WATCH: Reacting to the Big Ten media poll and your Michigan questions
The Michigan Wolverines head to Indianapolis this week for Big Ten Media Days at Lucas Oil Stadium as three-time defending conference champions. The media poll put out by the Kings of the North podcast have U-M as the fourth-best team in the B1G heading into 2024.
On this week’s Monday night show, TheWolverine.com’s Anthony Broome and Clayton Sayfie discuss the poll and take a wide variety of fan questions. To kick things off, Sayfie and Broome addressed the preseason media poll.
“Shout out to them for putting it together,” Sayfie said. “33 voters were participants in this thing. And the interesting thing to me is that it’s kind of funny. I take stock in these preseason polls in a different way than most people do. I just find it so interesting that a lot of people do all these preseason predictions and then they never revisit them at the end of the year and they’re never held accountable. Or they never learned from, whatever their mistakes were or how well they did.”
“And it shows you how irrelevant these are, right? Because that process never really unfolds. But the second thing is how wrong we usually are as a collective fan base across the conference and country media members across the conference and country. Four out of the last 13 years, they’ve picked the correct champion. So 9 out of 13, they’ve had it wrong. And Ohio State was the class of the Big Ten for a good portion of those 13 years until the last few when Michigan started to take over. So you felt like maybe that would have been the safe pick, but there’s always this notion that somebody’s on top coming into the year.
“That team this year is clearly Ohio State. They received 27 of a possible 33 first-place votes and Michigan didn’t get a single first-place vote. They come in fourth behind Penn State. Now Penn State does avoid Oregon and Michigan, so I think their schedule helps them here. It just seems it’s not going to play out how it’s predicted. I think that’s the only guarantee that we have with this whole process. So I’m interested to see how it plays out.
“In the preseason coming into Big Ten media day last year, everyone was talking about Wisconsin. They’re moving to the air raid. They were calling it the dairy raid, because it’s Wisconsin and they’re going to win the West. And then they just didn’t under Luke Fickel last year. Once the season starts, everything changes, all this stuff’s thrown out the window.
“It’s kind of irrelevant, bu it’s fun to look at. It’s fun to know that this order is guaranteed to be wrong. That’s why they play the games. It’s going to be fun to watch.”
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