Disclaimer:  I get into this a bit early on but this is maybe the most packed weekend of the season for me so if you’re expecting insightful analysis about a game that was played out like “Indiana, but slightly more annoying” I don’t know what to tell you.  I promise next weekend to dedicate more time and attention to *checks schedule* … Rutgers.

 

Best:  Skipping the Opener

The past couple of years the MSU game has fallen on what I like to call “Party Armageddon” here at BronxBlue household.  October 31st remains the landing spot for Halloween, the chameleon of holidays that is a big hit with little kids and older kids for completely different reasons.  As the proud overseer of a couple of kids who fall into the prior, it has taken on a familiar tone of talking about costumes, finalizing what’s necessary for said costumes, realizing that YouTube gives children unrealistic standards for parental craftsmanship, and ultimately settling on “Sonic the Hedgehog” and “Mermaid”.  Then come the parties, the costume contests, and the trick-or-treating proper, to say nothing of stopping every 5 feet on the walk home from school to marvel at the scary decorations and animatronic serial killers that festoon houses otherwise littered with “Live, Laugh, Love” signs and other kitsch.  But that’s just the beginning of the festivities, as we have two birthday parties during the same week, necessitating between 1 and 7 days of pre-celebration, child- and adult-friendly parties, multiple visits from grandparents and friends, and usually at least one instance where I find myself calculating CPC (cupcakes per child).  This shouldn’t be misconstrued as me complaining about any of it, as it’s usually a nice time of the year weather-wise, people are happy, and unlike fall weddings, its is inevitable and unmovable so getting worked up about missing parts of a college football game because of it feels ridiculous.

Luckily this year’s game was at least at night so it didn’t directly conflict with any of the festivities but I still found myself watching the gamecast for the first quarter as I put to bed one even of festivities and prepared for the next one.  So I missed MSU’s somewhat-successful first scripted drive, the Johnson fumble, the overturned 4th-down conversion, and tuned in right when Moody kicked the first of 5(!) short-ish FGs on the day.  My first sustained introduction to the game was The Coleman Drive™ where he made a number of highly-contested catches (with the help of some pretty blatant shoves) and for a moment I was annoyed because “dumb turnovers” and “MSU WR mossing good coverage” were prominent ingredients in an upset stew.  But unlike in 2020 when Ricky White was credibly open on a number of his huge gains, this first (and ultimately only) MSU scoring drive felt unsustainable even if Coleman was going to be beastly; Green had chances to knock those balls out and at some point I assumed he would break up a couple of these throws. 

And what followed for the really the rest of the game was a slow-motion blowout, something UM has done to most of their non-baby seal opponents all year.  They aren’t built, nor predisposed, to hang 50 on you by airing it deep and trying to score quickly and in bunches.  They’re very content to mount these metronomic drives that span chunks of quarters and typically end with a handful of points and defenders looking deflated.  Then his defense quickly halts the opponent and he starts the process all over again.  It’s not unlike this:

https://twitter.com/janecoaston/status/1586543898393985025

It has to be just infuriating to experience in real life, like watching erosion create the Grand Canyon.  If you told me Michigan Stadium dropped a centimeter deeper into the ground after this game I’d believe you whole-heartedly given how monotonously efficient the team was going up and down the field (until they got to the redzone, at least).

On the day Michigan had 9 meaningful drives and they scored points on 7 of them, fumbled one away, and wound up punting for the first time since a minute and a half into the 4th quarter against Indiana back on October 8th.  The average drive length 8 plays for 46 yards, and even that’s a bit misleading since one of UM’s scoring drives came after MSU’s punter couldn’t quite save the second air-mailed snap of the game and got tackled at the 8 yard line.  Throw that out and we’re talking about these taxing, nomadic drives across the field that clearly sapped whatever spirit MSU had in them.  In that way it was like watching a boa constrictor kill it’s prey; it’s fine letting the meal struggle a bit so it can compress even tighter.  MSU on the day had 2 meaningful drives and they were able to string them along consecutively; one was the aforementioned 75-yard TD drive where Coleman made some nice catches and the other was a 10-play, 68-yard affair after Michigan regained the lead where they again went to Coleman a couple of times and were ultimately stopped on 4th-and-1 in the red zone because they ran a comically slow-developing run play after a timeout that was dead-to-rights the moment it was sent to Thorne’s helmet radio.  But after that stalled drive MSU didn’t create double-digits in yards on a drive until their final one of the game, which ended in a Rod Moore pick. 

