Blake Corum explains why Michigan believes they can break through, win national championship

Blake Corum believes this could be the season the Michigan Wolverines end up on top when the College Football Playoff is over.

Michigan entered the dance the last two seasons and faltered, even when they were expected to win in 2022. However, Corum believes the Wolverines have taken the steps this season to ensure a different result in 2023.

“I think, from the beginning of the year, even the offseason, we just took a different mindset,” Corum stated. “We knew we’ve been to the College Football Playoff twice, but couldn’t finish. It came down to execution. It came down to taking care of the small things. When you play a big game like this, you must execute at the highest level. You must take care of those small things. You must protect the ball. Protect the quarterback. Make the right tackles. Be in the right fits.

“So I believe this team, with the leaders that we have, we’ll be ready with our preparation. I know the coaches will have us ready, and I know we’re ready to take that next step. This is our third time being here. So you would think we would’ve learned our lesson, and learned from our mistakes, and be ready to advance.”

As the No. 1 seed in the College Football Playoff, Michigan has accomplished their goal throughout the regular season. Will it be enough to capture a national title? We’ll have to wait and see what happens over the next month and change.

‘Stacked’ top of CFP rankings made for ‘probably the toughest’ choice in 10-year history

Michigan ended up on top, but this season’s College Football Playoff rankings was one of the hardest to keep track of over the last decade.

In a word, the final 2023 College Football Playoff rankings were historic. An undefeated Power Five conference champion was left out of the field, as was the team that was No. 1 in the penultimate rankings, marking a first in CFP history for both in the last year of the four-team format.

It seemed like everyone was asking the same question after Saturday’s conference championships: What would the CFP committee do? To executive director Bill Hancock, it was a year like no other.

In fact, Hancock said, it might’ve been the toughest decision the committee has had to make in the CFP’s 10-year history.

“Every year is so different,” Hancock said on a post-reveal teleconference. “Just looking at it from the big picture, we’ve never had a year with eight teams at the top as good as these are, and the five conference champions one through five. We’ve never had it come out that way. My feeling is, it probably was the toughest.

“I’m gonna sound like a coach and say I need to look at the video. I need to go back and look at the year-by-year narrative that we have. But I’ll just repeat, we have not had a year where we’ve had the top stacked so strongly as we had this year.”

On3’s Nick Schultz contributed to this article.