[NOTE: This article has been updated to reflect news that Cade McNamara was in the injury tent and was thus unavailable when the second JJ McCarthy fumble occurred]

Many reading this game recap are from the state of Michigan. Many of those from the state of Michigan are fans of the Detroit Lions. Others are too ashamed to describe themselves as fans of the Detroit Lions, but at least are cognizant of the Lions and the familiar arc that their games unfold in. Your author is perhaps one of the most diehard Lions fans you’ll ever meet, and to him, this outcome is all too familiar. Boneheaded mistakes from players and poor coaching decisions let a winnable game slip through the jaws of victory and into the chasm of defeat on Saturday afternoon, all of which was accentuated by (at times) bafflingly one-sided calls from the officiating crews. The Michigan Wolverines were the Detroit Lions today, and in the process, they dropped a game in East Lansing to rival Michigan State 37-33.

The contest got off to a promising start. Michigan held MSU off the scoreboard on the opening possession and then a 93-yard catch and run by Andrel Anthony put Michigan up 7-0. Two more failed Spartan possessions later, the latter of which ended on a Mike Morris INT, and Michigan found themselves at the 35-yard-line. The Wolverines drove into the Red Zone but stalled out in part due to a holding penalty on Cornelius Johnson. A Jake Moody FG put Michigan up 10-0.

MSU answered in a hurry, marching down the field and Kenneth Walker III ripped a 27-yard TD run on a clever cutback. Michigan answered but again saw a long drive stall at the 22, and Jake Moody threaded another FG through the uprights to make it 13-7. In the blink of an eye, Michigan State came right back. A brilliant call on 4^th & 1 at midfield saw Michigan bite hard on play-action and Jalen Nailor hauled in a forty-yard passing play. The Wolverines, who seemed as confused as a bear trying to be taught English when it came to the concept of up-tempo football, attempted to substitute their DT’s while MSU substituted no one, allowing the Spartans to get a play off before Michigan was set and Walker cashed it in to give MSU their first lead, 14-13.

Michigan’s answer over the final 7.5 minutes of the first half was terrific. They scored a TD on an incredible Andrel Anthony jump ball reception, saw a David Ojabo strip sack end an MSU drive, and then a two-minute drill got Moody in position for a 35-yard FG to make it 23-14 Michigan at the break.

The second half’s first 10 minutes continued to go Michigan’s way. Though their first possession stalled on a bad false start penalty, followed by a botched punt, they got off the field on defense, and then saw Cade McNamara, who was in a groove, hit Mike Sainristil for a TD, 30-14 Michigan.

The Spartans responded with a long drive that faced 4^th & 5 from the 30, potentially with the game on the line. Payton Thorne delivered the best throw made by anyone all game, a dime into the hands of Jayden Reed, over the outstretched Daxton Hill, down to the one. Walker punched it in, and a catch by Mosley got MSU the two, 30-22.

The flurry continued after the worst Michigan drive of the game, and then the Spartans again marched down the field, converting a pair of 3^rd downs and then seeing Walker get loose for a 57-yard run off an up-tempo play. A picture-perfect jump ball to Jayden Reed over DJ Turner, who provided good coverage, brought MSU all the way back and tied it at 30.

Michigan came back with a bomb to Mike Sainristil, but the drive ran into trouble after a JJ McCarthy fumble rolled out of bounds and set Michigan back behind the sticks. Moody’s 36-yard FG made it 33-30 Wolverines. MSU’s next drive was a disaster for the Spartans, as a pair of sacks from Aidan Hutchinson and David Ojabo forced a quick punt, and a good return from Henning got the ball to the 45. Michigan had the ball up 3 with 7:12 to go and good field position, potentially a TD away from putting the game in a stranglehold.

That’s when the van hit a pothole, careened off the road, and went over the cliff.

The opening play of the drive, a JJ McCarthy zone read, which had already produced a fumble on the last time it was used, produced another one. This time, the Spartans snagged it, giving them great field position. A quick holding call seemed to give Michigan a window to stop the momentum, but a devastating offsides on Mike Morris before a huge 3^rd & 9 made the down and distance more manageable. A Walker wildcat converted. Another incomprehensible illegal substitution penalty later and Walker scampered 23 yards for a TD. 37-33, Spartans.

