How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Wolverines 

“Sam, you know Michigan is one of the best teams in the country?” was sounded out slowly to me, out of a misplaced hope that my sudden lack of English comprehension was the reason I hadn’t answered the questions correctly.

“We’re good?” was my response followed by exasperated sighs and Darryl laughing at how I didn’t understand basic facts about the school I’d just agreed to attend.

Look, I’m an idiot—we all know this. But this was one of those times when you just feel it in your bones that you’re an idiot, and everyone around me also knows that I’m an idiot. My table in biotech class was a mixture of confusion and amusement as they began explaining the basics to me.

My table was actually an incredibly entertaining time. They were great people, always good-hearted and good lab mates: they just weren’t the most… academically focused in the 2nd half of senior year. But I mean who was? We had a good time with it and they copied my lab reports. In return, they kept me entertained during class. Plus Justin had been helping me out in Mandarin for 5 years before then, so I was just paying it back.

And yet they all looked at me in horror as they explained how Michigan is not only generally very good at sports but is also considered one of the eight bluebloods of football, schools that have been good across 2, 10, 50, about 100 years.

And I nodded sure and filed it away. Because I never really cared about the Super Bowl growing up, much less the normal sports season. Sure it was fun to hang out with people at games but I wasn’t watching football. Nor baseball, basketball, or hockey. 

If you then run the implications of this and are mad that I just didn’t care about my hometown team The Golden State Warriors from 2016 to 2022 in which they won it 3 times and got to the final twice… yeah that’s fair. 

But 6 months later I was dropped in Ann Arbor, told to figure it out and preferably not fail some classes and to call during winter break. At first, I had no interest in the spirit of it. Which put me instantly at odds with a lot of the in-state kids and midwesterners. 

To back up for some context: college rankings are dumb but school spirit is a thing. And Michigan borders on rabid. Take the vibe of Cal which makes fun of others for their academics, and combine it with Auburn Football and you have chaos.

We’re not the only school like this: Duke and UCLA with their basketball teams, UT Austin & Washington with their football. As much as it pains me Ohio St is such a good rival because they’re a good academic school and a good football school. But I can talk about Ohio St later.

This combination leads to a mixture of kids attending who have no interest in academics but because their parents went there and kids attending with absolutely no idea that they were good at sports (me). The thing is, Michigan remains a public school that services largely Michigan, with over half the students coming from the state. They grew up being on one side of the instate rivalry, Michigan vs. Michigan State. To the point where you can just say at any bar “Go Blue or Go Green” to divide the bar into two camps. When my mom landed in Detroit for my graduation the pilot and copilot argued this point over the air. And a large chunk of the out-of-state kids are from nearby states so often their parents will be alumni or have another conneciton.

And if you think I’m kidding about the generational defense of this school, one of my roommates had her parents meet at Michigan, her sister attended as well, and grew up watching every game. Which is great. Until you realize that she grew up in Chicago, which is in another stat

Fast forward to my first gameday weekend when I’m woken up by the entire university yelling about how it’s game day and to get hyped. And for better and for worse I decided to join my 110,000 closest friends in the football stadium. 

Now I wasn’t instantly sold after this game. Because unfortunately college football suffers from one crippling downside:

Watching football in person is BORING. 

Holy crap college football sucks in person. Largely this is because there are SO many commercials that you spend 50% of the time standing there. In the early games heatstroke. In the later ones, you freeze to death as you can’t move.

Michigan football games were cited by the NYT in an article discussing how much college games are “media timeouts” (commercials). ¹ link. And someone on Reddi does statistics on them each game². link

And so for a while, I just wasn’t that into it. Classes were busy, and my initial interest in the games fizzled out. 

With that said I quickly got sold on Michigan as an institution and that accompanying spirit. Catch me holding my tongue as other public schools claim to be the elite in the country. (Unless you’re Cal or UCLA: in which case well done we love our secure 3rd place go have fun fighting for #1 I’ll bring popcorn). You even become a defender of the winter, claiming it’s half the appeal. You own too many clothes that say “Michigan” on them and meet random alumni who yell “Go Blue”  in Jordan or Peru.

