Route 66

Blake put the team on his back, and the rest is history. (Patrick Barron)

Well, if you ever plan to motor west

Jack, take my way that's the highway that's the best

Get your kicks on Route 66

--"Route 66" as covered by the Rolling Stones on their 1964 album The Rolling Stones

In late June of this year, my family departed on a road trip covering 28 days, 7600+ miles, 19 states, and ten National Parks. When discussing some of the ideas on social media, noted Michigan game photographer and National Parks enthusiast Patrick Barron gave me a strong note not to sleep on Canyonlands after leaving Arches; it was majestic and beautiful and worth my time. So even though we had to get from Green River, Utah, to Zion the next morning (which was poor timing on our part since it put us in Zion on the most popular day of the year, but that's not the story), we slipped down to Canyonlands and explored a bit of one of the Mighty Five. At the end of the main road in the Island in the Sky section, we discovered the Green River Overlook, a vista 1,000 feet above the canyons carved by the Green and the Colorado rivers, explored by John Wesley Powell and his team in 1869.

Green River Overlook, Island in the Sky section of Canyonlands NP, July 1, 2023.

A perfect combination of timing, weather, and nature's glory combined to get the picture you see above. My wife and son have expressed confusion about why Canyonlands rated so highly of the ten parks we visited, but this moment spoke to me. I thought back to how Ralph Waldo Emerson believed that if man communed with nature, it could lead to a moment where you would achieve a tremendous spiritual understanding. I had never had that moment before standing there looking out at these canyons carved over the ages by the rivers below. It was one of the most singular experiences in my life, and it made me realize that there are endless possibilities; we just have to be willing to seek them out.

Well, it winds from Chicago to LA

More than 2000 miles all the way

Get your kicks on Route 66

The Rose Bowl Stadium facade, Pasadena, California, July 3, 2023.

Two days later, we departed St. George, Utah, very early, drove through the Mojave and Colorado Deserts and Joshua Tree National Park, and ended up in Pasadena, where we would stay on the first night of our week in the LA area. We pulled into the massive parking lot of the stadium, and despite being nearly 100 degrees in southern California that day, I began to explore this secular holy place in the religion of Michigan football. In Slate yesterday, Split Zone Duo's Alex Kirshner made the following case:

The extent of football fans’ care about the Rose Bowl as an institution cleaves along geographic lines, with plenty of Southerners not yearning much for a game or stadium whose history is wrapped up in the Big Ten and Pac-12. But Michigan has as much of that history as anyone. The Wolverines won the first Rose Bowl in 1902, before the current stadium even stood, and no fan base sees its team as a guardian of sacred college football tradition quite like Michiganders do. The Rose Bowl is Michigan-core.

One of the paradoxes of the Rose Bowl is that Michigan fans do generally hold it in their hearts as the pinnacle of the college football season, even if Michigan was 4-12 in their 16 appearances here since man first landed on the moon. Why are we drawn to this place that knows vastly more heartache and disappointment for Michigan teams than glory? Because this place is special, and that is all it needs to be. As I walked around the stadium's perimeter that July afternoon, catching what glimpses I could while it was being prepped for an LA MLS Derby the next day, I found myself forced onto the neighboring golf course and having to slip through a couple of locked gates to get back to my car. But I had walked the perimeter of the shrine of the Arroyo Seco, knowing that if the Michigan team that was to kick off in two months was worthy, they themselves would be in this place for the first time in what seemed like an eternity.

On the first day of this decade, the day that also marked the most recent meeting between Michigan and Alabama, Spencer Hall laid out the case for loving the Rose Bowl that has stuck with me henceforth:

On January 1, color TV images of college football games beamed back to Midwesterners and Northeasterners drinking bad coffee in their freezing living rooms. Someone watching the immortal, glorious sunset against the San Gabriels had to look and think: Why am I here, and not there?  The Rose Bowl wasn't just the place teams went when they were very, very good. It was a little piece of a whole life anyone could have simply by having the will to go. 

The Rose Bowl Stadium facade, Pasadena, California, January 1, 2024.

I did not expect to be here. That is not a stand-in for the concept of Michigan not being at the Rose Bowl; while the path to immortality in any college football season is fraught with the peril of a thousand little breaks that can go wrong, I knew Michigan had an excellent chance to be in Pasadena as the world celebrated the beginning of the New Year. No, I genuinely meant me. I never expected to be at the Rose Bowl. I wouldn't have deigned to ask, especially after the epic nature of our summer sojourn west. But when my wife and her brother coordinated that, yes, we were buying the Alumni Association tour package, and staying at the team hotel, here I was, just a shade under six months later, standing at The Grandaddy of them All. We had done all of the things that go with this tour: we had finished second and third place in the Rose Bowl trivia contest at the welcome party, we had attended the Pep Rally where the MMB sounded great, and someone needed to fact-check President Ono's pep related messaging (which he then, to his credit, at least made the same mistake about Tom Brady vs. Alabama in a bowl game the next day at the tailgate.), we talked to players in the lobby (shouts out to the always awesome Leon Franklin, Kenneth Grant, and Trente Jones.)  We were about to head into the biggest football game in modern Michigan football history, either a program redefining win or the end of a great era that never quite got to the mountaintop. All Michigan had to do was defeat the Great and Powerful Saban and his not-quite-fully operational battle station...with a month to prepare.

