Best:  Good Enough to Win, Bad Enough to Lose

I’ve been writing these posts for years now and the one after the first loss is always the hardest to get started.  Yes, there have been more boring games, where the outcome was given from kickoff or played out in unsurprising manner – witness last week’s NW game diary where the whole first section just chronicled the various levels of ass-kicking that occurred – but that first loss inevitably bursts the perfect bubble every fan has in his or her head of how the season might play out.  Now, objectively every fan, even those that root for the Alabama’s and OSU’s of the world, know their teams are not perfect; they all have flaws and shortcomings that, in the right circumstance against the right opponent, can be exploited in a loss.  But no matter how jaded, downtrodden you are, no matter how much you  wallow in the dark side of life and find every glass half-empty, you still know that perfection is out there, that your team’s slate remains unblemished until it isn’t.  And that’s why, in the part of your mind and heart you zealously protect from the harsh reality trying to break in every Saturday, you still watch the games and root for your team no matter the odds and revel in perfection’s survival after every win.  And in a cruel twist of fate, each time you watch your team emerge victorious you expose your soul a bit more to the world, letting the irrational optimism of fandom swirl with the part of the human condition that paints us all as the heroes of our lives’ story, and the resulting stew warms your heart for another week.  But when your team falls, as virtually every team does at least once a season, the heartbreak is that much worse because of it.

I wound up watching this game in pieces because, according to the calendar, approximately half my family has various birthday celebrations between the end of October and the beginning of November.  From child parties to family get togethers to everything in between, these these 2-3 weeks are always full of previous engagements and the attenuating pre- and post-event minutiae.  So I periodically caught pieces of the game on my phone in real time, watching UM race out to a big lead and then saw MSU claw back while the ESPN app diligently updated me about the state of affairs 15 minutes in the past.  I then re-watched the game at night, nearly breaking my DVR with how often I skipped through interminable commercial breaks.  While it’s rarely fun to do this exercise after a loss, when you can see past the misguided optimism toward the inevitable oncoming pain train and remember how you too shared it in only hours earlier, it also helps me evaluate the game with a level of dispassion one can’t have in the moment, when every high feels like cresting the mountaintop and every low feels like being stuck in line to enter Spartan Stadium. 

Both teams played well enough to win but also poorly enough to lose, and this was absolutely a meeting of two comparable teams and MSU “deserved” to win because they, in fact, did.  But as could be expected when losing to a rival, I saw a lot of fans rush to blame this loss on the coaches, the backup QB, the Fox crew and their interminable commercial breaks, and the referees and their tenuous grasp on the rulebook and camera technology without giving credit to MSU.  And that’s not fair – they weathered some early mistakes and a big deficit to come back, then held on despite UM making a gallant recovery and MSU making some mistakes that could have submarined them.  They’re undefeated for many reasons, some reproducible and some perhaps more ephemeral, but you don’t get to 8-0 without being a good team.  So credit to them.

But, and you know there’s a “but” in situations like this, I also want to make it clear that UM did play well enough in this game to win and had even a handful of breaks gone their way they would have likely emerged with a victory.  I’ll chronicle it below in more detail but Michigan did a lot of things right in this game, both offensively and defensively, that in most other contests would have led to a comfortable win.  They significantly outgained MSU offensively, picked up nearly a yard per play more, tied them in turnovers, took fewer penalties yards (with only 1 more penalty), converted at a higher rate on 3rd and 4th down (9/20 vs. 6/15), had more sacks (3 vs. 0, including 1 that was converted to a holding penalty), and picked up significantly more first downs.  Kenneth Walker had three big runs for TD (58, 23, and 27) but otherwise was largely held in check (89 yards on 20 carries), and Payton Thorne and MSU’s passing offense had sporadic success but nothing close to the barnstorm we saw last season, and Michigan only got called for one highly-questionable DPI.  Conversely, Michigan threw for a season-high 406 yards and 3 TDs on “only” 48 attempts and didn’t give up a sack, picked up another 146 yards on the ground at 4.3 ypc, and outgained the Spartans by over 150 yards total.  And beyond that, Michigan tended to answer any MSU spurt with a score or stop of their own – after MSU took a brief 14-13 lead in the 2nd quarter UM responded with 10 straight points, then when MSU tied the game at 30 UM responded with a FG AND a massive defensive stop.  It’s cliché to say but this game was much more of a heavyweight fight than, say, the PSU game from 2019 where Michigan spotted the Nittany Lions a huge lead and then had to claw their way back while PSU held on for dear life.  Both teams threw haymakers and had counters to any surge made by the other team, and in the end one came out ahead because the strictures of football require there to be a time limit.