I even went halfway, which is becoming a huge tailgate fan. If you don’t know. Tailgating is a common practice in sports but a cultural stable for college games where you either go to an outside party or someone’s truck in a parking lot near the stadium and eat and drink before a game. For a 7 pm kickoff (start) time that’s totally reasonable. Maybe start drinking at 3. But not every game starts then. Truthfully, many college games start at noon. Now we assume that you’ll wanna drink for 3 hours, let’s say start walking to the stadium an hour early, need an hour to get ready… and oh my god you’re waking up at 7 am to pre-game.

Yes, you pregame a tailgate, which is more or less a pregame of a football game. It’s the fucking midwest. We have more bars than grocery stores on average, there’s only one way to survive the winter.

So at 7 am my last 2 years in college Audrey and I would brew coffee while opening white claws or old styles (beer of Chicago. I like it. Audrey’s parents shipped it to me out of amusement). Oh and for the later games, it’s like 40 degrees outside. If you’re lucky. Probably closer to 30. So you better get drinking fast if you wanna survive the tailgate and the game. And still, some of these tailgates were my favorite memories of college.

To take a slight pause here university ain’t perfect. I can write A LOT about the issues with it. There’s a lot to improve. But that’s not why I’m writing this. I’m writing this because still supporting your school and dumb sportsball even while you strive to improve things is worth it.

But let’s talk about actual football. Because so far I’ve said 2 things

1. Drinking with friends is fun even if it’s 7 am
2. Having an academic superiority complex is also fun

Neither of those are particularly novel mindset changes for high school Sam. So let’s talk about how I actually got into this good old American football and sports in general

1. Winning is really fun

There’s a simple phrase I like: “Success makes quick friends”. And when I began college I was not becoming a fan. My first two years we were meh bordering on BAD. Like we nearly fired our coach levels of bad. And our coach had been to a Superbowl. It’s not like he was unproven.³

And then 2021 starts, and we’re surprisingly good. We’re all pessimistic watching these first few games. Because a quick rule of football, and especially college football, is that better terms just look better. They put away business against worse teams and don’t even make it close.

And going into the final game of the 2021 regular season we were looking like the real deal. Paranoia was at the max as maybe the unthinkable became a real possibility. 

2. We Love a Good Rival

And that unthinkability was THE Ohio State University. Nothing makes for closer allies than a common enemy. And we had one. It’s called the state of Ohio. And their main university, THE Ohio State University.

(Long story, they tried to trademark the word “The” a rival back. It got overruled but has led to a lot of good jokes over the years).

My first introduction to this rivalry was when my AP Literature teacher in my senior year of high school marked me down a point in the gradebook at the end of the year. The only explanation give was “You know what you did.” Guess where she went to school? I even really liked Mrs. Black, she was a fantastic teacher and fighting for my favorite teacher of High School. But she was willing to lower my grade for daring to attend her rival school.

We refer to the annual rivalry game simply as “The Game”. Always the last game of the regular season. First met in 1897, the only ever year off was 2020 due to our entire team catching COVID, 126 meetings total. And in my favorite petty tradition, Ohio Fans are crossing out every “M” on campus before The Game.

To most folks who spends too much time watching people get paid too money to carry a ball forward, The Game is considered one of the greatest sports rivalry in American sports and absolutely one of the best of college⁴. (To be fair though college has the majority of the best rivalries in sports. Part of why I prefer it.)

Again. Did not know at all about this rivalry prior to starting Physics 140 (introductory classical physics) at Michigan. 

As for why we’re scared there are considered to be eight “Blue Blood” programs in college football. We’re one of them. Ohio St is another. And more annoyingly while the definition of the blue bloods is that they’re always elite once a generation Ohio is elite basically every year. They’re horrifying good.

My freshmen year I watched them beat the daylights out of us 56-27. And I wasn’t aware but that was the 9th consecutive beatdown they’d given us. Even in 2022 when we (spoilers) beat them again they are the 3rd best team in the country according to the rankings.

1. Back to Winning however

But long story short we win. We storm the field. 

We even made it to the playoffs (top 4 teams in the country). We don’t really talk about our 2021 playoff game because we ran instantly into what I once heard termed “Death Star Georgia”. They had the best team in the country and sent 9 players to the NFL draft after that season (which is a very high number).

But 2022 is a repeat of the same except even more of a kicking to every team in our way. In 2022 for The Game I was yelling at the TV with Audrey’s family during Thanksgiving. Even if I was a little less enthusiastic about it. At one point I made a meme about how invested the family was and showed Audrey’s mom. She laughed but told me not to show her husband if I didn’t want to get thrown out of the house/

Then the playoffs happen. My final game in college. We’re matched against TCU, which had been a great Cinderella story of the season. The thing about Cinderella seasons when you’re in the institutional program, is they’re in our way now.

