Michigan veterans bringing experience against Alabama to Michigan Rose Bowl preparation

It doesn’t matter that the Michigan football team is the top seed in the College Football Playoff. It doesn’t matter that Alabama squeaked into the playoff in a year when it has looked weaker than normal.

Bama is still Bama, the team with three CFP-era national championships, and the Wolverines know what’s in store for them at this year’s Rose Bowl semifinal.

Luckily for them, they’ve got some players who have faced the Crimson Tide before in graduate linebacker Michael Barrett, graduate cornerback Mike Sainristil and graduate receiver Cornelius Johnson, who all played Bama in the 2020 Citrus Bowl. While it’s a game they probably want to forget — a 35-16 loss that they led at halftime — it’s a welcomed experience during a time of year where every advantage matters.

“It was funny, coach (Jim) Harbaugh brought that up in a team meeting, and he’s looking like ‘You were there, right?’ ” Barrett said Thursday. “I’m like ‘yeah’ and everybody just busts out laughing.”

The contributions were slight; Barrett’s biggest play came on a 23-yard kick return, while Sainristil caught one eight-yard pass back when he was still a wideout. But, the Wolverines’ elder statesmen are nonetheless familiar with what it feels like to play the powerhouse that is Alabama football.

That 2019 season, Alabama didn’t make the playoff with a stacked roster because of losses to LSU and Auburn. It marked the first playoff it missed since the format’s inception, and last season’s playoff became the second. That’s how dominant the Crimson Tide have been.

This year’s Alabama squad has made it back to the big stage, and Michigan will play them yet again, this time with a trip to the national championship game on the line. As much as 2019’s experience brings some experience that could serve the Wolverines well, it’s not a one-for-one comparison between the two Crimson Tide teams.

“They have a lot of similarities, but I feel like it was a different team back then,” Barrett said. “… They had Devonta Smith, Jaylen Waddle, Najee Harris. It’s hard to bring those kinds of players back where you have that kind of ability in another year, they kind of were stacked that year. So it’s hard to kind of compare those two.”

This year’s Alabama squad may not have all the same talent on offense, but its defense boasts the likes of linebacker Dallas Turner and cornerback Kool-Aid McKinstry. The Crimson Tide have plenty of talent, even if it isn’t as eye-popping as that 2019 year.

But it’s not as hard to assume that Alabama will bring the same elite level of preparation and game planning at the Rose Bowl that they did at the 2020 Citrus Bowl, something Barrett, Sainristil and Johnson can point to from personal experience. They’ve played and lost to the so-called weak type of Alabama team. They know the level of execution the Wolverines can expect on every down.

That’s where the familiarity with the Tide — and two straight semifinal losses — might materialize into an advantage for Michigan. Because in both 2021’s loss to Georgia and 2022’s loss to TCU, the Wolverines didn’t deliver consistently every down. Because of that, their opponents beat them. They can expect the same sort of play from Alabama, who has won the CFP as many times as Michigan has made appearances.

“We haven’t won it, they have … so we gotta prepare our tails off to get to that point to what they’ve done,” offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore said Tuesday. “So that’s our goal. That’s our mindset. Our goal is to go win, or do everything we can to do it.”

Having three players experienced with the Crimson Tide isn’t the kind of edge that will single handedly win a game, but Michigan undoubtedly embraces it. No matter how small, this time of year, every advantage matters.