What they're saying about Michigan football's College Football Playoff loss to Georgia
Michigan football finished its 2021 season with a 12-2 record after a 34-11 loss to the Georgia Bulldogs in the Orange Bowl College Football Playoff semifinal.
Here is a sampling of what local and national voices are saying after the contest.
RELATED
• Grading Michigan football in all facets of a 34-11 loss to Georgia
• Wolverine TV podcast: Instant reactions to Michigan football’s loss to Georgia
Michigan football head coach Jim Harbaugh on the season
Yeah, it was a great season. To me it’s one of the best seasons in Michigan football history. We were trying to make it greater. We were trying to make it
greater tonight. But it was still a great season. This team won’t be together fully next year. It’s still a beginning for this team. This is about when our guys Josh Ross to my left here and Cade McNamara to my right, that’s when it began last year, and it’ll begin anew this year. Start of a new year. Proud of them, the way they kept fighting. I could say they were — there’s never any quit in these guys. It’s a very resilient – ton of resolve with this football team, and as I said, to me it feels like a start. Feels like a beginning.
Chris Balas: Grading Michigan football’s defense in Orange Bowl
Michigan Rushing Defense: D
Georgia’s offensive line controlled the Michigan front seven on the way to 190 yards, 5.4 per carry. The Bulldogs set the tone in the first quarter with six carries for 40 yards, added 38 in the second and moved the pile at will behind its big line.
Georgia bled clock for much of the second half, and there was little Michigan could do to stop it. The Bulldogs ran for 82 yards in the fourth quarter and controlled the clock.
Michigan managed only one tackle for loss all game for minus-one yard.
Passing Defense: F
“Game manager” Stetson Bennett completed his first nine passes for 101 yards in the first quarter and had 151 in the second quarter. It could have been worse if head coach Kirby Smart hadn’t called off the dogs.
Michigan’s defensive ends couldn’t get to the quarterback, nor could anyone else. Bennett finished with 310 yards and three touchdown passes, one coming when corner Vince Gray lost a ball in the lights (per Harbaugh), and he could have finished with 500 yards had they kept the foot on the gas. As it was, they had four completions of 35 or more yards, including match-ups on linebackers in which the speed was too much.
Running back James Cook exploited U-M with a 39-yard touchdown and a 53-yard gain out of the backfield.
John Borton, The Wolverine: No New Year’s party in Miami, but no shame in 2021
The first half hit the Wolverines like a shock wave. Georgia looked a step faster, bigger and more physical up front, overwhelming in every phase.
Michigan’s strengths — running the football and dominating defensively off the edges — never had a chance. The Bulldogs were coming in waves defensively. Their own running game ripped off big first down runs, negating the threat from junior defensive end Aidan Hutchinson and redshirt freshman linebacker David Ojabo.
Kirby Smart’s crew simply manhandled the Big Ten champions. The Bulldogs scored on every possession except the final one of the half, tossing a halfback pass for a score, burning the Wolverines on a 57-yard TD bomb, and keeping U-M off balance enough to make QB Stetson Bennett (21-for-31, 307 yards, three TDs) look like prime-time Tom Brady.
The Bulldogs stomped on U-M’s season-long achievements like a schoolyard bully smashing a home-made sack lunch.
It took them all of 4:11 to score, posting the first opening-quarter touchdown against the Wolverines since the season opener against Western Michigan. The Bulldogs required only 17:24 to surpass Michigan’s season defensive average, racing to a 17-0 lead.
Georgia running back James Cook burned the Wolverines on a 53-yard sideline bomb, the longest play of the season against U-M. Four Bulldogs plays from scrimmage later, wideout Jermaine Burton topped that mark on the 57-yarder.
Those looking for some first-half hope couldn’t find much. The Wolverines did become the first team from the state of Michigan to score in the modern-era playoffs, when Jake Moody booted a 36-yard field goal.
That felt like cold comfort, in the face of a 27-3 smack down in the opening 30 minutes.
In short, the Wolverines needed a miracle over the final 30, and 34th Street wasn’t anywhere in sight.
Tom Fornelli and Adam Silverstein, CBS Sports: Orange Bowl takeaways: Dawgs dominate to earn rematch with Alabama in title game
Recency bias is a monster. Just because we’re the most intelligent species on Earth doesn’t mean we have the capability of remembering anything that happened more than 20 minutes ago. Georgia’s defense was dominant all year but then struggled against Alabama, so suddenly it stunk and was overrated by anybody who ever paid it a compliment. We can’t even entertain the idea that it just had a bad day against a great team.
And people will feel the same way about Michigan after Friday night. It was an awful night for the Wolverines, but even if the season ends with a terrible taste in Michigan’s mouth, the 2021 campaign was one to build on for the future. The Wolverines dominated all year long — when they fell behind 7-0 to start the game, it was the largest deficit they’d faced all season — and were finally able to get the Ohio State monkey off their back, beating the Buckeyes for the first time since 2011. They won their first Big Ten title since 2004. They won 12 games in a season for the first time since 1997 when they won their last national title. Aidan Hutchinson was a Heisman finalist. It was an incredible season.
