In the intro of this week’s edition of ‘This Week in Michigan football History’, I said, “Time will tell if this tonight’s battle will be talked about for decades to come…” Well, it didn’t take much time to make that assessment and you can have that answer now if you’d like it. Yes, this will be talked about for decades to come.
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Remy Hamilton Shakes Notre Dame’s Thunder | This Week in Michigan Football History
For this week’s segment which will be broadcast during WTKA 1050AM’s KeyBank Countdown to Kick-off, we go back to September 10, 1994, and remember when Remy Hamilton stuck his foot in the Ron Powlus hype machine: (Yes, Ira included the mandatory To Hell With Notre Dame drop!). Here’s how it looked: You can check out all of the This Week…segments here. Go Blue!
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Night Moves: Michigan’s First Night Game (1944)
While Notre Dame will be Michigan’s guest for the first night game at the Big House, did you know it was Bo Schembechler’s 1982 Wolverines who played in the inaugural battle under the lights in South Bend? The Irish upset the 10th-ranked Wolverines 23-17 on that historic evening in front of 59,000 fans at Notre Dame Stadium. But that ’82 game wasn’t the first time the Wolverines played at night, as that tradition started nearly 70 years ago. On September 23, 1944, Fritz Crisler’s Wolverines traveled to Wisconsin to play The Hilltoppers of Marquette in a game that kicked off at 7 p.m. As part of the war effort, Michigan had several players on the roster as part of the Navy’s “V-12” training program. To enhance the supply of college-educated officers, the Navy rolled out V-12 in 131 U.S. schools. Those enrolled were considered active-duty personnel, required to adhere to strict military rules and discipline. One of those rules prevented any member to be away from the “base” (the campus, in this case) for more than 48 hours. To accommodate the 48-hour rule and to play a game on the road as far as Milwaukee, Fritz Crisler’s crew left Ann Arbor at around 1:30pm Friday afternoon and arrived at Marquette that evening. Crisler held a brief practice under the lights…
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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…
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Ending Early
From the official game release: This is the first Michigan football game to end before all 60 minutes of regulation have been played. Well kind of. And I’ll clarify in a minute. It’s certainly not the first Michigan football game to end before the planned allotted time. Most notably two of the most famous games in college football history ended early: The 1902 Rose Bowl (the first bowl game ever played) ended with plenty of time on the clock because Yost, Heston and crew were putting a colossal smack down on Stanford. From the Bentley: With eight minutes remaining in the game, Stanford captain Ralph Fisher approached the Wolverine bench and offered to concede; Michigan consented. While this game yielded the Little Brown Jug, the great 1903 Minnesota-Michigan battle between the Western powerhouses also ended early. The common story is that after the Gophers scored a late TD to tie the game, the Minnesota fans stormed the field and the coaches agreed to call the game. (I’ve heard other claims that approaching weather was a factor in the decision, but haven’t seen much evidence to back that up). The Sunday November 1, 1903 Minneapolis Tribune says the game ended with “but a few seconds left to play.” The Detroit Free Press from that Sunday said two minutes remained, headline: Detroit…
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The Sharps Don’t think Michigan is so Keen
In last week’s WSJ, Darren ‘My Main Man’ Everson reported that the Vegas wise guys have pounced on the early release lines on two college football teams—Georgia, who they feel is underrated in the early lines—and your Wolverines for a different reason: Conversely, Michigan looks overrated to the experts, who are skeptical of teams that have a new coach. Of the five Michigan games on the list of available matchups, four have moved by at least three points because of action against the Wolverines—most notably the Notre Dame game. Once a two-point favorite, Michigan is now a four-point underdog. I just thought it was interesting, not a big deal. And there are many reasons not to give a crap about this (and FWIW, the underdog in the U-M-Notre Dame game has a ridiculously good record in the past couple decades). The bettors are reacting to the initial lines set by the book, so they are not necessarily saying Michigan is going to suck. Even if they did, as we sit here before U-M has even had a fall practice, I’m guessing most fans wouldn’t care. Check out the whole story here.