And thus, this feels more like what the loss looks like on paper (a close road loss to a top-10 team where some weird shit went against you) than how it feels (losing to THIS TEAM for the second time in a row where some weird shit went against you).   Now, that’s undoubtedly an unpopular sentiment around these parts because this game, this coaching staff, everything over the past 15-ish years has taken on a plane load of baggage, but this isn’t a lost season or evidence that Michigan is a fraud.  Now, UM will need to rebound against three very beatable opponents coming up and not let MSU beat them twice, but I’m still more optimistic than I was coming into this year that this team isn’t going to fall into the same rut as past seasons when they hit their first roadbump.  And that’s a lot better than I thought I’d feel after this game.

Worst:  Making Plays

I’ve always been annoyed with the idea of “making plays” as an idiom surrounding sports, especially those so reliant on teamwork and synchronicity like football.  It always feels like post-hoc analysis, divining merit and morality from accomplishment when oftentimes it’s simply the binary result of any football play – a team picks up more or less yards than they needed, someone did or did not catch the ball, etc.  It’s a zero-sum game, and while it’s human nature to find narrative structure in the ebb and flow of a game sometimes there really isn’t one.  Cade McNamara “made plays” all day against the same MSU secondary that decidedly did not “make plays” until Charles Brantley “made a play” by picking off a pass.  Kenneth Walker and Andrel Anthony “made plays” more consistently (but even there you have Anthony only snagging 28 yards after halftime and Walker picking up 32 yards on 10 carries in the 1st and 3rd quarters combined), while Payton Thorne and Cornelius Johnson struggled  “making plays” but then still had moments (Thorne on his dime to Reed in the 3rd, Johnson with his 4th-down reception in traffic).  R.J. Moten “made a play” on his first-quarter interception and then didn’t “make a play” on a dropped pick in the second half, while Quavaris Crouch “made a play” on Robbins’s fake punt but was also picked on all day by Erick All.  This doesn’t mean players didn’t stand out or have atypical performances that had outsized impact on the game, only that the idiosyncrasies of the game don’t lend themselves to a tight narrative of “players” and “scrubs”.

And yet, after this game, the dominant narrative was that MSU “made plays” in the final quarter-and-a-half while Michigan didn’t, and the main evidence of that was MSU outscoring UM 23-3 over that span.  And on one hand, absolutely MSU (and more specifically Kenneth Walker, who was scintillating in that second half with 100 yards and 3 TDs) had more success offensively on the ground and were able to claw themselves back into the game after being down 30-14.  But that doesn’t mean Michigan really “crumbled” in that second half.  Consider these numbers:

• MSU’s first half:  219 yards, 6.8 ypp, 2 turnovers, 1/5 on 3rd/4th down, 40 penalty yards
• MSU’s second half: 176 yards, 5.1 ypp, 0 turnovers, 5/9 on 3rd/4th down, 35 penalty yards

Obviously the conversions on 3rd/4th down improved significantly, but compare that to UM’s numbers:

• UM’s first half:  333 yards, 8.6 ypp, 0 turnovers, 4/8 on 3rd/4th down, 31 penalty yards
• UM’s second half: 219 yards, 4.9 ypp, 2 turnovers, 5/12 on 3rd/4th down, 28 penalty yards