What followed was the most painful football game I think I’ve ever watched. Whatever we could’ve screwed up we did. And my pain watching this game made me realize that I was truly and utterly on the football bandwagon. As I’m watching us flounder in horror.

So 2023. Our last year with this group of players and our last shot to do something besides get knocked out in the first round of the playoffs.

And oh do we. I was watching those games from a bar at 9 am in PHX (noon kickoff in EST). Some things hadn’t changed even if I missed the era of cheap drinks. And we take it all the damn way. 12-0 in the regular season and beating Iowa to go 13-0 and grab the Big10 championship.

The first playoff game was against Alabama. Never an easy matchup but we all had hopes. Held in the Rose Bowl, the oldest Bowl (a post-season college football game). The nickname is the “Granddaddy of them all” and located in Los Angeles. The first-ever meeting of it in 1906 was Michigan beating Stanford. And as a Michigan alumnus who grew up near Cal, that tickles my heart.

I watched it with alumni friends in the Bay Area as we won in overtime in the second-worst game I’d ever seen to that point. Luckily Alabama decided to play just as badly as us.

Then watched as we won the national championship vs Washington. (the real Rose Bowl as the final Pac-10 vs Big10 matchup). Until the Pac (probably) reforms. And so we went 15-0. A feat only held by 4 other teams. 

(If you are wondering which ones they’re Penn, Clemson, LSU, and Georgia)

So for three years we never lost a single game at home and won a national championship out of 135 teams at the 3-year to complete the story. It’d be hard for me not to be a fan by that point.

3. It’s a Meaningless but fun hill to die on

Look I care about a lot of serious topics. And I support caring about them. But it’s a mixture of exhausting and stressful. There are all sorts of studies that it’s genuinely unhealthy to always be worried about world events. Humans just weren’t designed to be able to read about every terrible thing happening in the world every single day.

And sometimes you want to have a group of people to support with friends without worrying about the socio-political implications. And sports is that. You can absolutely take it too far. There’s a great joke I saw on the internet somewhere about how “Watching an 18-year-old lose has ruined my weekend and I’m going to take my anger out on a waiter”. The day I actually am mean to someone because a college sports team plays badly is the day we call it good. They’re 18-22 years old. I can tell you what dumb stuff I was doing those years

But Cal vs Stanford? I mean growing up I liked to see Cal win it but I wasn’t watching the game. Now I’m tuning in every year to watch some truly atrocious football. There’s a cannon! And an axe trophy! We have some of the smartest drunkest posters you’ll ever see. And Cal fans entered the stadium at 1 am for a 7 pm game the next day.

I get an excuse to text friends I need to talk to more when games happen. Gives us an easy talking point and even stuff to make fun of each other about. Weirdly very similar to the perk of painting my nails. Either people don’t care or I get complimented and we now have something to talk about. Even an easy way to resonate with bartenders, similar to how whenever I see someone in a college shirt I resonate. And look 

4. It’s a mixture of petty and stupid

I even now like the NFL, albeit less. The talent is 1000% better. But the stupidity is half the fun. But I still enjoy it. And there’s a lot I still don’t know about it still. Catch me looking up what the shotgun and what a pistol formation is. 

Hockey? Do you mean legal bloodsports? Sign me up. The traditions are the best part. You’re bringing in newspapers to “read” them when the other team comes out and writing NSFW phrases on whiteboards you show to the other team’s fans.

Slight pause here. You can genuinely get into the X’s and O’s of football. Where you are learning the obscure rules and tactics. There’s a LOT. I would wager money the only sport more convoluted is Magic the Gathering. My sister could list off basically every wide receiver’s height in the NFL. But you don’t need to know all that to have fun with college games.

Even college chants border on stupid. Much of it is because of tradition. Why does Michigan’s fight song say “The Champions of the West?”. Ann Arbor is in the Eastern time zone after all. Bonus points if you know who the fight song was written about. The Arizona State vs University of Arizona rivalry game is called the territorial cup because Arizona wasn’t a state when they started playing each other.