It just had a terrible ending, and that’s fine. Not every story can end with everybody getting what they want, but at least Michigan proved to the world it can get to the playoff. Before the year began, plenty of people — including some in Ann Arbor — were questioning if the program would ever get back to such a lofty status.
Mark Schlabach: Georgia cruises into College Football Playoff title game with rout of Michigan
With Georgia throwing myriad screen passes, the Bulldogs didn’t allow a sack and held All-American Aidan Hutchinson to four tackles and only one tackle for loss. All-Big Ten linebacker David Ojabo didn’t have a tackle. Conversely, McNamara was pressured on nine of his first 24 dropbacks and could never get comfortable in the pocket.
Any hopes of a Michigan comeback in the second half were over after the Wolverines turned the ball over on their first two possessions. Georgia’s Derion Kendrick intercepted McNamara’s pass in the end zone, and then Devonte Wyatt recovered Blake Corum’s fumble at the Georgia 47.
It was a disappointing end for the Wolverines, who won their first Big Ten title in 17 years to reach the CFP. They had won their previous five games, including a 42-27 rout of rival Ohio State and a 42-3 defeat of Iowa in the Big Ten championship game. Everything that had worked the past two months was no match for Georgia’s speed, however.
Nick Bromberg, Yahoo Sports: Michigan’s line struggles with Georgia’s front
Michigan’s offensive line was one of the best in college football and won the Joe Moore Award for the best line performance of the season. The UM line dominated Ohio State in the final game of the regular season and bowled over Iowa in the Big Ten title game. It was going to hold its own against Georgia’s marauding front, right?
Not exactly. Georgia’s defense pushed around Michigan up front, bullied McNamara and Michigan’s powerful running game was stifled.
McNamara has been at his best in 2021 when he’s been able to play off of Hassan Haskins and one of the best rushing offenses in the country. But without a run game to scare the Georgia defense, Michigan’s offense was incapable of coming back. The Wolverines had a chance to get back into the game at the start of the third quarter, but McNamara miscommunicated with his receiver and was picked off by Derion Kendrick in the end zone.
Pat Forde, SI.com: Stetson Bennett, Georgia Make Statements in Semifinal Drubbing of Michigan
The college football postseason remains highly flawed, but the playoff itself is a ruthless—if repetitive—meritocracy. If the nation wanted to halt an all-SEC final, it had two chances to stop it Friday. Both failed badly.
And of the two teams that lost, Cincinnati acquitted itself better than Michigan did. At least the Bearcats were in the game well into the second half, whereas the Wolverines were in disarray almost immediately. Cincinnati is the one the elitists argued didn’t belong, but it was the better of the two losers. This was a pretty dreadful showing by the Wolverines, along the lines of its worst performances under Harbaugh against Ohio State.
Georgia was much better than Michigan in every phase of the game. After the first two possessions there was no real window of hope for the Wolverines to get back into the game, no conceivable path to victory.
But Smart wasn’t interested in much of a celebration after smoking the Wolverines. He vetoed a Gatorade bath from his players, preferring to view this victory as a prelude and not a coronation.
“I want to get focused on Alabama,” Smart said. “They got a five-hour, six-hour head start. To be honest with you guys, I’m not interested in celebrating that. We’ll look back in that win and that’ll be great, but we’re focused on the task ahead. I’m not focused on Gatorade baths.”
Chris Vannini, The Athletic: Another year of semifinal blowouts illustrates why the College Football Playoff must expand
Ten days from now, the sport’s commissioners will meet in Indianapolis, the site of the national championship. They will again try to come to an agreement on expansion. It’ll be their seventh meeting on the topic since a 12-team proposal was put forth in June. What once seemed like a sure thing was nearly derailed by conference realignment.
All of the commissioners say they want expansion. They just can’t agree on all the details, whether it’s eight or 12 teams or how many teams are guaranteed a spot by winning their conference championships.
If they want to expand by the 2024 regular season, this meeting in January might have to be the time. Waiting until after the 2025 regular season would allow a clean slate and get the CFP out from various bowl contracts. Can the sport afford to go through four more years of this, though?
College football succeeds despite itself. It put its marquee semifinal games on New Year’s Eve instead of New Year’s Day, a day the sport used to own, because of antiquated bowl contracts.
Cincinnati fans still showed out in Arlington. They were much louder than Alabama fans. Michigan fans outnumbered Georgia fans in Miami. There are fan bases craving the chance to reach this stage. But the collection of talent is so tied up in a handful of teams at the top that we’ll continue to get the same schools in the four-team field most years.