That certainly doesn’t look like Michigan cratered.  The yards per play dropped in the second half (a 93-yard TD throw will skew your numbers) but it was largely the same for both teams.  And even the turnovers were a bit fluky;  McCarthy’s in particular because it had virtually nothing to do with MSU (they didn’t even touch either player until the ball was out) and he was out there due to McNamara apparently being injured and under evaluation.  I know Mel Tucker said after the game he never felt his team was overmatched or out of it, but it also never really felt like they had an answer for Michigan defensively nor were they imposing their will on the Wolverines.  In fact, the only area where it felt like Michigan really hurt themselves was in responding to some tempo changes by MSU, which have been an issue for UM under Harbaugh but, I’d like to add, is consistently an issue for lots of defenses.  Don Brown, for all his warts, had a semi-functional method of addressing it by not rotating his players often and having enough positional flexibility, especially up front, to adapt without having to bring guys on and off the field.  MacDonald’s penchant for rotating guys through hurt him in those instances, but again harping too much on that failing doesn’t describe the overall contours of this game or the outcome.  MSU’s game plan wasn’t to tempo UM up and down the field and they didn’t do so in this game, even if they had some success at times doing so.

Now, the scoring difference is more stark, with UM scoring 23 in the first half and 10 in the second while MSU scored 14 and 23 in the two halves, respectively.  But MSU’s game plan was undoubtedly not to spot UM a 16-point lead and then try to come back with a couple of homerun plays surrounded by a lot of flailing about.  And we can’t even blame red-zone scoring in that second half; UM was 2-2 (including a TD) while MSU was 1-1 (with a TD), and the FG try was only considered a “red zone” possession because UM ran their 3rd-and-8 play from the 18 and came up short.  MSU never had an answer for UM’s passing attack all game, with a handful of obvious uncalled DPIs oftentimes and dropped passes being their only means of slowing them down.  For all the talk about MSU dedicating themselves to stopping the run, UM still averaged a healthy 4.3 ypc (the highest total MSU gave up all year) and gave up exactly 1 TFL for 2 yards.  Despite facing at over 50 passing plays MSU didn’t pick up a sack and only hit the UM QB twice after coming into the game one of the more sack-happy outfits in the country.  Watching the game it was hard to really pinpoint what MSU was doing “better” than Michigan beyond “Kenneth Walker”, which is obviously a hell of an ace card to play but also doesn’t feel particularly tactical unless you believe that “guy who covers up for our bad offensive line” is something Mel Tucker taught them in the offseason.

If anything, MSU tried desperately very hard to give this game away at the end.  Two MSU defenders effectively tackled Johnson on the 4th-down play, which in the same world that featured Turner being called for a DPI even though Thorne’s pass was in the dirt 2 yards in front of his receiver as he dove would have led to a penalty call and kept that drive alive.  And then after failing to pick up a first down, MSU again picked up a dumb penalty with a very late roughing-the-passer penalty on first down that got UM to midfield with a minute to go.  Those plays were equally as egregious as anything Michigan did in that 4th quarter, and yet one team suffered immensely for their mistakes while the other escaped largely unscathed.  It’s why I get tired of comments that claim a team can’t win by making mistakes in “big games” when, in fact, we just saw a team (MSU) win in a big game despite making numerous mistakes.   MSU won because they scored more points in the end and played well; the same complaints and praise would be applied in equal measures if the outcome was reversed.  This wasn’t a game where Michigan got outplayed by a superior opponent, nor scuttled against an inferior one.  It was a game where two even-ish teams played and one, through a combination of opportune play, some highly questionable officiating, and luck prevailed.  Replace “MSU” on the jersey with a half-dozen other teams and it wouldn’t feel quite to gutting, but that’s the reality. 

I’m sure there will be MSU partisans and jaded UM fans who will come across this post and rush to comment that this is all loser rationalizations, that MSU played like champions and Michigan wilted under the pressure.  They’ll point out plays where MSU did well and UM didn’t, where mistakes were made by the Wolverines and the Spartans capitalized on them.  And that because MSU scored more in the 2nd half versus the first half they deserved to win this game more, since as we all know points scored before halftime are worth less than those in the final frame.  An they’re entitled to their opinions.  But attempts to create some narrative thru line to justify the outcome, at least to me, don’t seem particularly relevant nor germane. 

Best:  (Number Like a Video) Game Manager

Coming into the game most fans and pundits assumed MSU’s defensive focus would be forcing Cade McNamara to throw more than he was comfortable with while shutting down the run.  MSU’s pass defense wasn’t particularly potent but they had collected a decent number of sacks and McNamara had come off a somewhat-shaky performance against NW.  It made sense on paper, even though McNamara had performed pretty well on the road already throwing the ball.  I was optimistic that if called upon to throw the ball, McNamara would as a complement to the rush-heavy focus of the offense. 

