Analysts: Michigan football equipped with hunger, pieces to reach the 'ultimate pinnacle'

Editor's note: This is part of an extended Q&A with Gary Danielson and Rick Neuheisel that will run in Sunday's online edition. The way CBS Sports analyst Gary Danielson sees it, while Michigan has made major strides the last two seasons as back-to-back Big Ten champions, stumbling in the College Football Playoff semifinals and falling short of making the national title game has made expectations even greater this season. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh enters his ninth season with the Wolverines and has led the team to a 25-3 record the last two years after a disastrous 2-4 mark in the COVID-shortened 2020 season.

The Wolverines have twice beaten archrival Ohio State, which had dominated the series the previous two decades, but they were outmatched by eventual national champion Georgia in the 2021 national semifinal and fell against underdog TCU last year. The Michigan players have spoken plenty of their motivation since losing to TCU and they seem focused on maintaining the game-by-game mantra that has served the well the previous two seasons. Now that the Wolverines are the favorite to win the Big Ten, is that enough? “Confidence is important, but if you ask me, ‘Well, how would you define pressure?’ I would define it as expectations,” Danielson told The Detroit News in Indianapolis during the recent Big Ten media days.

“And the expectations for the Michigan program this year is if they don't get into the playoffs and make a run at winning the national championship, the season will be a disappointment. ” Harbaugh pushed back at media days over the growing sentiment that if the Wolverines don’t win a national title, the season won’t be a success. "Championship or bust? What does that mean?" Harbaugh said to reporters.

"That doesn't mean anything to me. That's not real. We're the same as we always are.

The way we go into every year, our goal is to win the (Big Ten) championship, win the national championship, to beat Michigan State, beat Ohio State, beat Penn State. There’s so many good teams that we play, so many football fights. "I haven't heard one football player say, 'Championship or bust.

' I know I've heard that media-driven slogan, but that means nothing, that word bust. ” CBS Sports analyst Rick Neuheisel and Danielson joined the CBS contingent that attended Big Ten media days. CBS is part of the Big Ten’s seven-year media deal that's worth more than $7 billion, along with NBC and FOX, that will allow all three networks to broadcast conference games beginning this year.

CBS is doing seven games this fall while concluding its deal with the Southeastern Conference, and Danielson, a Detroit native and former Lions quarterback, will be shifting his focus from calling SEC games to Big Ten next year. Danielson, who attended Dearborn Divine Child and Purdue, will make the full-time switch to Big Ten games in 2024 and is using this season to observe and study the Big Ten. Neuheisel, who has been a head coach at Colorado, Washington and UCLA, is an analyst with CBS' "College Football Today" show and regularly appears on SiriusXM.

Neuheisel was a quarterback at UCLA and was the starter in 1983. From a head coach’s perspective, Neuheisel said the challenge this season for Harbaugh and the team leaders is to keep the team in check and avoid that “championship or bust” approach. “Every team is different.

You can't just assume because you hung up the cleats at the end of one season and had this kind of feeling in the locker room that the feeling is going to permeate into the next year,” Neuheisel said. “And so you build it from the start every year. “They do have the pieces in terms of the leaders, the Blake Corums of the world, the J.

J. McCarthys of the world that are going to come back with the same kind of hunger because it's still unfinished business not having won a playoff game. To get to the playoffs is definitely a feather in their cap, but they haven't taken the next step.

So complacency is probably not as much a concern in that regard, because they're still trying to get to that ultimate, ultimate pinnacle. ” The pinnacle, of course, is the national championship. Neuheisel, who was at UCLA and coached against Harbaugh when he was at Stanford, believes Harbaugh is more than equipped to keep this team focused.

“He's done a magnificent job of resurrecting the program because it looked, at least in his tenure, down-and-out after the pandemic,” Neuheisel said. “The last couple of seasons, with the exclamation point always of beating Ohio State, have put him back on the map. He's always going to be newsworthy because he's quirky in some of the things that he does, but in terms of giving his team an identity of toughness, check that box.

” Toughness has distinguished Michigan during its successful run, with an offensive line that has won the Joe Moore Award as the nation’s best the last two years and a physical run game that has been the offense's calling card. “Now, he's landed a team that's very talented,” Danielson said. What sets apart championship teams, Danielson said, is having “clutch” players.

He used 1997 Michigan Heisman Trophy winner Charles Woodson, who helped lead that team to an unbeaten season and the Associated Press national title, as an example. Having a player or players like that, he said, is more important than the swagger of a team. “I'd rather have clutch than swagger,” Danielson said.

“I think their coach (Harbaugh) produces swagger the way he's him against the world, and I think the players can take that and use it for motivation. The expectations will be strong, but I think Ohio State is a very hungry team because the way they lost, they believe, the national championship. Penn State, if they don't win this year, when are they ever going to win?” .