Expansion won’t change who wins in the end. It’ll probably continue to produce lopsided semifinal results. But the College Football Playoff is supposed to be the climactic moment of the sport, and it’s just not. It’s time to adjust. It’s time to open the door and reimagine what the sport’s crowning moments should be.
Nick Baumgardner, The Athletic: On Michigan’s scar tissue, a year of strain and remembering what got you here
Michigan, quite frankly, had the type of year no one — except for itself — thought was possible. So while Harbaugh’s comments about making sure the full picture remains at the front of the program’s mind as it moves into winter conditioning are noted, Hawkins — a player who has seen damn near everything a guy can in six years at one school — made, perhaps, the greater point.
This is not the same program that it was a year ago.
That one, the one that limped into its offseason, did so without a single clue of how to compete on a championship level. None. Michigan entered this offseason starting underneath in the basement. It had to learn how to strain, learn who it could count on, learn how to grind, learn how to win — all while a sizable portion of the fan base spent January through August complaining about another year of Harbaugh and assuming this team had no shot to do anything.
For the first time in a long time, Michigan had a football team that ignored all noise — including a bunch of it that always seems to come from the inside — and just put one foot in front of the other every day until the final day. This team didn’t try to mimic or copy another Michigan squad’s blueprint. It didn’t waste air talking about how great things have been in the past here and how, somehow, that’s proof they can be again. It did not lie to itself.
This team just worked. Nothing else.
Bob Wojnowski, The Detroit News: Michigan’s special season ends with a hard slap of reality
In this one, Georgia was nearly perfect from the start, scoring on its first five possessions. At halftime, the Bulldogs had 330 yards to the Wolverines’ 101 and the final numbers (518-325) weren’t much different. Harbaugh knew they were in trouble early and gambled on fourth-and-four from Georgia’s 41 on their first possession. Mistake? Not sure how many other options he had. McNamara’s pass went awry and Georgia made it 14-0 moments later on an 18-yard halfback pass. Kirby Smart called off the Dawgs, so to speak, for much of the second half, surely looking forward to the Crimson Tide. The Wolverines were stymied and unable to gain much, except an appreciation of what it takes to beat the very best.
For someone like Aidan Hutchinson, the Heisman runner-up who will head to the NFL, it was a sobering experience. Michigan’s defense didn’t sack Bennett, didn’t force a turnover and allowed 190 yards rushing. After rolling through Ohio State and Iowa, the Wolverines finished their season by collecting wounds, and perhaps wisdom.
“All those young guys, they got this scar tissue now, being in the playoffs, losing, having to feel this,” Hutchinson said. “I know they’re going to bounce back next year and give ‘em hell. Michigan football will be in good hands.”
This outcome doesn’t change that. The Wolverines made tremendous gains this season, and then learned in one lopsided loss how much more there is to gain.
Shawn Windsor, Detroit Free Press: Michigan football doesn’t belong on sport’s top shelf, but loss won’t spoil monumental year
The Wolverines have a bevy of promising young players, including the quarterback who played the bulk of the fourth quarter — J.J. McCarthy. The freshman’s speed and elusiveness allowed him to escape the volcanic pressure of Georgia’s front seven a few times. He even spun from a defensive tackle’s grasp at one point, rolled to his left and lifted a pass downfield.
It fell incomplete. But his ability to avoid the sack and give the play a chance is something Harbaugh will have to consider heading into next season.
He isn’t the only skill player that belonged on the field against Georgia. Running back Donovan Edwards had a few nice moments. So did receivers Andrel Anthony and Roman Wilson.
There is more building to do, certainly, up the middle defensively, on the edges there as well. And as good as the offensive line has been this season, it struggled to protect McNamara or open much for Hassan Haskins.
Harbaugh got a good, tough look at the final steps he has to take. The recruiting momentum he has enjoyed since beating the Buckeyes should help.
So, too, should the vibe and connectedness reset inside his program. The last rung of college football won’t be easy to reach.
Yet if U-M can climb as much as it did this season, then there is no reason to think it can’t climb the rest of the way.
A beginning indeed.
Brendan Roose, The Michigan Daily: Georgia eviscerates Michigan, 34-11, ending Wolverines’ improbable championship push
The sting of Friday’s loss is a sensation familiar to the Michigan program. Even in the wake of an improbable season that featured the program’s first conference championship since 2004, the disappointment of falling woefully short after coming so close to the pinnacle of the sport will remain.
Still, it’s a reality most teams face, especially those trying to break into the sport’s upper echelon. The moments were there — from that Big Ten title, to comeback wins against Nebraska and Penn State, to the upset victory over Ohio State.
“We climbed mountains this season that no one thought we could,” senior edge rusher Aidan Hutchinson said. “We did some things that nobody expected this Michigan team to do. I think we set the standard for the future of Michigan football, and we really helped this program tremendously for the future.”
Football is cruel, its conclusions almost universally unpoetic. As is the truth for all but one program at the end of the season, the Wolverines will be left wondering how close they were and what could have been.