But even on UM’s first drive it was clear that Michigan wanted McNamara to throw the ball because they saw weaknesses in MSU’s pass defense they could exploit.  While I doubt he expected to uncork a 93-yard TD toss on his second pass of the game, from the jump McNamara threw with precision and force across the field.  In fact, Michigan wound up throwing the ball the same or more than they ran in every quarter of the game save the first, and that was likely due to the aforementioned bomb to open the scoring.  While media and fans have often speculated about the tenuousness of McNamara’s hold on the starting spot, the coaches and program have always been pretty consistent that he was the undisputed starter and have acted as such.  When he’s struggled (which to be honest has rarely happened) they’ve stuck by him, never pulling the ripcord and sending in a backup, instead usually just shifting the playcalls to simpler reads and even more rushing with Haskins and Corum.  But it’s clear that they trust McNamara to run the offense they want to run, get players in the right position, and limit mistakes while being willing to take risks when appropriate.  This has earned him the somewhat-derisive description as a “game manager”, a term that metamorphizes into a generic football jersey with names like “Dilfer”, “Collins”, “Batch” and dozens of others on the back.  They’re basic but functional, a known commodity that won’t wow you but also won’t send you spiraling into the abyss of despair.  A Chipotle in cleats.

But that has always felt short changing McNamara’s abilities.  While he’s not the most dynamic athlete or has the biggest arm, he’s also never been passive at the QB spot for Michigan.  He led UM’s comeback last year against Rutgers by playing within the offense but also willing taking shots downfield when presented.  This year the complaint has been that he does a ton of work assessing the play pre-snap but lacks the dynamic playmaking to adjust when his reads are off, but he’s also shown an adroitness at escaping pressure and finding guys downfield to keep the chains moving.  He’s certainly not perfect, and there have been times when he’s absolutely missed the optimal read for the one he identified as the best at the jump, but that’s true for virtually all QBs and, frankly, his assessments tend to be right more often than wrong.  And his production this year has come against the backdrop of losing the one known quantity (Bell) at WR in the first game of the year, forcing him to work with a somewhat rotating-door of pass catchers who all have their strengths but haven’t flashed the consistent playmaking abilities the best offenses rely upon.  The fact Blake Corum and Erick All, a RB and a TE, are two of the top 3 pass-catchers on this team 8 games into the season, highlights these inconsistencies at WR. 

And yet, McNamara had a masterful performance against State.  He threw for a career-high 383 yards on 44 attempts, throwing 2 TDs and one interception while throwing in 23 yards on the ground.  Of Michigan’s 27 first downs he was responsible for 16, including 5 of 9 3rd- and 4th-down conversions.  And he did some of his best work when under duress, from the opening TD on 3rd down deep in UM’s territory to the 43-yard strike he threw to Sainristil to get UM back on top after MSU had tied it up at 30.  And he likely would have had an even better performance had his receivers and backs not dropped some very catchable balls, including one to Corum that would have likely been a huge gainer in the first quarter and a ball to Johnson in the 4th that would have gotten UM to midfield to start their second-to-last drive. 

Now, obviously it’s one game and the output is unlikely to be duplicated (MSU’s pass defense wasn’t great and 90+ yard TDs tend to goose your numbers a bit), but if this outburst is indicative of a new level of comfort in this offense by McNamara, we might be seeing a repeat of the Jake Rudock closing stretch in 2015 where the Iowa transfer morphed from an underwhelming QB to a bomb-throwing juggernaut that had a 5-game closing stretch of 1500 yards, 14 TDs and 2 picks against a slate of teams that look a lot like the next couple of opponents on the schedule.  I’m not saying that’s likely by any means, but McNamara has looked more comfortable in this offense than early-season Rudock did, and if some of these receivers continue to emerge as playmakers (Anthony and Sainristil in particular made nice plays in this game along with Erick All) this game could be a springboard to a really nice finishing kick for McNamara and the offense.

