The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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AUGUST 2023 ❱ THE WOLVERINE 25 year earlier, captured most of the early headlines. "It was really a strange beginning to the year," Karsch noted. "I don't remember something like this happening before. It felt like Jim Harbaugh really wanted to make it a competition as long as he could. "The schedule provided the luxury of almost playing NFL-style exhibition games. That's how Har- baugh treated it. He got his guy. I'd never heard the term meritocracy before he used it. Best man gets the job." All McCarthy did as best man involved throwing for 2,719 yards and 22 touch- downs, while adding 306 yards and 5 TDs on the ground. There will be no tryouts in the early games of 2023. "I suspect it will be J.J. McCarthy this year," Karsch quipped. "Remember, I called it." Others called Michigan's nonconfer- ence schedule dangerous, in the sense that thrashing Colorado State, Hawai'i and Connecticut by a combined score of 166- 17 couldn't possibly get the Wolverines ready for their opening road trip to Iowa. After the Wolverines dispensed with the Hawkeyes 27-14 in an increasingly resigned Kinnick Stadium, most of the schedule hand-wringing went away. "I'd been to a bunch of games there and had never seen Michigan win," Karsch recalled. "They won, and they won em- phatically. The J.J. skill set was on display, escaping the pocket, a touchdown pass to Donovan Edwards in the back of the end zone. The Michigan run game asserted itself. "That was the first game where it felt like the pass rush is going to be OK, post-[David] Ojabo and Hutch [Aiden Hutchinson]. Mike Morris got home, and they applied a lot of pressure. "At the time, we suspected Iowa's of- fense wasn't very good, and that was con- firmed later. But it was what they did to the Iowa defense. "I know people tend to dismiss home and road, but I've been to that stadium and seen a better Michigan team lose. Ohio State teams have lost there. "If you can win on the road in a tough environment against a not-horrible team, you take them any way you can get them." Momentum grew when the Wolverines blasted Penn State (41-17) and Michigan State (29-7) right out of The Big House. The Spartans fought back, but only after the clock had run out. "Those games come with hype, and those games come with special attention and intensity in the weeks leading up to them," Karsch pointed out. "And they re- sponded." The Wolverines also responded on an afternoon rife with adversity in Michigan Stadium. Losing tailback Blake Corum (1,463 yards, 18 touchdowns) to a knee injury, Michigan scored a lone touchdown in a 19-17 win over Illinois. Grad kicker Jake Moody supplied the game-winner with 9 seconds remaining, one of three fourth-quarter field goals he notched. "You can't go throughout a 12-game regular season without a clunker," Karsch insisted. "You can't. They survived the Illinois game. They found a way. That was not Michigan's best performance. "The red zone deficiencies showed themselves, and they had to rely too much on the kicking game. Their drive wasn't very good, and neither was their approach. But they found a way. "That was the game where any single play could have blown it up — a missed field goal, the fourth-down conversion on a play they'd never run before in a game with [walk-on tailback] Isaiah Gash. That was the trap door. They survived it." The following week, they thrived in Columbus. Then they thumped Purdue in the Big Ten title game, 43-22, with then- freshman cornerback Will Johnson picking off a pair of passes. No fewer than seven Wolverines — Corum, vet- eran offensive linemen Zak Zinter and Trevor Keegan, grad transfer center Olu Oluwatimi, Morris, senior defensive tackle Maxi Smith, and Moody — earned first-team All-Big Ten status from conference coaches. The team carried high hopes into the College Football Playoff semifinal, but fell in a wild shootout with TCU, 51-45. "That game was filled with catastrophic mistakes," Karsch said. "Michigan only made a handful of catastrophic mis- takes all season long. There was a pick six against Penn State, but there were just so few bad mistakes for 13 games. And then there were multiple catastrophic mistakes in one game. How does that happen?" That remains for the 2023 squad to overcome. The Wolverines certainly don't lack motivated returners, following a sea- son shouting Michigan's strength for the foreseeable future. ❏ Rounding Out The Top Five Michigan trotted out a number of other effective squads on the male side of the ledger. Here, in order, are the next four in the voting among the staff of The Wolverine. 1. (Tie) Hockey and gymnastics — Brandon Naurato's hockey crew finished 26-12-3, going 12-10-2 in the Big Ten, good for second place. The Wolverines ramped it up in the postseason, winning the Big Ten Tourna- ment and making it to the NCAA semifinals. They featured a Hobey Baker Award winner in freshman Adam Fantilli, and only a 5-2 loss to eventual champion Quinnipiac in the Frozen Four kept them from the title game. Yuan Xiao's men's gymnastics squad finished second in the nation, led by freshman Fred Richard's three individual national titles in the NCAA finals. The Wolverines posted a season-best 419.889 score, finishing behind only national champion Stanford. The Wolverines also won the Big Ten championship, going 19-12 overall, 7-1 in the conference. 3. Lacrosse — Kevin Conry's squad went 10-7 overall, going 2-3 in the Big Ten regular season. But it used a late-season run in the Big Ten Tournament with wins against Ohio State (14-10), No. 4 Penn State (17-15) in the semifinals and No. 7 Maryland (14-5) to claim the conference championship. U-M then advanced to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in program history and pulled off a thrilling 15-14 overtime win on the road at No. 6 Cornell before bowing out 15-8 in the quarterfinals to No. 1 Duke. 4. Tennis — Adam Steinberg's Wolverines went 27-5, recording the second-most wins in Michigan his- tory. They finished No. 6 in the nation, second in the Big Ten and made it to the NCAA Elite 8 for the second consecutive year. — John Borton ❱ Doug Karsch, voice of the Wolverines for the Michigan Radio Network "The overriding feeling that will stick with me is the fourth quarter of the Ohio State game. It was a very definitive stamp and an exclamation point on the changing of the guard. It was the return to competi- tive balance in the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry." 2022-23 YEAR IN REVIEW