shot from page 69 of I Wore 21 of Howard celebrating with the lineman and the madness over in the student section?  Look at the faces of the guys running up to him: Side note: I’m probably in that photo somewhere, over to the left.  It’s up there with Woodson’s 1997 interception in East Lansing as the greatest Michigan catch I’ve witnessed. Here’s a clip from chapter two, Grbac talking about the play: Quarterback Elvis Grbac is still amazed by what Howard did that day. “I threw the ball up and it was really incomplete, to tell you the truth,” Grbac said. “Then at about the 5-yard line, Des looks up and he goes into another gear and absolutely runs by the corner and there are not too many guys who can do that. “That was a catch that just propelled him through the entire season, because now once we got inside the 20-yard line, people were like, ‘OK, what’s…

  • Coach Robinson’s Championship Ring (1990)

    It looks like another Michigan championship ring up for auction, this time a 1990 Big Ten Championship Ring.  Here’s a look: A few notes: Like most of these rings it’s 10K gold. It appears as though the stone is maize colored, the first time I can recalled seeing that. Reads “Big Ten Champions” around the stone. One side reads “Count On Me” which I take to be the team slogan that season, along with the score 35-3 below an alligator.  That of course is a nod to the 1991 Gator Bowl when Gary Moeller’s men crushed Mississippi (Wolverine Historian YouTube).   That’s the game the entire Michigan offensive line (Dean Dingman, Tom Dohring, Greg Skrepenak, Matt Elliott, Steve Everitt) was named the MVPs of the game.  Steve Everitt told the Ole Miss guy across him, “YOU LIKE THAT, HUH??” a record 17 times that day. The other side features the player/coach name, a depiction of the Big House and their position/role on the team. This one belonged to a coach named “Robinson”.  There wasn’t a major position coach on the team with that surname but the team photo does reveal a David Robinson, fourth from the right in the seventh row, probably supporting S&C or another group: So…this probably was this man’s ring.  Having featured a bunch of rings on this…