Worst:  I Hope You Get the Plague (But Survive)

I’ve tried very hard to not blame referees for losses anymore, especially in football where even honest mistakes can have outsized impact due to the small number of possessions each team has and the (relatively) few plays that are run during them.  By its very nature football is a chaotic mess of bodies slamming into each other, men rocketing past each other at break-neck pace while trying to hold onto a wobbly, misshapen synthetic ball.  The rulebook is written with ambiguity dripping across its pages, with the unspoken understanding that you have to tolerate a certain amount of “rubbing is racing” if you want to maintain any semblance of flow and competitiveness out there instead of a series of citations being issued between moments of physical exertion.  Guys are held on almost every play, receivers and corners jostle for position, and the difference between a catch or incompletion, a first down or a turnover can hinge on the subconscious determination of a player’s momentum and body control.  Getting it “right” is impossible in that context because of the very subjectivity in a number of these determinations.

Still, it is human nature of try to make sense of chaos, and thus instant replay was introduced some years ago to help sort out those circumstances where a split-second decision based on incomplete information produced the “wrong” result.  Was the goal line stop successful or did the ball’s nose break the plane?  Was the receiver’s toe actually in as he possessed the ball, or was did the ball bobble in his hands as he slipped out of bounds?  Did a player fumble the ball or was he “down” before he lost possession?  All of these scenarios (as well as many more), often coming at critical times in the game, were suddenly made reviewable, with referees given access to numerous other angles of the play and an opportunity to take a breath and evaluate what had just happened.  The presumption remained that the initial call was the right one (likely informed in part by the fallacy that your gut instinct should be trusted), but replay gave the option to overturn or confirm the ruling if necessary.

The problem, as you have undoubtedly seen both in this game as well as numerous others, is that replay has become a crutch to “correct” plays that are already somewhat ambiguous, particularly as it comes to possession of the ball.  And what drove me insane in this game was that the referees repeatedly relied on replay to overturn their initial assumptions about possession always to the benefit of MSU.  On the day referees reviewed 6 plays involving MSU’s offense and on every one they came to the conclusion that benefitted the Spartans.  Some of them were correctly called, such as a 2-point conversion or Walker breaking the plane on a 1-yard TD, and I take little issue with the referees confirming a play that looked pretty bang-bang.  But others were far less precise.  The headliner was the overturning of a fumble by Payton Thorne that was initially called a TD recovery by UM late in the first half.  I’ve watched quite a bit of football so I’ve seen these plays numerous times, where a defender is raking his hand down on the ball as the QB is sacked and the ball pops out, and almost always barring irrefutable evidence one way or the other the referee sticks with his initial call because determining if a hand holding the ball against your body as a shin meets grass constitutes “possession” is nigh impossible even on a frame-by-frame basis.  And you could tell in the moment as they went to the replay that something was amiss because of how long they spent watching the monitor, almost seeking out evidence that the initial call was a mistake.  Even’s Fox’s rules analyst could sense the refs were trying to rewrite the play after the fact, stitching together a narrative that what everyone had just seen hadn’t happened because a shin was slightly more perpendicular to the ground in a split second.  So what could have well been a back-breaking 2-score lead for the Wolverines turned into a 70-second FG drive that pushed UM’s lead to 9 instead of 13 right before the half.

Of course, such deference to possession was not extended to Walker’s first score of the game, which featured him crossing the goal line on a long run as the ball jostled around in his grasp.  Now, I’m of the belief that was a TD because there was no irrefutable evidence of a turnover, but if ambiguity is entertained on a fumble it’s not beyond pale to apply the same logic to that TD.  Perhaps more egregiously, the referees reviewed two consecutive passes on MSU’s third scoring drive, one a pretty bang-bang catch by Reed on the sideline for a first down (though I will say MSU had earlier gotten a rather chintzy DPI on Turner on a badly-thrown ball) but the other a far more ambiguous catch by Reed the refs initially called an incompletion because the ball touched the ground as Reed put his hands under it.  I wouldn’t have been flabbergasted had the initial call been a catch and upheld, but there absolutely was not enough evidence to justify overturning the initial non-catch call.  And that seems to be a pattern with MSU in this game recently; last year’s game famously featured another non-catch that was left un-reviewed and ultimately was the deciding score in that game. 

