Michigan football countdown to kickoff: 92 days until 2022 season

There’s much anticipation heading into the Michigan Wolverines football season, and TheWolverine.com is counting down the days until the Sept. 3 opener against Colorado State. We’ll discuss the current Michigan events, upcoming season and/or take a look at a significant number that correlates with how many days remain until kickoff, whether it be a player’s jersey number, a year, a date, a score, etc.

Slowly but surely we are inching closer to the 2022 season, which is a milestone year for Michigan. Just not in the way you may think.

This season will mark 30 years since Michigan last tied in a football game. The Wolverines went 9-0-3 during the 1992 season, which still resulted in a Big Ten Championship for the program in Gary Moeller’s third year.

Michigan opened the year at Notre Dame on Sept. 12 and walked out with a bitter 17-17 decision to start off the campaign. From there, it would win eight-consecutive games (Oklahoma State, Houston, Iowa, Michigan State, at Indiana, Minnesota, at Purdue, at Northwestern) heading into the final two dates of the regular season.

The Wolverines would then host Illinois on Nov. 14 as the third-ranked team in the land. Sitting at 5-4, it seemed the Illini would be a reasonable hurdle to cross the week before Ohio State.

It did not play out that way, either.

Michigan and Illinois duked it out to a 22-22 tie, leaving a sour taste in their mouth. The bitterness would extend into next week’s edition of The Game in Columbus, a 13-13 decision. The Wolverines had the conference title locked up anyways, but it was a less than ideal way to end the regular season.

The season was capped off by a 38-31 win over Washington on Jan. 1, 1993. It ended a nearly two-month wait between victories. At least for Michigan, there were not any losses thrown in there, either.

U-M’s three ties were their 34th, 35th and 36th in program history.

When did ties stop taking place for Michigan, college football?

So what happened to ties, anyways? The last one was recorded in 1995, which was a 3-3 showdown between 4-5-2 Wisconsin and 5-5-1 Illinois. It is fitting that the final tie game was a Big Ten slugfest.

On3’s Ivan Maisel, writing for ESPN at the time, discussed what happened in a piece in 2010:

College football euthanized the tie in the 1995 postseason, the inaugural year of the Bowl Alliance. The championship game resembled the panda exhibit at the National Zoo: When No. 1 and No. 2 got together, no one wanted to face the possibility that they might not produce the champion offspring that prompted the date in the first place.

Once the NCAA committee in charge of bowls made that decision, the NCAA Football Rules Committee followed suit for the 1996 regular season. The tie disappeared as if autumn Saturdays had turned into Casual Fridays.

The tie is gone, and no one is advocating for its return. But it shouldn’t be dismissed as college football’s version of polio, a pox eradicated by crusading officials who saved the game. Ties brought a different kind of strategy to the field. Ties brought controversy. They may have ended games, but they started debates that endure to this day.

NCAA’s new overtime rules

We do not have to go through the practice of settling for no-decisions anymore. Overtimes have been in place for nearly 40 years now. The NCAA updated its overtime rules in 2021.

• In 2021, the NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel approved a change to overtime rules. Teams will be required to run a 2-point conversion play after a touchdown when a game reaches a second overtime period. Previously, a 2-point attempt was required after the third overtime period.
• If the game reaches a third overtime, teams will run alternating 2-point plays, instead of starting another drive at the opponent’s 25-yard line. This is a change from the previous rule, which started to use 2-point plays in the fifth overtime period.