Recalling 1997 Wolverine National Champions Before Saturday's 25th Anniversary Recognition

Enjoy Derek Kornacki's chapter from "Miracle Moments in Michigan Wolverines Football History" based on interviews from the last reunion of Griese, Woodson, Sword, Steele and Co.

They’ll officially dedicate the tunnel at Michigan Stadium to Hall of Fame coach Lloyd Carr at Saturday’s Penn State game, and the 1997 champs will be recognized on the field during a 25th anniversary weekend. Senior linebacker Rob Swett has a moment with Carr on the victory podium after the Rose Bowl win over Washington State sealed an undefeated season.

Photo Courtesy of Bentley Library, University of Michigan

Revisiting 1997 National Champions

By Derek Kornacki

I had the chance to meet with several members of one of Michigan football’s most celebrated teams during their 20th anniversary reunion held at Crisler Arena in April of 2017. I was overcome with nostalgia watching so many of my boyhood heroes walk through the tunnel and into the arena. Some of them looked as if they could still throw on some pads and lead the maize and blue to another title, and some of them looked like the guy in front of you at a Chinese buffet. Some of them had full heads of hair, and some of them didn’t have much lettuce left. But to a man, each one had a smile on his face as wide as the Grand Canyon. They were home. They were back with The Team.

In speaking with the starting quarterback and one of the leaders of that 1997 squad, Brian Griese, he recalled a moment during the very first team meeting that fall when all of the guys were gathered in the theater-style seating of the team meeting room at Schembechler Hall. He said that seniors always sat up front and that on that day there were two players who’d both had the same idea about which seat they were going to lay claim to for that season’s meetings, and it was one of the much-coveted aisle seats in the first row. The two men involved in the dispute were senior fullback Chris Floyd and senior defensive lineman Ben Huff (the latter sadly passed away in 2006 at the age of 31). As Griese put it, “Neither one of those guys were guys you wanted to mess with.” Adding, “Everybody in the room just kind of stopped and we didn’t know if they were gonna get into a fight or what was gonna happen.” Now it goes without saying that if the very first team meeting of the season had kicked off with a fight between senior teammates it would have been a disaster for any college football team going forward. But what happened next may just have set the tone for what this team went on to accomplish at the end of the season. Griese said that at the exact same instant, Floyd and Huff both took a step back, took a breath and decided that they weren’t going to fight about a seat. Griese adds, “They checked their egos at the door and we became a team. Everybody watched that and said, you know what, we’re not gonna fight each other, we’re gonna love each other and we’re gonna do this together.”

Coming into the 1997 season, Michigan was coming off of four straight four-loss seasons, so expectations weren’t exactly sky high going into their season opener at home against Colorado, which had broken the hearts of 106,000-plus at Michigan Stadium just three years earlier in the most dramatic and brutal fashion with Kordell Stewart's "Hail Mary" touchdown pass. Michigan would have its revenge that day, though, taking away any lingering heartache from ’94 by trouncing the Buffaloes, 27-3. It was more of the same the next week when the Baylor Bears came to town, and the following week they beat a very good Notre Dame team in the Big House, 21-14. At this point, Wolverine faithful were starting to get an inkling that this team might be capable of making a run at the Big Ten title. Dominant wins in the following two weeks over Indiana and Northwestern further fueled growing expectations around Ann Arbor and set up yet another home game for the 5-0 Wolverines with the 4-1 Iowa Hawkeyes who’d just lost convincingly to Ohio State the previous Saturday, 23-7.

Michigan came out flat in the first half and found themselves trailing the Hawkeyes, 21-7, at halftime and you could almost hear the collective thoughts of Wolverine nation all thinking in unison to themselves, ‘If we’re down 21-7 at the half and Ohio State beat this team 23-7 last week…’ But the mood inside the Michigan locker room at the half that Saturday was far more calm and optimistic. I spoke with defensive lineman Glen Steele at the reunion about the resolve that the team showed that day, and he said, “Coach Carr walks in (the locker room at the half), doesn’t say anything. Guys walk in but there was no fatigue, there wasn’t any worry. It was just, okay, how are we gonna fix this?” Adding, “At the end of the day we had to get one more point than these guys. There was no panic, there was nothing like that. We had great leadership.”

Taking cues from their head coach and senior leadership, the Wolverines came out and played an inspired second half. With the defense holding the Hawkeyes offense to just three points in the entire half, it enabled the Michigan offense to put up 21 and secure a 28-24 victory. Griese had three interceptions in the first half, but told the team he had never played worse in a half. Then he calmly added that he was going to play his best half, and his teammates picked up on his confidence. The senior quarterback threw for two touchdowns and ran for another with nary an interception.

The team had faced their first hiccup half of the season and figured out a way to make the proper corrections and adjustments to get the win, and any championship team will tell you that there’s almost always that one game where they came out flat early or midway through the season and they figured out a way to pull it out. As Michigan Stadium held its breath during the hiccup, a confident Wolverine football team navigated the adversity of that first half and got themselves out of a corner and into the Big Ten title and National Championship conversation.

