This week’s Mood: 62 (down 18 from the preseason. This is easily the largest drop following a win since I’ve been tracking this, not even close).
Michigan has certainly been the victim of the Hail Mary before, and we’ve won games in the final moments on some very long passes — Mercury Hayes, Touchdown Manningham, Wangler-to-Carter come to mind— but I can’t remember anything quite like that.
Despite the ending — and as that 62 Mood suggests — this game was basically a disaster. There are instances of getting nipped, or nearly nipped, by smaller opponents. One that comes to mind during this time frame is <gulp> the 1909 Notre Dame game.
As John Kryk broke down beautifully in this course and in Natural Enemies, Michigan had literally taught Notre Dame students how to play football back in 1887, and for years the would-be Fighting Irish occupied sub-Little Brother status. Michigan had never lost to them, and Notre Dame was generally treated as something closer to a warm-up game ahead of bigger opponents.
But then Yost’s former Michigan player Frank “Shorty” Longman took over as head coach at Notre Dame. (And yes, he was a tall dude named Longman who was nicknamed Shorty — an early precursor to Fatboy Slim and Biggie Smalls.) In 1909, Longman brought Notre Dame to Ann Arbor and stunned Michigan, 11-3.
Yost — who is very much one of the stars of our course — could be cocky, arrogant, and not especially fond of being one-upped. After the loss, he tried to brush it off by suggesting the game had merely been “practice” for Michigan. Longman had a response.
He actually lived in Ann Arbor at the time, and he outfitted his dog, Mike, with a little jacket displaying 11-3, the final score of Notre Dame’s win, and paraded him around town to taunt the locals.
The good news? Michigan recovered. The Wolverines scored huge wins over Penn and Minnesota and finished the season laying claim to the title “Champions of the West” — yes, despite Michigan being on hiatus from the Western Conference/Big Ten at the time. Naturally, Notre Dame claimed the same distinction thanks to the head-to-head. 1909 was the spark for what was to come: one of the strangest, most bitter relationships in college football between two schools that, geographically and historically, seemed like they should have been natural annual opponents.
Instead, the feud simmered, often off the field. The 1910 game was cancelled just before the game over a different off-field dispute, and in the 1920s it even spilled over into, of all places, a track meet. We didn’t meet again until the 1940s. We break all this down, and a ton more, in our new online course ‘The History of Michigan Football Vol I: 1879-1927‘ !
