The University of Texas and University of Michigan are heading into this year’s Cheez-It Citrus Bowl as two of college football’s bluest of blue bloods. In many ways, the two programs are very similar.
Both are some of the most winningest programs in college football history (Texas is fifth and Michigan is first).
Both are flagship universities that excel in multiple sports and the classroom.
Both have huge alumni bases that will travel well to the game.
And both are coming into the bowl game with identical 9-3 records.
But for as much as they have in common, the two teams are facing two very different challenges in preparing to face each other.
Texas is battling the disappointment of not making the College Football Playoffs and the, what can only be described as apathy, that comes from playing in a non-CFP bowl game.
“I think there’s a level of frustration that we feel like we have a good football team, we feel like we put together a body of work that is, that could be competitive against any of the other teams that are in the CFP,” head coach Steve Sarkisian said at a Citrus Bowl dinner in Orlando this week.
While Michigan is facing something entirely different.
“Unique and complex,” is how interim Michigan coach Biff Poggi described the challenges facing his team during bowl preps. “I don’t know that you can prepare for something like this. It’s been, I’ll just say, complicated.”
Poggi is, as a reminder for any college football fan who may have been hibernating since Thanksgiving, the interim coach of the Wolverines because their former head coach, Sherrone Moore, was fired and then arrested after police say Moore broke into the home of a football office staffer with whom he was allegedly having an affair.
Poggi said the players have gone through the gamut of emotions since the news first broke.
“It has been a tumultuous time, and a lot of you know, anger – at first disbelief, then anger, then really, what we’re in right now is the phase of the kids, quite frankly, feel very betrayed, and we’re trying to work through that,” Poggi said in Orlando this week.
He says he has spent nearly all of his time meeting individually with players, sometimes multiple times, in an attempt to help them through this process.
“The mandate that Ward Manuel gave me as the athletic director when he asked me to be the interim coach, was to love and take care of the kids, and so that’s what I’m spending all of my time doing, is loving kids.”
The love appears to be working. So far, Michigan hasn’t had any major players from the 2025 team opting out of the bowl game. But then again, maybe that’s because actually playing football has been a bit of normalcy for the players in this extremely abnormal time in Ann Arbor.
“Playing football helps a tremendous amount,” Poggi said. “When they’re inside that rectangle for those hours that were either in meetings or practicing, it’s a bit of a sanctuary, right? And the chance to not think about what is a constant barrage (of bad news.”
The Longhorns may not be dealing with a headline making coaching change that will play itself out in the courts, but that doesn’t mean that Steve Sarisian’s players don’t have their own challenges to overcome ahead of the game.