Michigan wasn’t technically dead yet, as there were a full 5 minutes remaining in the contest. The next drive did not go well for Cornelius Johnson, dropping a possible 30-yard pass and then dropping another after he failed to run a route past the sticks. Michigan dialed up a ballsy 4^th & 4 play on their own 32-yard line, without much reason to believe they needed to go for it, and McNamara dropped a dime in to Sainristil.

From there Michigan marched down the field, setting up a 3^rd & 3 with 1:52 left. McNamara targeted an open Sainristil but just missed him down the sideline, a puzzling decision given the ease to which Michigan was converting throws underneath. The 4^th down pass was incomplete to Johnson on a controversial no-call (more on that later) and Michigan turned it over.

Again, the Wolverines were not dead. They stuffed Kenneth Walker and Payton Thorne’s rushing attempts three times, used all three time outs, and got the ball back on their own 33 with 75 seconds left. A quick roughing the passer moved the ball out close to midfield, and that’s when McNamara forced a ball into Schoonmaker, and an unbelievable one-handed grab by Charles Brantley intercepted it and ended the game. 

[AFTER THE JUMP: Mulling over a spear to the heart]

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There are a lot of things to say about a game of this nature. Michigan led by 16 with 21.5 minutes to go, but it’s also incorrect to say that Michigan definitely had it in the bag at that point. Michigan State’s big play offense always left the window open to a charging comeback. Michigan’s problem was doing too many things to help open that window further. A drop on a potential huge play by Blake Corum early on and failing to score a TD on their first red zone trip stand out in the memory. So does the Schoonmaker false start on what was going to be an easy 4^th & 1 conversion early in the second half.

The bigger mistakes came much later. The 4^th & 5 completion to Reed was backbreaking, but there also wasn’t much Michigan could do about that. A perfect pitch and a perfect catch by two important players. Far more important was the consecutive McCarthy fumbles. The use of the package made little sense in this game to begin with, given the way MSU had keyed in to stop the run and the way McNamara was dissecting the Spartan pass defense with ease. The decision to take your best offensive player off the field when you enter the red zone felt like Galaxy Brain-ing it, and though Michigan got saved by the first fumble going out of bounds, it set them behind the sticks and stalled a drive that was moving with ease when McNamara was in the game.

And then the second fumble was devastating. We have since learned that McCarthy had to be in the game due to McNamara dealing with an injury, but the fumble didn't make any one feel better. Still, we cannot be too tough on McCarthy, and Michigan fans would be best served online by letting the young QB know they support him, rather than berating him. Just ask a Toronto Maple Leafs fan how abusing a player on social media after a crucial mistake has affected the psyche of said player.

The fumble was most consequential, but mistakes kept coming in the second half and most players on the field were to blame for something. Cornelius Johnson’s poor performance in this game (multiple drops and a holding) hurt, as did the Morris offsides. For the record, my blame game money is most on the coaches, not just for using the McCarthy package, but for the disaster that was Michigan’s defensive substitutions. At this point, we might as well accept that Jim Harbaugh’s defense will never be able to properly adjust to an opponent going up tempo, much the way that your author accepted at age 13 that he would never be 6’0” tall.

Tempo has been a problem every year of the Harbaugh era, and this was just the most putrid example. Being unable to keep up with the opponent’s pace of play, when it was clearly on film, is terrible coaching. Yet continuing to try and sneak substitutions on, when all it is producing is confused linemen and three illegal substitution penalties, is unforgivable. Michigan needed to make a decision early about either ceasing to substitute when the Spartans weren’t (which was the correct answer) or deciding to take a timeout every time they were caught with too many men. But letting your players not get set up before they have to face Kenneth F***ing Walker III is coaching malpractice 101.

