There's a lot of wishful thinking in college sports, which is generally pretty cool and good! I want to see various annoying football teams crash and burn at the hands of the Buckeyes, and one thing that helps me sleep better than a kitten with a belly full of warm milk is the mental picture of the Michigan Wolverines losing by 50 to the Buckeyes.
Where things go awry is when the sports media, ostensible truth-tellers of the sporting world, start hoping they can speak preferred outcomes into existence to make fanbases feel better. For a long time, that's what some Michigan Wolverine "insiders" have been doing, and that makes it hard to take anything else they say seriously.