Michigan got voted out of the AP Poll’s Top 25 entirely last week, reduced to a stray 69 votes, and eight days later walked into the Big House and beat a ranked Oklahoma team by a touchdown. If you still trust that poll’s Week 2 math, I’ve got a Jets Super Bowl window to sell you.
The unranking came after Michigan needed a retroactively added second on the clock and a Bryce Underwood Hail Mary just to survive Western Michigan in Week 1, a sequence the internet immediately dubbed Clockgate, according to Yahoo Sports. This Michigan Oklahoma upset isn’t really about the voters looking dumb for a few days. It’s about a sport that lets a rotating panel of anonymous ballots set the table for Playoff seeding math in Week 2 using a snapshot from the previous Saturday that’s already stale by kickoff, and Michigan just proved the eye test and the committee’s own numbers can flip inside a single week.
Nobody’s fixing the poll over this, though.
Underwood, who nearly got run out of Ann Arbor on a rail a week ago, opened the scoring with a 38-yard touchdown run in the first quarter. Oklahoma clawed back to tie it at 10-10 in the third on a 22-yard touchdown pass from John Mateer to Mackenzie Alleyne, and for a while this had the exact shape of the letdown Michigan’s remaining doubters were circling on their calendars.
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Then Mateer threw the pass that decided the afternoon. Midway through the fourth quarter, with the score still knotted at 10, he got picked off and the ball came back the other way inside Oklahoma’s own 5-yard line, via Saturday Down South, and Jordan Marshall punched it in from a yard out to make it 17-10.
Oklahoma finished with two turnovers to Michigan’s zero, which is most of the ballgame in one clause.
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Michigan’s defense held an Oklahoma offense that had just hung 51 on UTEP to 289 total yards, and let the Sooners manage a measly 2.3 yards a play once the fourth quarter turned into a track meet nobody but Michigan wanted to run, per ESPN’s box score. Mateer finished 189 yards on 33 attempts with one touchdown and the interception that will follow him into next week’s game notes.
Michigan beats Oklahoma at home, in front of a Big House crowd that spent the previous week hearing their own team didn’t belong in the conversation at all.
Which isn’t an excuse to declare this Michigan team bulletproof. They’ve needed a Hail Mary and a fourth-quarter takeaway to escape their first two games of the year, and a team living that close to the wire twice in a row usually finds the wire eventually. That’s the complication, and it’s a real one — ask anybody who’s watched a 2-0 team implode by October.
The committee has all season to catch up to this Michigan Oklahoma upset. My dad’s group chat, currently a wall of exclamation points about a team he’s never once texted me about before September, already has.