In the following week, Michigan travelled 70 miles north to face a 5-1, Nick Saban-led Michigan State team. The game itself does not stand out years later as a particularly interesting meeting between the in-state rivals (UofM won convincingly 23-7), but what is etched indelibly on the minds of all Wolverine fans who witnessed it is the unbelievable interception that Charles Woodson made on the sideline in that game. Woodson glided across an overcast Michigan sky, right arm outstretched, and plucked a third-and-nine pass that had to have been at least 13 feet in the air out of that gray sky, and when his left foot came back to earth in bounds, the entire college football world knew his name. It was his first step towards The Downtown Athletic Club of New York.

The game at home the next week provided another showcasing of just how good the Michigan defense was that season. Holding Minnesota to just three points over four quarters set the tone for the extremely tall task the unbeaten Wolverines were going to face in their final three games of the regular season… away to Penn State, away to Wisconsin and then back home to host Ohio State in "The Game" and the maize and blue’s first shot at an undefeated season, without a tie, since 1948.

Going into the ballgame in Happy Valley, the polls had the Nittany Lions sitting at No. 2 and the Wolverines sitting at No. 4. A matchup that had the college football world salivating and at that point in the season, definite Big Ten and national title implications. Between the two teams, there were 46 players who dressed that day who would go on to play in the NFL. Penn State was having a season that had their fans tasting national championship, but that Saturday, the Wolverines quickly slapped that taste out of their mouths. From the get-go, it was never really even a contest. Michigan was the tougher, more physical team right out of the gates. And with a 10-0 lead, on the last play of the first quarter, Daydrion Taylor put a hit on Penn State tight end Bob Stephenson that sent a hush around Beaver Stadium. In an interview for the Big Ten Network in 2012, Charles Woodson said of the hit, “It’s gotta be the hardest hit I’ve ever witnessed.” Neither team knew it that day, but that hit would end both players’ football careers. It did, however, serve as fuel for the Michigan defense for the rest of that season. Twenty years later linebacker Sam Sword recalled the affect that the hit had, saying, “We put our foot on the gas a little bit more, because you never know when it’s gonna be your last game.”

Average teams after witnessing a season-ending injury of a teammate tend to shrink and look for ways to avoid contact. Championship teams turn it up a notch and go as hard as they can for their fallen brother.

Michigan was as dominate in the next three quarters as they were in the first, dismantling the Nittany Lions for a 34-8 final score. Leaving very little doubt in the minds of the Associated Press poll voters as to who was the best team in the country.

Camp Randall Stadium in Madison, Wisconsin was everything you’d expect it to be on November 15 for a matchup against No. 1-ranked Michigan. It was filled to capacity, there was newly-fallen snow plowed to the edges of the field and Barry Alvarez had his No. 24 Badgers ready to play spoiler to the Wolverines’ perfect season. The only thing missing that day was the injured Wisconsin running back, Ron Dayne. And without Dayne, Wisconsin struggled to get much of anything going offensively. Michigan came out and dominated both sides of the ball in the first half, with an outstanding effort by committee from the backfield of Chris Howard, Anthony Thomas and Floyd. They may have gotten caught looking ahead to the next game a little bit in the second half, but escaped Madison with a 26-16 win. The stage was set for one of the biggest games to ever take place in Michigan Stadium.

There was an electricity in the air the Saturday of November 22, 1997 at Michigan Stadium that I hadn’t experienced before as a 16-year-old kid, and haven’t experienced since. There was a level of confidence about that game within the stadium that was palpable to both the players and the fans. This was what every Michigan player and fan dreamed about. We needed one more win against our greatest rivals and we were going to Pasadena to play for a national championship.

Every great team needs to have a truly great player, a player who’s the best on the field every time he walks out of the tunnel. A player who sets the tone in every game he plays in. Charles Woodson knew he was that player, and so did Ohio State. The 20-14 victory that day was certainly a team effort, but I think that it’s safe to say that without Woodson, that game may have had a very different outcome. He returned a punt 78 yards for a touchdown, set up a touchdown with a 37-yard reception and intercepted a pass in the Michigan end zone.

The college football world recognized the same in Woodson in the weeks to follow, awarding him the Heisman Trophy. He was the first primarily defensive player to ever win it, and the only one since. So with Heisman in hand and an undefeated, battle-tested team behind him, Charles and the Wolverines headed to southern California for their shot at immortality.

Sitting in the stands that day at the Rose Bowl you didn’t feel the same electric assuredness as the previous game in Ann Arbor. In fact, it felt like Washington State came out to start the game looking like the better team. It wasn’t until Woodson’s interception of WSU quarterback Ryan Leaf in the end zone in the second quarter that the Wolverines started to feel more like the team we’d become accustomed to seeing. That pick not only saved Michigan from going down two touchdowns, but provided the spark that they needed to start playing Wolverine football.

Woodson may have been the spark in that game, but it was Griese who kept the fire going. He completed 18 of 30 passes on the day for 251 yards and three touchdown passes and lead Michigan football someplace it hadn’t been in 49 years. The 21-16 win over the Cougars capped off a season that had begun with Coach Carr handing out pick axes as a visual metaphor at the beginning of fall camp. The message was that no person attempting to climb a mountain reaches the top alone. No man is more important than the team… the team, the team, the team. The Michigan Wolverines were back at the summit of college football.