They Said It
National columnists’ take on the Rose Bowl:
Mitch Albom, Detroit Free Press
The gun went off and the hats came on and oh, baby, it was really a happy new year now. Never mind that the last play of this crazy championship game may have been the craziest of all, with an all-world quarterback deliberately throwing the ball in the dirt only a pass away from a stunning upset. Never mind. This was a moment of history, a team a destiny, and nothing was going to stop the young men in maize-and-blue from the happy pile that waited in the middle of the field.
All roses, no thorns.
Michigan, perfect.
Jim Litke, Associated Press
Forget the unsatisfying finish. The last brush stroke in a masterpiece is rarely the best one, anyway.
The college football season is over, at least in this very important sense: Michigan was, is, and should still be No. 1 when the final poll is released Saturday.
The Wolverines’ 21-16 win Thursday at the Rose Bowl over No. 8 Washington State might not have been as decisive as everybody wanted. But it decided the only matter left to decide. Michigan, unbeaten in 11 regular-season games, was No. 1 heading into the game. And since 1968, when the last poll of the season was first released after all bowl games, every No. 1 team that won won its final game held onto the top spot.
Now is not the time to change that.
George Vecsey, New York Times
This is the end of the Rose Bowl as we know it, but at least the golden era went out with a game worthy of the glorious past. Michigan earned the unofficial national college championship with its 21-16 victory, with Washington State still threatening until the final whistle.
The Rose Bowl is changing forever, selling out to join the lustful rush for money in a coalition of bowl games that rotates the championship around the Sun Belt. Next year the No. 1 and No. 2 teams are promised to the nouveau Fiesta Bowl in Arizona, which means this is the last time the Rose Bowl is guaranteed to the champion behemoths from the Big Ten grappling with the hipper-dipper champs from the West Coast.
There will always be room for matchups like the one between Charles Woodson’s Heisman Trophy and Ryan Leaf’s aerial display. The Rose Bowl deserved this big game, for all the New Year’s Days when it entertained the snowbound masses.
For more than half a century the Rose Bowl was the so-called granddaddy of bowl games, and not only that, but every New Year’s Day it gave Americans a major case of climate envy.
“Oh, my goodness, Myrtle, they’re watching that parade in their shorts!” people would exclaim in ice-encrusted quadrants of America.
Diane Pucin, The Philadelphia Inquirer
This game will belong always to Brian Griese, a memory to caress, a monumental effort of unassuming precision, a neat package of short passes, of two spectacular bombs, of nerveless accuracy on one final possession that resulted in no points but that consumed just enough time that the opponents were left to beg and plead, shout and scream for just one more second. But there were no more seconds.
Bernie Lincicome, Chicago Tribune
With a rosy dusk framing the San Gabriel Mountains, 29 years after the last national title won by a Big Ten team was confirmed upon the same storied sod of the Rose Bowl, a half-century beyond the last undefeated, national-championship Michigan football team, urgent flashbulbs searched for souvenirs, flickering around the great stadium like scampering Tinkerbells. Do you believe in Michigan?
Yes, Michigan.
In a game as gripping, as grinding, as full of consequence as any Rose Bowl ever, a game that needed every second to find its finish, Michigan met the world’s expectations, ditched its own bowl demons and without shame danced and hugged and wept on each other at the end.