So it felt like a return to form, a cosmic correction for the past 2 years where MSU pulled off more high-leverage moments and escaped with two victories by a combined 7 points.  Michigan was the better team in this game and it showed, and watching Michigan put this game away I harkened back, sadly to those mid-2010’s MSU/UM games where Dantonio just snuffed Michigan out for 4 quarters.  We’re talking 2013 (where Devin Gardner got sacked approximately a billion times and Michigan went 2 straight games with negative rushing totals) and 2014 (the Tent Stake game, which at one point was considered the nadir of impropriety in this series), games where MSU was clearly the superior team and proved it on the field even though UM periodically showed signs of life.  I won’t go as far as to say the rivalry is reverting to its “proper” form where Michigan looks the superior team more often than not but it does feel more like the end of the Dantonio era (when UM won 3 of 4 with ever-increasing margins of victory) than the past couple of years when unpredictability reigned.

And at the very least, next year’s game looks to be more than a week before the festivities, so that’s nice. 

 

Best:  You Can’t Beat Math

A lot has been made about Mel Tucker’s $95 million contract he signed this offseason, something between a panic move by MSU (out of some degree of legitimate fear they might lose ANOTHER coach to LSU) and a way to flex their new booster muscles.  After Tucker had initially spurned the Spartans and pledged to remain at Colorado (where he had gone 5-7), he ultimately joined MSU (with a healthy pay raise) prior to the 2020 season.  That year, for innumerable reasons, was a clusterfuck but did feature Tucker beating Michigan, a major feather in his cap given how poorly that year went overall.  2021 saw him snag the Doak Walker winner and shoulda-been Heisman finalist off the two-deep at Wake Forest and ride some close-game magic (5-1 in 1-score games) to an 11-win season and another comeback win over Michigan.  Along the way he has been lauded for his swagger, his imminent arrival, and affection for bucket hats and cigars, and there were (some) signs that his approach was working on the recruiting trail as well as the portal.  It definitely had the vibes of “fake it ‘til you make it”, but college football is filled with guys who were considered lightweights until it all clicked.  And honestly, Tucker the man doesn’t seem particularly odious, especially compared to Mark Dantonio, and far be it from me to get mad at a 50-year-old career coordinator securing the bag after a good season.

But this deal always seemed destined to underwhelm, as no matter how shiny Tucker buffed the Spartan “S” the underlying parts were still rusty.  Case in point, since 2018 (so the last 2 years of Dantonio’s run up to this year) these are the cumulative scoring margins in conference play for MSU:

• 2018: 6 (155 points for/149 points allowed)
• 2019: –60  (178 points for/238 points allowed)
• 2020: –120 (126 points for/246 points allowed)
• 2021: –8 (217 points for/225 points allowed)
• 2022: –86  (81 points for/167 points allowed)

For comparison purposes, here’s UM over that same period:

• 2018: 167 (331 points for/164 points allowed)
• 2019: 109 (287 points for/178 points allowed)
• 2020: –37 (170 points for/207 points allowed)
• 2021: 174 (349 points for/175 points allowed)
• 2022: 87 (162 points for/75 points allowed)

The stark difference in those totals highlight a couple of things about the differences between these programs but perhaps the biggest is that MSU is basically a .500 B1G team while Michigan has been played a (small) step behind OSU but otherwise has been the cream of the crop in the conference for a while.  Can MSU ride some momentum and good fortune to double-digit wins?  Sure.  But that’s incredibly hard to replicate year-over-year and all the issues you saw toward the end of Dantonio’s run (mediocre offensive line play, issues in the secondary, etc.) carried over with Tucker and, thus far, he’s struggled to really rectify them in any meaningful way.  Now, his contract affords him a healthy bit of time and opportunity to do so, but MSU isn’t in the position to vault back into the upper tier of the conference.  What that means for this series in the near term is likely more games like this one, where UM is the clearly superior team and MSU’s chances of winning rest heavily on high-leverage plays and the randomness of football.  It’s going to be annoying at times to watch but that’s the deal with rivalries, even ones that are tilting toward one side.

