The following was written in the immediate aftermath of our collapse against USC, when the pain and embarrassment were still raw, before I even attempted to regain any sense of perspective. It's poorly organized, clumsily written, and none of my thoughts are really carried through to conclusion, but the emotion is genuine.

The Victors: The Debacle
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Thrice is a streak. Four times in a row? That's a tradition.

For three years in a row, we've lost the last two games of the season, the annual rivalry against the hated Ohio State University Buckeyes and the inevitable bowl. We've lost four consecutive bowl games. After the mediocrity of the 1950s and 1960s, all Michigan partisans owe an unpayable debt to Bo, may he rest in peace, for restoring Michigan football to greatness, but the one area in which Coach Carr should not seek to emulate Coach Schembechler is performance in bowl games. Counting today's humiliation, we're now 5-7 in bowl games under Carr.

Mike Hart and Chad Henne are both great players, and Michigan's fortunes rise and fall in accordance with their triumphs and struggles. All our hopes for victory lie with them. But the sobering reality is that both are three-year starters... the same three years in which we have lost the last two games of each season. Fielding Yost's ghost, guys, even John Navarre managed to beat the hated Buckeyes! And yes, those hated Buckeyes were coached by the villainous Jim Tressell. He's an evil genius, but he's not invincible.

As for Ron English's defense, it looked almost the exact same as Jim Herrmann's: absolutely dominating against inferior opposition, but utterly ineffectual at the end of the year. In three of the last four games, the defense gave up 26, 42, and 32 points. Bob Davie kept saying that we have a greta defense, but what evidence is there to support that? The defense might have looked great in October, but it's easy to appear stiffling against the inept offenses of Michigan State, Penn State, Iowa, and Northwestern. In November and January we might as well have not put any men out on the field when our opponents had the ball. Three possibilities: we do not have good players and thus it doesn't matter how well they are coached; the players are fine, but the coaches don't know how to make adjustments as the season progresses; or both the players and the coaches are lost causes. I know not which of those most accurately describes the sorry state of our mistakenly much-vaunted defense, but next year will end in a repeat of this season's debacle unless wholesale changes are made.