I could go on all week about random traditions different fanbases have. And every university has at least a few. I’m not in a novel position because I went to Michigan. Here’s a few fun ones: Notre Dame often plays the Army and Navy (West Point and Annapolis respectively) due to scheduling. And due to Notre Dame’s powerhouse status, they often beat them. 

Slight tangent but I always get a grin out of remembering that the US Army, Navy, and Air Force field is a football team. And they don’t win very much every year. Yes, there’s actual reasons for this but at face value, it’s really funny. “Alright on one side we got Vanderbilt, the nerds of America, facing ah yes the literal US Army.” But due to Notre Dame often beating them, the general phrase we have is “Notre Dame just hates America.”

Across the country, Boise State heard their opponent’s quarterback say “I don’t know where Boise St is located”. So every single time Boise scored a touchdown the jumbotron screen played a video of Google Earth zooming in on the Boise St field (which is bright blue).

Every year before The Game we have a competitive blood drive. And I once walked by a line of Michigan students giving blood just to give a middle finger to Ohio and prove that we’re nicer people than them… in an aggressive fashion.

In Conclusion…

So 6 years after entering college I’m a diehard Michigan alumni and even watch some sports that don’t involve Michigan.

Why? Because I made a mistake in my first two years of college. And that’s thinking it’s a flaw to be invested in stupid shit like college football. Stupidity is fun. Screw having naturally formed hills to die on. I’m out here with an excavator forming them myself. 

You don’t have to be 1000% invested in where you went to college or sports. I’m not saying it makes you a happier or better person. I wouldn’t be one to talk about that either. I am saying that caring is awkward but unfortunately for us all it’s the only thing that matters worth a damn.

If your team is the underdog and you want an upset I’ll be honest you’ll probably not end up happy at the game. After all, it’s called an upset? But you might end up euphoric. And the chance of that is worth it. Sure, asking to try something new at work could be embarrassing but it could lead to something better. Cold-calling friends is terrifying if you haven’t talked to them in a while, but it puts me in a better mood every time I hop off one of those hour-long calls if they do pick up the line. And 4 years of my life as an originally unwilling fan helped show me that.

College football and school spirit to a larger degree is dumb, borders on absurd, and absolutely meaningless in the grand scheme of things. And that’s why I support drinking the Kool-aid on it.

Next up: A lot of loosely collected dumb stories involving nature. Nearly finished too. Just need to edit down.

References and Extra Notes

1. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/4883452/2023/09/21/college-football-tv-commercials-game-times/ ↩︎
2. https://www.reddit.com/r/CFB/comments/18wd5xz/postgame_thread_michigan_defeats_alabama_2720_ot/
   
   For those who don’t wish to scroll through the thread for the Michigan vs Alabama semifinal game the following commercial statistics
   
   Total commercials: 154
   
   Total commercial time: 1:01:18
   
   Total broadcast time: 4:01:00
   
   Now to be fair the game went into overtime so it is a little longer than a then the normal 60 minutes on the clock but when a 63 minute football takes 4 hours to play through it sucks to watch in-person. ↩︎
3. Jim Harbaugh, our coach, is to be frank a magical football gnome teams shake and then he poops out championship-caliber teams. He took the 49ers to a SuperBowl and us to the championship. ↩︎
4. ESPN.com – ENDOFCENTURY – ESPN.com’s 10 greatest rivalries (The Game was ranked #1 in all of American sports)
   
   The Game is generally ranked in the top 3 of college rivalries if you ever look up lists, with Alabama vs Auburn (The Iron Bowl), and UNC-Duke being the other two up there. But Navy vs Army, USC vs Notre Dame, and Texas vs Oklahoma (The Red River Shootout) are also always up there. The Game also tends to blow ratings out of the water. With the ’21, ’22, and ’23 matchup being the most-watched college game of the regular season, and in ’23 it was double the second most watched game.
   
   In case you don’t believe me here’s a bunch more sources.
   But also here’s other links just in case you don’t believe: https://www.saturdaydownsouth.com/sports/ranking-top-25-rivalries-college-sports-2023/ (#2 in all of college sports behind UNC-Duke)
   https://www.nfl.com/photos/top-10-college-football-rivalry-games-0ap2000000285589#28372207-3936-4475-8883-119258ae5cab (The Game was ranked #1 in all of college football)
   https://sports.yahoo.com/ranking-top-10-rivalries-college-182000704.html (The Game was #2 in all of college football behind Alabama vs Auburn) ↩︎