This is not a claim of any vast conspiracy; my general assumption is that human nature mixed with garden-variety incompetence can explain a series of bad calls.  But in a game like this, where two teams are evenly matched, taking points off the board or missing obvious infractions can have a significant impact, especially when they are tilted toward one squad.  Michigan lost this game (and MSU won) for a variety of reasons beyond poor performances by the refs, but that shouldn’t absolve them either of their impact on the outcome.

Worst:  Not The Enemy

I’ve been one of the more vocal Cade McNamara fans/apologists this season; my “hot take” that he’d keep the starting spot all year (barring injury) was met with the appropriate level of sighing about what such a proclamation said about the recent state of QB1 in the Maize and Blue.  But at no point was this intended to be degrading of JJ McCarthy as the potential future star for this team, and it’s why I’ve tried to not frame the discussion of potential replacement at signal caller as a battle between foes, between good and “right” vs. bad and “wrong”, and instead about who is best suited to perform the role right now.  Both McNamara and McCarthy are competitive guys (you have to be in order to reach this level of organized football), and I’m sure both feel they deserve to lead this team and help Michigan be the best they can be.  But unlike virtually any other position on the field, where rotations are common and guys can see the field in multiple different configurations and roles without disruption to the larger machine, quarterback is generally dominated by one player who takes the bulk of the snaps and is the de facto “leader” of the offense.  Teams can and do still rotate multiple QBs in for specific plays or series, typically as a change-of-pace runner or for a particular package, but as the saying goes, if you have two QBs you don’t really have one.

That said, Michigan has made a point this year of integrating J.J. McCarthy into the offense pretty consistently.  Early on he mostly came in as the backup, taking the reins during blowouts and playing like a 5* true freshman with a cannon for an arm.  But as the year has gone on, you’ve seen him rotate in as a running QB with moderate-but-promising success, though he still wasn’t often asked to pull the trigger throwing the ball.  But starting 2 weeks ago against Nebraska I mentioned that in order for McCarthy to continue to be a weapon in this offense he needed to be a passing threat as well, someone who DCs had to account for and not simply instruct defenders to crash down on the minute the ball was snapped.   In this game, McCarthy took that next step by being a very real dual-threat player, expertly finding Andrel Anthony in the endzone to put the Wolverines back ahead late in the 2nd quarter.

But sadly, that won’t be the play fans will remember from this game; instead, it’s the two fumbles in the 4th quarter, the latter being recovered by MSU and setting up the game-winning TD.  As noted above, he was out there because McNamara was apparently being evaluated medically, and so this was in fact not an instance where a coach was trying to be “cute” for its own sake.  But even if McNamara had been available, giving McCarthy more plays wouldn’t have been indefensible, especially in this context where he was running the read option just like he had for the entire year.  This wasn’t some “gimmicky” play that McCarthy wasn’t comfortable with, nor did MSU really do anything to disrupt the play.  Clearly McCarthy didn’t handle the exchange properly but AFAIK he hadn’t fumbled it in any game up to that point, and I’m off the mindset that you can “send a message” to a player on the sidelines and show confidence you have in him (and your team) by having him run a play he’s comfortable with the next time up.  The fact it turned disastrous makes it a hard pill to swallow, but it doesn’t change the fact that it was a perfectly reasonable play to call in the moment.

Now, the hope going forward is that McCarthy (and the Michigan team in general) can be goldfish and learn from these missteps without lingering on them.  Because despite how the day ended, this was a game in a very hostile environment, against a rival, where McCarthy played a key role in putting UM in a position to win, and I fully expect him to be used even more in those circumstances moving forward.  McNamara has proven himself the starter going forward but McCarthy has similarly shown he can be a valuable asset to this offense and this team needs both of them to be at the top of their games in order to realize this squad’s fullest potential.

