SO ENDS 2014 FOR MGOBLOG…
I like to tell people that sometime in the afternoon of September 1st, 2007, after the final whistle of The Horror, Michigan football began a long walk in the woods in search of itself. We saw the edge of the woods perhaps in 2011 in the first year under Brady Hoke, but only for a fleeting moment as we took the bend in the path which led back into the thicket of seemingly muddled identity.
Even going into 2014, it didn’t seem like the way out was coming anytime soon, and as disappointments mounted, we began to wonder if 2014 was becoming a make-or-break moment for the program. That is to say, we seemed to come to the conclusion that it either gets righted now – or at least gets in a position where it can be righted – or we might be in for a long period of numbing irrelevance.
2014 itself began, I think, with some cautious optimism but much impatience after a lackluster end to 2013 with the bowl loss merely encapsulating the frustrations that had been building since one night in October 2013 where we witnessed, to quote Ace, “the stupidest fucking game that Michigan ever played”. Let’s be honest, it was exactly that.
It was with those memories we began the year, but we did have an excellent run from our basketball team which ended sadly with a loss to Kentucky in the NCAA Tournament. During the so-called Polar Vortex, during which much of the upper Midwest became the densely populated mockup of Greenland, we watched with delight as Michigan basketball put another great season in the books.
The late spring and summer were dominated with football talk around here – more than usual - because I think the crossroads were before us, and we knew it. The fall began with a bit of vengeance against Appalachian State, but then the reason of the season happened – I’ll put it that way. We endured deteriorating performance even with a theoretically excellent roster, public relations nightmares and it became clear by the end of September that this was not, in fact, Michigan. Indeed, the things that made it so were absent altogether in some cases.
Enter Jim Hackett. The absence of David Brandon as our Halloween treat suddenly breathed some life into what was a thick fog of disillusionment around the fanbase by that time. Sure, he was interim, but almost immediately, changes began – vestiges of the Brandon era in the department were told they had no future – and the culture began to change. Our season was lost by then, but we all talked about the potential to make it right existing where it had not before.
We lost to Ohio State. Days later, Brady Hoke found himself unemployed – this felt like a necessary, sad duty and if there was anything that would have summed up 2014 to that point, it was having the team leaderless yet again. We talked about whether or not the leadership had actually been there in the first place, but now it physically was not.
December on MGoBlog was one of the nuttiest months I’ve ever experienced here. Up and down, left and right, rumors, sources, sources shooting down or confirming those sources, the NFL / college axis of reporters…every conceivable name up to and including some Division III guys being discussed as potential replacements. We had no effing clue, more or less, until not that long ago that this was in fact “happening”, but I think that deep down we loved every minute of this or we would not have tried so hard to make “Stitt Happens” a Michigan thing for 15 minutes.
If 2014 up to the point of noon yesterday were to be called anything, it would be the year where Michigan’s identity crisis reached critical mass. With the Harbaugh hire, I think we’ve put ourselves in a position to have 2015 be the year where Michigan rediscovered itself.
A year that began on a cautious note, sunk to despair for a lot of fans (myself included), and then has now ended with a grand slam hire in Jim Harbaugh is a year that I wouldn’t call completely lost then. Indeed, we end 2014 with a renewed optimism and a sense that the future really can be ours. We end this year with the hope that football can get back to where we know it has been, perhaps even farther than that at some point. It might not happen right off the bat, but the potential is now real under the stewardship of Harbaugh, in my opinion.
I realize that this diary rehashes some unpleasant moments, but it isn’t anything you didn’t know. I just want to believe that now, after 7 long and frustrating years, this walk in the woods ends along with 2014 and the future is indeed bright.
Cheers, MGoBlog. Here’s to an exciting 2015.
-LSAClassOf2000