OPINION

By Tim Dahlberg

updated 9:47 p.m. ET Jan. 2, 2007

PASADENA, Calif. - The drama was taken out of this Rose Bowl long before it was even played. So when yet another beautiful California day turned to dusk on Monday, only one thing was really settled in the Granddaddy of them all.

The computers were right after all. Michigan didn’t belong in a national championship game.

Actually, the Wolverines looked like they didn’t even belong in the Rose Bowl. The Chick-fil-A Bowl might have even been a stretch for this bunch.

Their quarterback spent much of the first half on his back. Their secondary spent much of the second half watching USC receivers race past them into the end zone.

Hard to take for the thousands of Michigan faithful who came halfway across the country only to see their team embarrassed. Even harder to take for a coach and a team who thought they had been wronged by the BCS and were determined to plead their case on the field.

About the only good that came out of the whole exercise was that Ohio State and Florida can play next Monday in Arizona without worrying about very many “what ifs.”

Except now there’s some new “what ifs.”

Florida probably isn’t the second best team in the country. The Trojans can now make a decent argument that they are, despite having two losses, and the bookies in Vegas would back them up.

The only thing for sure is that Michigan isn’t.

“I don’t know if we showed that we didn’t belong, but SC showed they did belong,” Michigan running back Mike Hart said.

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Hart didn’t look like he belonged, running for only 47 yards against the best defense Michigan has seen all year. But he wasn’t the only one to struggle in a game where Michigan appeared mismatched at almost every position.

Chad Henne was sacked six times, three on one possession alone in the second quarter, and Pete Carroll let John David Booty loose in the second half to throw at will against Michigan’s secondary.

The end result is an increasingly familiar one at Michigan: The Wolverines have lost their last four bowl games and their last two games for the last three years.

Eleven straight to open the season looks good on the resume. Top teams, though, are supposed to finish out seasons on top.

Hard to believe that just six weeks ago, the Wolverines were not only undefeated but touting themselves as the best in the country.

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“People are going to say what they want,” Hart said. “They’re going to say we can’t beat the best teams. But that’s not true at all.”

On a night when nothing much was at stake except bragging rights in a Rose Bowl that meant little, the Trojans cast aside their running game after a 3-3 first half and showed the kind of offense everybody expected to see against UCLA.

But they lost that game and in doing so, any shot at the national championship.

This victory came a game too late. The Trojans will move up in the final rankings but have to watch on TV when Ohio State and Florida play in a game that most believe rightfully should have been theirs.

As consolation prizes go, the win looks good on Pete Carroll’s resume and the trophy will look good in an already crowded trophy case. But this wasn’t the ending envisioned for a team that had played for the national title in its last three seasons.

“Tonight erases everything that happened this year,” Booty said. “This was the most fun I’ve had my entire life.”

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Like his quarterback, Carroll was almost giddy about the outcome.

“This was an opportunity to kickstart what’s going on for the future,” he said. “I think we captured the night.”

The team that just manhandled Michigan will lose only seven seniors from the top 44 position players on the depth chart. The only major casualty figures to be star receiver Dwayne Jarrett, who says he still hasn’t made up his mind abut the NFL.

The mood was a lot more somber on the other side, where Lloyd Carr had to once again begin the distasteful process of figuring out why his team starts so fast and implodes just as quickly.

Carr was asked the kind of question writers love to ask, and coaches hate to answer. It began with the traditional “How disappointed are you ...?”

“How disappointed can you be?” asked Carr, before pausing for several seconds, “as disappointed as you can be.”

He didn’t like the next question much better, but at least it drew a laugh.

Carr was asked whether USC could beat Ohio State. Who better to ask than the coach who had lost his last two games to them both?

Carr, though, wasn’t biting.

“I’ll let you be the judge,” he said.

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