Meh:  A “Good” 37 Points

I’ll admit to not really having a good take on the defense.  On the one hand, Kenneth Walker picked up nearly 200 yards on 23 carries and scored 5 TDs.  That’s the one guy on MSU every team has to account for, and as we saw with IU and Nebraska solid tackling at the point of attack can significantly blunt his effectiveness.  In this game Walker broke a number of big TD runs, oftentimes because multiple defenders failed to tackle him when given opportunities before he could break into the open field.  And while I noted above I don’t think those breakdowns were due to MSU’s sporadic deployment of tempo, it absolutely hurt on a couple of runs that UM seemed caught out-of-position as MSU ran the play before the defense was fully set.  But at the same time, Michigan still held a team averaging 450+ yards a game to barely 400 and did so despite the aforementioned ref show robbing them of a defensive TD.  It’s hard to tell how much new stuff MSU cooked up in the bye week for UM because unlike during the Dantonio era MSU didn’t make it blindingly obvious when they’d trot out some new wrinkle like a delayed FB go route or a triple option, but they absolutely had a game plan to attack UM’s corners and linebackers in space and were more frustrated than they likely expected with their ineffectiveness.  In all honesty, most of Walker’s biggest runs were the result of his own elite talents, such as his complete reversal on a stopped TD run or his ability to evade a safety’s grasp on the game-winning score.  Those were more great individual plays by a great player than plays designed to exploit UM’s defensive shortcomings, and despite it all Michigan still nearly prevailed. 

The biggest concern coming out of this game remains the fact that UM’s defensive rotations to counter tempo weren’t effective, and are likely a by-product of MacDonald being a first-time DC having to deal with the wrinkles of college offenses.  The penalties you saw in this game for illegal substitutions and the breakdowns are a cost of the transition away from Don Brown, and while you’d obviously not like to pay them they feel, on whole, to be worth it because otherwise the defense played reasonably well.  The corners held up very well against two big-play receivers; the DPI on Turner was exceedingly weak and the two longest completions of the game were on a clever 4th-down conversion to Nailor and the absolute dime to Reed on 3rd down over the outstretched hand of Dax Hill.  The latter was just a great throw, really the one good one from Thorne all day, and sometimes just happens.  But Hutchinson and Ojabo were unblockable and the defensive line in general consistently reset the line of scrimmage.  I do think the non-Ross LBers will come in for some minuses but are to be expected to a degree. 

So on one hand Michigan could have played better defensively, especially with respect to Walker, and UM would have left EL with a comfortable win.  But on the other hand this wasn’t a game where MSU dictated play and the defense was left catching up, even in the second half when MSU got into a groove offensively.  I’m very interested to see how it grades out in the UFR and how it responds against IU this weekend.

Quick Hits:

1. A lot has been made of UM’s struggles converting TDs in the redzone; they came into the game  converting only 61% of their red zone trips into TDs, which was 66th in the country.  That’s about average in college football, though we’re talking a very narrow band here; if Michigan had scored 3 more TDs out of their 33 red zone possessions they’d be tied with UCLA at 33rd, and if you think back over this year you absolutely remember situations in blowouts or egregiously bad calls on the goal line where UM could have picked up these TDs with minimal difference in effort.  But regardless, the fact remains that 7 > 3 and Michigan is one of the most field goal-friendly teams in the country, so in a high-scoring game like this every missed opportunity to score a TD can be amplified.  But even in this game a couple of red zone possessions only materialized because UM would break into the 20 on 3rd-down or, in the case of the final drive of the first-half, had to go 75 yards in about 70 seconds with only TO and found themselves with limited options once they got close to the goal.  That doesn’t mean UM shouldn’t have been more efficient in scoring TDs when given the opportunity, but that focusing on what a team does between the 20s isn’t particularly illuminating out of context.
2. Andrel Anthony had a fantastic game and I hope continues to do so going forward.  I’ve often lamented the fact that the receivers haven’t been great at bailing out their QBs with tough catches this year, so it was great to see Anthony fight for balls in traffic (including McCarthy’s TD throw) while also flashing speed in the open field.  Cornelius Johnson struggled a lot in this game and Baldwin didn’t chart at all, so if Anthony is starting to realize some of the offseason hype around him that would be a welcome addition.

Next Week:  IU

It’s apparently going to be a night game at 7:30 on Saturday on Fox, meaning there’s a good chance it’ll be Sunday before the game ends.  Don’t expect a particularly robust write-up as a result.  My hope is that UM bounces back and grinds out a win against a Hoosiers team without anything to play for and continues to build on the offensive growth they showed in this game.  There are still some goals within reach this season but they hinge on beating teams like IU, Maryland, and PSU first.  Picking up a win this week and not dwelling on this game again has to happen.