Of course, no Detroit Lions Special is complete without at least a couple devastating refereeing gaffes, and it is simply impossible to discuss this game without talking about the officiating. Though your author was once the sort of “whine about refereeing all the time” fan when he was in his teens, he has since aged into a calmer and fairer observer, and friends and family can attest to that. Perhaps a summer attempting to umpire middle school baseball has given me appreciation for just how difficult the job is. I acknowledge that trying to referee football in the modern day, when the players move at lightning speed and the rule book is more difficult to understand than a late-career Stanley Kubrick film, is nearly impossible. We shouldn’t hope for 100% accuracy, but the expectation should be for a roughly balanced game that gets most all of the obvious stuff right.

You need not be a Michigan partisan (in this case, my uncle who attended neither school, rarely watches college football, and lives in Iowa) to deem that the aforementioned expectation is not what happened in this game. Several hugely crucial calls went against the Wolverines that added significant win probability to the Spartans. The first was a strip sack fumble on Thorne when the game was 20-14 by David Ojabo, which was recovered in the end zone for a TD. Referees inexplicably overturned the call on the field and ruled Thorne down, taking points off the board and ultimately representing a four-point swing as Michigan got only a FG on the subsequent drive.

My informal survey of Twitter (probably 50% Michigan fans, 20% MSU fans, and 30% neutral) was something like 80% for “leave the call on the field” and 20% “OVERTURN.” I think you could make a case there wasn't indisputable evidence to overturn the call if Thorne was ruled down on the field. But he wasn't; the call on the field was the same call that was most apparent on review, and there is no argument that I’m willing to consider legitimate that there was indisputable evidence that his shin went down before the ball came out.

The second most crucial was on Michigan’s turnover on downs on the second to last drive, when a 4th & 3 slant saw Johnson get sandwiched by a pair of MSU defenders before the ball was there, one of the more obvious DPIs you will ever see, but no flag came. If assessed, Michigan would’ve had a fresh set of downs inside the MSU 30 to win the game. Game-altering.

Other fans will cry for Michigan to have gotten more holding calls, and there’s no question that there probably should have been. I am slightly less sympathetic to that argument overall because the fact is, this is college football: elite pass rushers like Aidan Hutchinson get held on nearly every play but the flag comes 1 out of every 10 times, because the game would be unwatchable if you refereed it correctly. Much the same way that Connor McDavid could draw 15 penalties per game in the NHL, but he gets maybe 1-2 calls, because the game would be so lopsided and hard to watch if it were called correctly. This same phenomenon happened three years ago with Rashan Gary. Sure, there probably should’ve been an extra flag or two even using CFB ref standards, but if you were hoping for 5-8 extra holding calls, it was never going to happen, because the NCAA has collectively decided that the referees are the mechanism with which to level the playing field between elite pass rushers and leaky linemen.

The referees decided the game, in the sense that if you flip those two calls, Michigan wins. On the other hand, if Michigan simply played as crisp, error-free, and dynamic as MSU did in the final 21.5 minutes, they would’ve won going away, referees notwithstanding. Some Wolverines did play impeccably: I thought coverage was uniformly very good, Andrel Anthony was a stud, and Cade McNamara had the game of his life, but too often MSU’s players made plays and Michigan’s didn’t.

Reed, Thorne, and Walker all were money for the Spartans in the game’s final 21.5 minutes, while Michigan turned it over twice, saw a potential interception glance off the hands of RJ Moten, in addition to the litany of other errors and coaching mishaps I have outlined. I said in FFFF that Michigan State beat Miami, Nebraska, and Indiana by letting the opponent beat themselves. Michigan beat themselves and will join that list.

Michigan fans believed after Nebraska that this year would be different, that if when matched with a reasonably similar team, the Wolverines could find the killer instinct and pull it out. That belief crumbled like a house of cards in the wind over about an hour of real time this afternoon, and again here we are to pick up the pieces of a “shoulda won” game, just like 2016 Iowa/OSU, 2017 MSU/OSU, 2018 ND, and 2019 PSU before us. It’s hard to believe at this juncture that it’s ever going to change. The Jim Harbaugh era has not been nearly as inept as the 60-year arc of the Detroit Lions, but in the aftermath of these kinds of finishes, it’s often impossible to tell which football team from the state of Michigan is on the field.

The Wolverines have dropped their second straight to MSU and fall to 7-1 on the season. They will host Indiana next week. A time for that game is still pending.