A Big Boy Win.

Never mind the coach, Michigan ground it out

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Among other things, the national champion Michigan Wolverines went 9-0 and 6-0 this season. That’s 9-0 with their head coach on the sideline, and 6-0 when the guy wasn’t allowed on the field.

So — yeah. Not your traditional path to glory. And that is all the more reason why the story today ought to be about the players who accomplished the feat, and not the coach who tends to be an attention magnet and probably gets written about way too often. (Guilty as charged, by the way.)

But man, look at that Wolverines performance in the College Football Playoff championship. Its 34-13 victory over Washington was far more of a grinder than the final score makes it appear; this was a one-score game until the mid-fourth quarter. Michigan’s defense was just a superior force throughout, holding a Huskies team that averaged 37 points a game to a single touchdown and relentlessly attacking Washington quarterback Michael Penix Jr., the Heisman runner-up, who threw two picks.

Offensively, the Wolverines were old school. Their running game piled up 303 yards — in a national championship. One of Michigan’s running backs, Donovan Edwards, averaged 17.3 yards per carry. That’s insane.

"I feel like this has been the perfect happy ending," Edwards told ESPN after the game. "A lot of personal success, a lot of personal failures, but our ultimate goal was to win a national championship. ... There's no other feeling than to go through what we have and still come out on top. So, perfect story, a lot of adversity -- Coach Harbaugh's not there for six games -- perfect story."

Ah, Coach Harbaugh. Gentleman Jim sat out the first three games of the season after Michigan self-imposed a penalty while the NCAA looked into recruiting infractions going back to 2020, including Harbaugh lying about what happened. He took another three-game seat after the program was caught blatantly stealing opponents’ signs in a manner that college rules forbid.

So instead of making Monday night about Harbaugh, let’s give the credit to Michigan’s massive offensive line, which cleared the holes for Edwards to rush for 104 yards and his teammate, Blake Corum, to go for 134 and be named the championship MVP. Credit quarterback J.J. McCarthy, who has only ever played for Harbaugh and Michigan, who is not the focal point of the offense and who understood his mission: Be efficient, make no mistakes and let the run game do its thing.

Credit a devastating pass rush that repeatedly took down Penix hard after the Washington QB threw often-hurried passes. Michigan’s Kenneth Grant had the only recorded sack, but the Wolverines got to Penix again and again — and often while rushing only four. That’s something.

It’s a Michigan team loaded with high NFL draft prospects, one reason why folks are so happy to speculate that the head coach will leave Ann Arbor after this impossible-to-top season. At this point, I don’t know or care. The Wolverines’ players are the ones who had to figure out how to get things done when Jim Harbaugh wasn’t around to tell them what was what. Clearly, they knew how.