92 days until Michigan football: Thank goodness for abolished ties
There’s much anticipation heading into the Michigan Wolverines football season, and TheWolverine.com is counting down the days until the Sept. 2 opener against East Carolina. We’ll discuss current Michigan events, the upcoming season and/or take a look at a significant number that correlates with how many days remain until kickoff, whether it be a player’s jersey number, a year, a date, a score, etc.
Michigan football had three ties during the 1992 season, their 34th-through-36th and final ties in program history. The Wolverines went 9-0-3 during the 1992 season, which still resulted in a Big Ten Championship for the program in Gary Moeller’s third year.
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So what happened to ties, anyways? The last one was recorded in 1995, which was a 3-3 showdown between 4-5-2 Wisconsin and 5-5-1 Illinois. It is fitting that the final tie game was a Big Ten slugfest.
On3’s Ivan Maisel, writing for ESPN at the time, discussed what happened in a piece in 2010:
College football euthanized the tie in the 1995 postseason, the inaugural year of the Bowl Alliance. The championship game resembled the panda exhibit at the National Zoo: When No. 1 and No. 2 got together, no one wanted to face the possibility that they might not produce the champion offspring that prompted the date in the first place.
Once the NCAA committee in charge of bowls made that decision, the NCAA Football Rules Committee followed suit for the 1996 regular season. The tie disappeared as if autumn Saturdays had turned into Casual Fridays.
The tie is gone, and no one is advocating for its return. But it shouldn’t be dismissed as college football’s version of polio, a pox eradicated by crusading officials who saved the game. Ties brought a different kind of strategy to the field. Ties brought controversy. They may have ended games, but they started debates that endure to this day.
Michigan tied Notre Dame 17-17 to start the season before winning eight-straight games, then tying the last two games of the season to Illinois (22-22) and Ohio State (13-13). The season ended with win No. 9 in the form of a 38-31 win over Washington in the 1993 Rose Bowl.
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