Well, do get hip to this kindly tip
And go take that California trip
Get your kicks on Route 66

When I mentioned to people that we were doing the trip, I heard refrain repeatedly: "It's one of the few things in life that lives up to the hype." Those people were absolutely correct. Any expectations I had built up in my mind were being met. The grass so green, the sky so clear and blue, the breeze feeling like a late September game in Ann Arbor, not the first day of January. I stood in my seat in the Michigan end zone, a mere forty rows up as opposed to my usual seventy in The Big House, and I soaked everything in, the Alabama band and the MMB in their pregame, followed by the MMB nailing the anthem as the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber flew directly overhead. The game was about to kick off, and I was ready. I had a feeling akin to that moment at Canyonlands, but this time, it was the beauty of nature combined with the curated hands of people to make a moment. There were endless possibilities, but only one outcome to be determined.

I don't really have any pictures from the Rose Bowl Game. I have the moment before kickoff and nothing else after that until after the last snap. I was genuinely trying to live (and not die) in the moment. When JJ's first pass looked like an interception, I laughed at how the football gods had decided to tell us straight away that pain, our longtime companion in Pasadena, had also bought the tour package. But then it was overturned on replay. By the end of the first half, even though Michigan led, I had no fewer than half a dozen "you just cannot make this mistake in the post-season and expect to win" ledes written for whatever this column would become. But I was never angry, not even when Alabama took the lead, not even when Alabama extended their lead. But, as Michigan got the ball back with 4:41 left and ESPN's win probability peaking for Alabama at 88.8%, all I could hear in my head was Leonard Nimoy's voice near the end of Star Trek VI, "I've been dead before." I did not know it was going to work; I did not know Michigan would win. I had to believe that it could work. So Blake and JJ went to work themselves, determined to write their own legend, joined by an offensive line holding fast and Roman Wilson atoning for a block in the back with one of the most improbable, spectacular catches I've ever witnessed in person, followed by his touchdown. Turner's extra point tied the game, and the concern was, "Did Michigan give Bama too much time?" Well, maybe, but Michigan's defense was not going to let things end poorly and forced an Alabama punt, leading to the utterly terrifying sequence on the opposite end of the field from where I was sitting where Jake Thaw's misadventure with a punt nearly gave Michigan a game-ending fate forever worse than "trouble with the snap." But Providence did not choose cruelty today, and Michigan moved the game to overtime. I chuckled to myself. I was trying to figure out the symbolic meaning of my hotel room number 1348. Game 1348 was the 2020 game against Rutgers or Michigan's most recent overtime game. That's what it meant.

If you were watching at home, you saw Mike Sainristil come out alone for the coin toss for overtime and perhaps thought it was odd until Blake ran in from off-screen. What you did not see at home is that Blake had run all the way down to the Michigan end zone, and with every ounce of energy he could muster, he exhorted the Michigan crowd to get up and get loud, which it did. Alabama won the toss again, but this was perhaps a blessing in disguise, forcing a hot Michigan offense back out on the field and forcing Alabama to try and score on an end zone defended not just by 11 players in maize and blue but by a chorus of fans desperate for not just a victory, but this victory. Corum took care of his part with a solid run on first down and a showstopper on second down that looked like 2022 Blake Corum. Now, it would be on the defense to try and end this. After getting a stop on first and goal, a TFL on second down, and Josh Wallace planting his cleats in the verdant grass of the Rose Bowl turf to stop Jermaine Burton from getting beyond the three-yard line, we faced a fourth and goal from the three, essentially a two-point conversion that would either keep Alabama alive or end the game. Burton cramped, leading to a delay, then Michigan called a time out, then Alabama called a time out, but the play was finally here. Like so many in the game, the Crimson Tide snap was low, Jalen Milroe had to take a half step back to retrieve it, Michigan's defensive line collapsed the center of the Alabama line, and Milroe was stopped after just one yard. Michigan had won the football game.

The Michigan crowd exploded into a roar, a cathartic release that comes from a combination of years of heartbreak and rising expectations on the impossibility that, for the first time in more than a quarter-century, Michigan would leave Pasadena in sheer joy. There was hugging, so much hugging, hugging family, hugging strangers, cheering, crying, singing The Victors, and just knowing that just happened.  

For the first time in 144-team history, Michigan football will have a singular opportunity to stake a claim to an undisputed national championship. It will need to defeat a Washington team that can move the ball and score as well as anyone in the country. But that matchup in Houston is still to come. For now, let us celebrate the moment when the past, present, and future of Michigan football finally came together in one of the most hallowed places in the program's heritage. Michigan won the Rose Bowl. 

Tales from the Spreadsheet

• Win 1,003
• 27-20 is NOT a Scorigami (4th time, most recently 10/14/2017 in Bloomington, defeating Indiana in Overtime)
• 96,371 was the attendance (the 15th largest crowd of Michigan's 21 Rose Bowl Game appearances.)
  
  
• Michigan moves to 3-3-0 all-time against the University of Alabama.
• Michigan snaps a two-game losing streak to the Crimson Tide.
• Michigan moves to 16-20 all-time on January 1. This game was Michigan's first New Year's Day win over a school that wasn't Florida since the 2001 Citrus Bowl win over Auburn.
  
  
• Michigan moves to 44-7 when scoring exactly 27 points (fun fact: four of Michigan's 14 overtime wins have been with a score of 27 points. And yes, one of the losses, you know which one.)
• Michigan moves to 24-20-1 all-time when allowing 20 points to the opposition.
• Michigan has won 52 games all-time by precisely 7 points, most recently, the 2023 Maryland game, bka Win 1000.
• Michigan moves to 14-3 in overtime games, with this being their second overtime win over Alabama, the first being the 2000 Orange Bowl (also Michigan's first-ever OT game), 35-34, which you may remember, hinged on a missed extra point by the Crimson Tide in OT.