Even before it slipped into janky comedy in its dying moments, you wouldn't necessarily say that Michigan's season opener against Western Michigan on Saturday was "a good football game." But also just making such an assessment would be missing the point to an extent. It was certainly shaping up as a very specific type of college football game. It's one in which a power conference team playing poorly loses to a MAC team—it has to be a MAC team; that's the type of game it is—that makes fewer mistakes.
This is not necessarily a fun kind of game to watch, although if you're on social media at the moment it can be fun to watch other people watching it. But it is absolutely a type of game that happens, and one of the gnawing anxieties that would confront a FBS team—especially one fresh off a bunch of queasy and humiliating scandals, with a new coach and a bunch of new players—is that they have become a team that this type of game would happen to. UMass breaking a 16-game, 677-day losing streak against Rutgers last week is the most degrading possible version of this type of game, even before the Greg Schiano aspects of it enter the equation.
Western Michigan defeating Michigan, at Michigan, on the strength of four field goals from a rosy-cheeked backup kicker named Dieter Kelly, would have been something like its apex. And while the game was not a thriller by any stretch, there was some formalist satisfaction in watching it drearily assume the form of the type of game that it was revealing itself to be. Michigan QB Bryce Underwood fumbled the second snap he received, and while he recovered on that play thanks to a circus catch from transfer WR JJ Buchanan and led a touchdown drive on that possession, Underwood and the Michigan offense was basically never in rhythm or especially close to scoring again after that. They were 3-for-10 on third-down conversions, and Underwood—a big-ticket recruit furnished to the program by leathery cultural villain Larry Ellison as a gift to what the Wall Street Journal described as "his mystery wife"—was wobbly and over-aggressive and generally doing too much in ways that could have made things even worse than they were; he was called for a holding penalty in the third quarter that negated a long Michigan gain, lost a fumble, and only escaped throwing a pick-six at the end of the first half when a replay review showed that the Western Michigan's Dillon Moore had stepped out of bounds on his return. This is foreshadowing.
What happened between that first scoring drive and the last two plays of the game was, basically, Michigan getting pushed around and making weird mistakes. They committed nine penalties, and Western Michigan dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball; Western Michigan possessed the ball for 40:08 of game time. Again, it was a very specific type of ass-kicking, and not at all the way a new coaching administration—that coach is Kyle Whittingham, who brought Buchanan with him from Utah—would want to get started. Michigan was able to get the ball to midfield with nine seconds left, down 12-7, but when Underwood's pass sailed out the back of the end zone as time expired, the game seemed to click finally into place as what it had been becoming all along—an impressive win for Western Michigan and an undeniably transcendent moment for placekicking Dieters, but mostly One Of Those Types Of Losses. This, finally, is where things got interesting.
A seemingly perfunctory Hawk-Eye video review of that last play from the Big Ten's central replay center held that a second should be put back onto the clock, and so it was. It is worth noting that the video review team that made this determination were and to all appearances remain the only people that could see this. Those watching at home could clearly see the clock turn over to zeroes with the ball still untouched in the air.
Here’s my Michigan-WMU Zapruder breakdown
— Rodger Sherman (@rodger.bsky.social) 2026-09-06T03:14:36.639Z
NBC rules analyst Terry McAulay was blunt in his assessment of the decision to overturn the call. "The ball isn’t even close to touching the player when it goes to zero," he said. "Now their system, their Hawk-Eye system, apparently either had a different sync or whatever and they came up with one second when it touched the player. I don’t see how that happened, assuming our clock is correct. It is clearly not touching the player; the ball is clearly still in the air when the clock goes to zero on our screen."
With one second left on the clock, Underwood got another shot at a Hail Mary, and his second prayer was answered. Michigan's receivers sealed WMU's secondary deeper in the end zone and Buchanan came down with the pass at the goal line for a game-winning score. Where there had been audible "Fire Kyle" chants, there was now only a kind of embarrassing sort of jubilation. Members of the Tarps Off Community streamed out of the stands and onto the field, as they might have in a dramatic victory over a traditional rival, and not after their team belatedly cashed in a video mulligan against a MAC team after 60 minutes spent seemingly playing through extremely bad allergies.
"The Big Ten is going to have to tell a lot of us how did they get to one second on this play," McAulay said on NBC, and after the game the Big Ten did. The statement was inexplicably formatted and styled like the text on the back of a VHS box for a 1989 horror movie, and contained some other questionable aspects besides.
While a power conference team would naturally not want to be on the wrong side of the type of game in which a MAC team outclasses them in that classic grunt-forward MAC fashion, there are more embarrassing things than that. (Again, Rutgers is excepted here.) A ranked team like Michigan that loses like that, to a team like this Western Michigan one, would only have revealed itself as less good than expected. But a team that wins off some janky administrative college football–ass stuff will be remembered longer, and with a different sort of shame. The kids yelling "let's go" at each other and wandering around on the turf after Buchanan's catch are unlikely ever to tell the story of the time they stormed the field after they almost lost to Western Michigan that one time. It would be a strange thing to brag about. Whittingham, after the game, seemed to understand it a bit better. "This game will go down in history, Michigan history," he told the press, sounding predictably and justifiably dazed. "I don't know if it's in a positive way, but it'll go down in history for certain."
