Wikipedia has the AP and Coaches' Polls week-by-week.
In the AP, we were #1 starting week 12, after moving to 9-0 by beating then #2 Penn St @ Penn St, 34-8; Nebraska had been #1, but eked by Mizzou in the Flea Kicker game, in which they should have lost. From Weeks 14-16, we had 69 First Place Votes and Nebraska had one (1). After Bowl Week, in the AP, we had 51 1/2 First Place votes and Nebraska had 18.
In the Coaches', Florida State was still ahead of us after the Penn St game, until Week 14, when they lost. After Week 14 our regular season was done. Prior to Bowl Week, we had 53 1/2 First Place Votes and NE had a measly 8 1/2. After the Bowl game, it was 32-30 in favor of NE. Wowza.
"In the final Coaches Poll of the 1997 season, Nebraska leapfrogged Michigan to secure a share of the national championship, making it the 3rd split championship of the 1990s.[19] Eight coaches split their first-place votes, with a final tally of 32 first-place votes for Nebraska and 30 for Michigan."
- link to the article is dead, so I can't see if there's any more information on who voted which way.
Pathetic.
Here's what Lloyd Carr had to say about it (this was in 2014):
?
I got a phone call the day after Nebraska played Tennessee (in the Orange Bowl), and I had stayed in Los Angeles (after the Rose Bowl) for recruiting, and I got that phone call that said ?coach you just won the national championship from The Associated Press,? ? Carr recalled in a television interview, according to MLive.com. ?And I knew, based on what we had done (that we would win the AP national title), and I fully expected to win the coaches? vote.?
"(But) it was explained to me that we had lost and the way the balloting ended up, one coach voted us fourth or two coaches voted us third,? Carr explained. ?I didn?t tell the team that, I didn?t want them to dwell on negatives. But I was extremely bothered by it and I still am.?
As far as I can tell,
this is all Tom Osbourne said about it:
"
We were undefeated, and Michigan was undefeated, and we very badly wanted to play Michigan and we were pretty much a free agent and able to move at that time, but Michigan had contractual obligations with the Rose Bowl," Osborne told Sirius XM radio recently. "So as the champion in the Big Ten they had to go to the Rose Bowl and they couldn?t? play us. We weren?t allowed to go to the Rose Bowl at that time.
"I think those kinds of scenarios led to the BCS and the desire to get 1 and 2 together.
That same article has Scott Frost's whiny quotes. Sounds like he already knew the AP vote favored Michigan, and so was lobbying coaches, specifically ACC and SEC coaches.