McNamara finally pulled one and got a hilariously easy run to set up 1st and goal for his trouble. Can we please see that like 3-4 more times a game? I mean, if you aren’t going to use his arm, may as well force teams to play Haskins honest up the middle.

I’ll look to dissect this game later in the week, when I’ll wonder how concerned I should be about the passing game.

Right now, I’m just enjoying the win.  And being happy once again that we don’t look anything like last year.  (Last year can rot in hell!).

Major kudos to the big house crowd.  They were absolutely incredible on TV. 

One word. Sludgeball. I’ll take a 3 touchdown win, but boy, it didn’t make me less nervous about the rest of the schedule. We need a more diverse offense to beat teams from THIS century.

I read somewhere that Washington has the longest streak in the country of holding teams below 35 points. We did not officially get there (Haskins obvious TD on 4th and goal makes it 38) due to yet more incompetent refereeing but it was close while the game was not. We beat a solid team handily yet all anyone can focus on is the passing game.  

Sure, it needs some polish but we did quite well last week through the air and winning convincingly, with a ton of big time recruits in attedance, matters more than the style in which the beatdown was delivered. Washington has one of best secondaries in the country. We played with a lead all game. There was no need to try anything fancy. Next week there should be ample time to get some kinks worked out, while giving a lot of our (still) young talent some much needed reps and confidence. 

Strangest 31-10 game I can remember. Even after the game was no longer in doubt I was still frustrated with the game plan. It doesn't help that we saw Oregon run the offense we thought we were getting when we hired Gattis and beat OSU at their place. Just weird.

Two wins. Both by significantly more points than what was expected...so certainly there are reasons for optimism.

Michigan is re-establishing an identity on offense, which isn't a bad thing, even if it isn't the offense that some people had hoped for... We will have to see how they adapt when other teams are able to stop the run.

Good win, start working towards next week.

These dudes want to kick some ass this year. I love the attitude. 

My biggest takeaway was the crowd looked absolutely incredible from TV. So good to have the stadium experience back to normal. 

Just win baby 

I can't reconcile my thoughts. Michigan's lack of a passing attack will probably be an issue at some point. Maybe the loss of Ronnie Bell is going to take a bit to get past.

But damn it if that wasn't the most brutal rushing attack I have ever witnessed. It was cool, and then it was boring and then it was kind of beautiful. 

My gripe isn't the balance of rushing vs throwing, or lack thereof. My issue is once again the two phases seem still disconnected. With how bad we were smoking them on the ground, you'd think when we needed a first down and did throw it would be set up off the rushing success with play action or at least vaguely the same formations. Seemed like we went empty backfield a ton and telegraphed passes and even with a back in, there wasn't really much to get the LBs and Safeties to bite. 

So......Others Receiving Votes this week???  /s

Even the refs were falling forward for a few yards.

If anyone cares to notice Harbaugh's pressers have struck a different tone. In the past he has seemed overly content in the face of issues. These last two he has mentioned that the team shouldn't get satisfied, and with regard to the run heavy approach it seemed like that was a Washington specific thing. Was it frustrating to watch at times? Yeah. This feels both familiar and different to me. I think they're going to improve while remaining weak in some areas. I think the energy is different team wide and that this has potential to be a special year.

Keeping it on the ground worked and won. Not that that goaline turnover on downs didn’t abraise me, but that instance of ground failure felt like the outlier tonight. Mike Hart’s contribution this season is welcome. Let’s ramble past fools every week and maybe throw when we feel like the situation demands it. 

With the offense seemingly getting 4-5 yards every run, Harbaugh and the coaching staff seemed to decide to take a sure W against a P5 opponent and to figure out this whole passing game without Ronnie Bell thing another week.... Hard to argue, he's put there to win games and he took the most obvious route to a W with the least downside given that it didn't involve running the same freshman back coming off a knee injury 32 times into a packed line....Defense looked iffy late when Hutchison looked gassed on their quick TD drive and the one after, offense had a chance to put the game away there but went three and out with barely a minute off the clock.... That was the worst sequence of the game but it still left UM up 14...

Ground and pound into oblivion.

More negativity in the posts thus far than I expected.  I don't care that we didn't throw the ball in this one.  I absolutely loved the physical anger that the team played with tonite, on both sides of the ball.  It reminded me a bit of when Wisconsin ran it down our throats over and over and over...  I'm sure the Washington fanbase is not talking about how they shut down our passing game, but rather melting down about how we straight ran it down their throats for 4 qtrs.  

It was a good win with all three phases looking sharp.  There have been so many upsets in the first two weeks, so starting out 2-0 and looking solid doing it is a position that a lot of fanbases wish they had right now.  

Also, Hutchinson is Legit AF.     

minor quibble, about 20 of Washington's yards were absolute bullshit since the clock expired before their last play of the half and should have been blown dead

I'm of two minds here.

First, if an opponent is giving up 5-8 yards per rush and not scoring their own points, why do anything else?

Second, though, is that we've seen for years under Harbaugh that he DOESN'T sandbag the offense. That what you see every week is what the team is capable of doing, and that he does not have a Ferrari in the garage. 

I remember saying that if harbaugh was going down that he should/would transition back to his roots. I want Michigan to throw the ball, but he made his name running the ball, and he’s on a short leash. I get it.

I agree that they need to throw more. On some clips by JDue it looks like Cade missed a couple of guys early. But yes, agree that PA that works with this running game would be awesome! Gattis needs to figure out how to leverage that.

that said, this was the durkin defense against OSU. Even when Michigan was up 24-10 and clearly never passing, Washington kept that safety 15-20 Yards back. I don’t know what they were thinking. 
 

last, I love how much the defense rotates this year. I hated that under DB, who I liked, that they played guys until late in the fourth to preserve shut outs. It’s fun to be on the field. I like that they are getting linemen in and out 

All we did was what Wisconsin did to us back in 2010.  When Monte Ball and James White had basically carried the ball every play of the second half and beat Michigan 48-28.  They ran the ball on EVERY play in the second half and still scored 24 points.  Why challenge to top corners when you can basically control the clock and the pace of the game by averaging 6 yard a carry.  

Offense played some bully football tho, which is fine by me. And, there were some pretty bad breakdowns in pass pro along the way. I recall a Haskins whiff that left Cade quite vulnerable. Pass pro and pocket creation need to stabilize for the passing game to improve. And we do miss Ronnie!