The thing you need to keep in mind about college football right now is that everything is about winning. No matter what it takes, no matter how much of yourself you have to give up, no matter how far from your original path you have strayed — if you win, all those sacrifices paid off. Think about how far this sport has traveled. When today’s college football fan first began following the sport, the idea of a single “champion” was not only not the singular focus, the entire notion of it was seen as sort of besides the point. They used to call teams the “mythical national champions,” as if trying to determine a true winner was like capturing a minotaur, or basilisk. And you know what? It was fine. The world kept turning. People still loved college football. They loved it a lot.
What the College Football Playoff — in accordance with Justice Kavanaugh’s infamous 2021 Supreme Court concurrence that essentially eliminated the NCAA as any sort of arbiter or overarching authority — has done is turn a once-charming regional pleasure into a wild, lawless, undignified, and (yeah) deeply entertaining bloodsport in which august, revered institutions of higher learning have gleefully turned themselves into ATM machines for television networks, dispatching with every principle they have espoused to their students since their founding in the name of Winning It All. This is a sport run by terrifyingly intense middle-aged men in visors in league with billionaire robber barons, who have decided their lives lose palpable, tangible meaning if their alma mater does not beat your alma mater to win a championship that, again, did not actually exist 15 years ago. It’s lunacy ± destructive, amoral, end-stage-capitalism behavior that flies in the face of everything higher education has ever purported to stand for.
And then you watch Michigan beat Ohio State, and you totally understand why they do it. It’s still isn’t worth it. But in the moment, it sure feels like it is.
Michigan’s thrilling, electrifying 30-24 victory over their hated — “hated” is maybe too weak a word — rivals from Ohio State on Saturday afternoon secured Michigan’s spot in the Big Ten Championship Game next weekend, a game it will surely win over Iowa and thus send it to the four-team College Football Playoff. What Michigan has also now done is remind its fans, and all fans, really, that in the end, if you win, nobody will care how you did it, only that you did.
Michigan has become the biggest story in college sports this year not because of the quality of their team, even though that team has been terrific from the very start of the season, and is clearly the top challenger to stop Georgia’s attempt to become the first college football team to win three consecutive titles since Minnesota in 1936. Everyone’s obsessed with Michigan because of their quixotic, brilliant, and increasingly deranged coach Jim Harbaugh and an unofficial assistant/booster named Connor Stalions, who not only seems to have spearheaded a sign-stealing scheme that has plunged the school into scandal but also, amazingly, sometimes appeared in disguise on opposing sidelines. This strange affair led to Harbaugh’s suspension for the final three games of Michigan’s season (he had previously been suspended for the first three games of the season, for an entirely unrelated scandal that still isn’t entirely resolved). It has also caused fans of every other team in college football, fans who have long bristled at Michigan’s infamously holier-than-though attitude, to discount all of Michigan’s accomplishments and brand them as the cheatiest cheaters who ever cheated. Meanwhile, Harbaugh, off-screen but surely chewing on his television throughout the three games he has been on the sidelines, keeps telling people it’s Michigan versus the World, that Michigan is “America’s Team,” and essentially accepting his status as the sport’s prime villain.
Now, you can (like me) agree with my colleague Jonathan Chait and think that this scandal is absurd and that Harbaugh’s suspension was a result more of spite than of logic — while still acknowledging that the way Harbaugh and Stallions and millions of Michigan fans have been acting is not exactly normal, cool behavior. But it doesn’t really matter what any of us think because, well, Michigan just won. The entire sport has oriented itself around the ethos of winning being the only metric that makes any difference — to the point that even The Michigan Men are carrying themselves like they went to Auburn or something — that pretending that this behavior is somehow lamentable, or punishable, or even in any way unusual feels like self-deception. Whatever you have to do to get there, all that matters in college football is that at the end of the year, the number next to your school’s name is higher than the number next to the other school’s name. Michigan just did that against despised Ohio State. They’re about to get a chance to do it in the College Football Championship, potentially winning their first (mythical or otherwise) title since 1997.
Maybe you think Michigan is undeserving, or maybe you just dislike Michigan. Maybe you think they’ve sold part of their soul to get here, or maybe you think this whole thing is just amusing. In the end, it’s all pretty irrelevant. Did you see those Michigan fans losing their minds after beating Ohio State? Do you think they care what you think about them at all? They got what they wanted. Your team would do the same thing if it could. And when your team won, you’d celebrate regardless of how it happened, regardless of what anyone thinks about it. It will have all been worth it. Do you think Michigan is being dishonest? They’re as honest as any other school playing the sport. Maybe more so. What did you think this was all about?
