Disagree on that specific criteria with no other context. You could be the second best team in the history of football (and thus undeniably “great”), but if the best team in the history of football is in your conference, you might not win that conference.
Not saying we are the second best team in the history of football, but Urban Meyer’s record is the best in the history of their (highly successful, win at all costs) program.
Other teams beat them. Including Purdue.
OK…and?
That doesn’t contradict anything I wrote…
5 conference losses in seven years - Purdue, Iowa, MSU twice, and PSU.
And some have argued Meyer put so much emphasis on the Michigan game that maybe it detracted from their focus a bit in other games. Either way, not only is he a better coach than anyone they have had before, but the “run up” to Harbaugh versus Meyer was a 2-12 record on our part and many games where we were not particularly competitive.
Those problems did not exist in the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, it was OSU that had to make a coaching change because Cooper was 2-9-1 against Michigan.
And one final, overlooked factor is the quality of QB play. When we had the upper hand, we had several NFL talents like Grbac, Collins, Griese, Brady, Henson, and Navarre. Once Troy Smith hit Columbus, you had him, Pryor, Braxton Miller, Barrett, Jones, Haskins and now Fields. They significantly upgraded at QB while we had guys like Threet, Forcier, Denard (love him, but fairly one dimensional), Gardner, Rudock, Speight, etc. Some of that is clearly on JH, but you would always like to have a good upperclassman with NFL type talent, and clearly Hoke didn’t leave him anyone like that.
Our issue hasn’t even directly been QB quality but QB health. Starting with Henne, we’ve had some crazy bad luck getting experienced QBs to the end of The Game healthy.
Granted, when we knocked Barrett out of the game and Haskins replaced him in 2017, they didn’t skip a beat (you might even say that helped them) so that’s not all excuses, but the fact remains we’ve been snakebit in this area for over a decade.
Okay, but they broke Gardner in little pieces and then tried to play the pieces. Most painful one-player story in my lifetime with Michigan football. Maybe that’s why I’m calmer now.
Are we… looking at the same chart?
The point is they weren’t unbeatable and we weren’t the second best B1G team during Urban’s tenure. Other teams won the conference while he was their coach. Wisconsin, MSU (2x), and PSU.
Harbaugh has been fine like the chart says, but we are not back to being great.
That makes more sense to me. I would respond by saying that Harbaugh’s tenure is the more relevant timeframe. In that time,
We beat MSU in the year they won the conference and went to the playoff but for the punt fluke.
We beat Penn State 49-10 in the year they won the conference.
We battled Ohio State down to a coin flip call in Columbus in 2016.
I take your point, and obviously results matter, but the quality of our teams is of the level of B1G conference champs in Harbaugh’s tenure.
I think the teams have been very good, but we need to punch our ticket to Indy before I say great. Just my perspective.
5 losses in 7 years is really close to unbeatable. Far better than anything UM has done since the early 1970s.
Give me a break. How old are you? I ask because I’ve closely watched all those teams you keep referencing. And all were very good. Aside from 1997, the closest to elite we came was 1999 and 2006. Both very good teams, but probably neither as good as Urban’s best OSU teams.
Not sure if it’s my posts you’re trying to make a straw man out of, but just to clarify, I’m referring to their S&P+, which indicates this is the highest their 10 year average has been in their history. In other words, this is the best they have been over an era, so any measuring of our program historically against theirs needs to take into account that their recent run is better than any other they’ve had. No more, no less.
The winning percentages don’t lie.
Urban at OSU: .902.
Lloyd Carr: .753
Gary Moeller: .758
Bo: Went 50-4 from 1970-1974. Went 144-44 the rest of the time (.765).
We were always a very good program, with one national title and a few seasons (1985, 1992, 1999, 2006) where we were otherwise among the top teams in football. Of course, there was no playoff back then, and we got hammered in some of our higher profile matchups against elite teams (FSU and Washington in 1991, USC in 2006).
The biggest flaw with your analysis is that leading into the Meyer/Harbaugh matchups, OSU was at its historical best while we were at our historical worst. I mean, I don’t care who Auburn hires, they’re not going to be Alabama’s equal in four years. Ditto South Carolina - they’re not matching Clemson in four years no matter who they hire.
There’s no question Michigan was OSU’s equal from 1990-2004, the problem is from 2004-2014, we fell way behind. Kids who are juniors in high school now were born in 2004 - they don’t care about what happened before they were born.
I love how I’m “revising” the history I’ve personally witnessed and you probably haven’t. The winning percentages don’t lie. Urban Meyer was better than any OSU coach since Woody and he had a huge head start on Jim Harbaugh, fueled by the decline of our program under Lloyd and the crash of it under Rich Rod and Hoke.
Really, that’s all we’re debating here, I think. We’re 2-2 against Wisconsin, 3-1 against PSU, and 2-2 against MSU (should be 3-1) under Harbaugh. And all of those teams have been very good during his tenure, save a bad 2016 by MSU. It’s been OSU standing in the way.
And, as I often do, I’ll point out Tom Osborne couldn’t beat Oklahoma for years, and Bobby Bowden couldn’t beat Miami for years, but both schools stayed patient and were smart for doing it.
You know, people like to choose the different vacuums in which they lodge their arguments. But for me the overarching context is universities and university life. Michigan has consistently found its way among the top 15 universities in the world according to the London Times poll–perhaps the most highly regarded of them all- and is currently among the top 25 nationally among all colleges in the US News poll, number 3 among public universities.
Michigan’s superior status limits the number of kids who can or will come to Ann Arbor, there is zero doubt. I’m quite happy about that.
Instead of grousing that we don’t beat some creepy and corrupt clowns at a bad school in Ohio, why not be proud of how well we do despite the limitations? Almost every one of those kids who played for John Beilein over the last 12 years was someone to be proud of.
Choosing to be bitter and grind your teeth endlessly when your team loses. . . absolutely some people’s option. But not good for your dental health, your gut biome, or your sanity. Maybe it’s because when Michigan lost when I was a kid my father and grandfather shook their heads and got on with their rich lives. But I have to say that what we saw the last two weeks is not healthy or a credit to the university. There’s got to be more to life than whining, or winning, especially when–as LA Woverine has more than aptly made the case–Harbaugh has us in a far better place than the two coaches who proceeded him.
Okay, Some Guy having a hair day has another opinion! Whee!
Honestly, I don’t think we inhabit that top tier without going all bagdude. I’m cool with that. That’s not a question of Jimmy Harbaugh’s essential magical voodoo as Coach-and-Savior. People become a little cultish about coaches. This is a giant institution with a lot of tentacles that are not simply shaped around football or one bogus Baptist Preacher-Coach-God, as at UA or Clemson. Thank freaking Jehovah.
So THAT’s what John Lennon meant by “Bagism.”