 

Worst:  The Tunnel

So…there was an incident in the tunnel.  Initial reporting (and I use that term loosely when considering the source) was that a “scuffle” had broken out in the tunnel between multiple UM and MSU players.  Video evidenced showed that “multiple” meant 9-on-1 and “scuffle” referred to MSU players stomping and helmet-smashing Michigan players, and as of this writing it appears MSU’s AD and Mel Tucker will be dealing with the players (4 have already been suspended) involved in an appropriate manner.  It was a scary scene to watch, and it’s no surprise that Harbaugh reported at least one substantial injury resulted from the attacks.  There’s no justifiable reason for what happened after this game, and any MSU media types or fans trying to deflect otherwise are, at best, deeply unserious people and, more likely than not, ignorant trolls.

This incident, of course, also comes on the heels of The UnCrustables Incident, in which Michigan and Penn State players got into a yelling-and-shoving-and-projectile-PBJ kerfuffle at halftime of that game.  James Franklin, never one to look an excuse for a poor performance in the mouth, lamented the fact this 100-year-old tunnel existed and somehow his Nittany Lions were drawn into a confrontation because of it.  He of course failed to note that after the game both sides sure seemed capable of co-existing in said tunnel, but that didn’t stop people who should know better repeating the idea that such violent confrontations were seemingly inevitable.  And so I’m sure there will be some convoluted effort next season to segregate the tunnel more for the two teams, giving Fox/ESPN/ABC/whomever another opportunity to sell a commercial spot during an elongated halftime. 

In a better world nothing would happen to the tunnel and teams would simply be expected to not fight like they’ve been able to (largely) accomplish since the invention of cheeseburgers and Band-Aids.  I’m absolutely one of those people who recognizes that its better to be safe than sorry in most circumstances, but at some point if the one consistent impetus behind tunnel issues (and I’m including the yelling that happened against OSU last year) is Michigan beating the snot out of land-grant colleges in the Midwest at football I’m fairly certain there isn’t a remedy on earth that’ll correct for that.  And trying to turn these issues into some systemic one inherent to Michigan Stadium’s design (which, again, is nearly 100 years old) is just theatre and absolves to a degree the actions of everyone involved.  I get an ugly incident like what happened Saturday night should be avoided at all reasonable costs but much like how studio executives tend to take the worst lessons from successful movies (famously multiple studio executives thought the success of Tim Burton’s Batman was because people liked pulpy period pieces and not, you know, fucking Batman), thinking you can stop violence between football players by keeping them slightly more separated in a hallway seems dubious.

 

Worst:  Tribalism

As an addendum to the tunnel discussion I do want to briefly touch on the dog whistling that has accompanied some of the discussion around the incident.  There is no way anyone can condone what happened, and I’m certainly not going to be one to stick my neck out to defend the MSU players’ actions.  But afterwards there was a distinct undercurrent of “classiness” vs. “thuggishness” going around what happened, with a lot of UM fans calling for criminal charges, heads on pikes, and everything else to be done to the offenders.  Now, I absolutely believe they should be punished by MSU, including but not limited to the rescinding of their scholarships if so decided by MSU and the conference.  Playing football is not an inalienable right, and being an asshole should have consequences.  But I do draw the line with those portraying them as particularly callous individuals, as some sign that MSU is making them into worse human beings than they would be otherwise.  Under Dantonio in particular I do think he pushed his players to play “dirty” on the field; his entire aura as a coach was as a raw nerve designed to make everyone around him as angry as possible.  But that hasn’t really been the M.O. under Tucker as far as I’ve seen, and if anything it felt like they tried to reign in the aggressiveness even more once MSU got called for a couple of personal fouls in this game, neither of which seemed particularly egregious. 

I’m not going to wade too deep into the Donovan Edwards situation from earlier this week but that was an incident that didn’t cast Edwards or the team in a particularly flattering light, and yet vocal chunks of the UM fanbase rushed to defend or diminish the incident for any number of reasons, some pretty dubious and troubling.  And that’s the nature of fandom to an extent; you defend the members of your tribe while vilifying others, even when objectively there’s little difference between them.  Hell, only last year Juwan Howard was involved with a fight against a rival after a dispiriting loss in which the losing team took umbrage with some late-game decisions.  I’m not trying to equate the two by any means but at some point we should all recognize that attaching too much morality to the failings of human beings in high-stress, competitive settings is the Spiderman meme on steroids.  And more generally, fanbases shouldn’t believe their schools or teams are morally superior to others because, given the horizon of time everyone ultimately winds up in the muck.  I certainly remember crowing about how nothing like Sandusky or Nassar would ever happen at Michigan until, you know, we found out it did for decades.

What happened in that tunnel is uncalled-for and the majority of people of all fandoms would agree that appropriate punishment should be meted out.  But it serves nobody any good to transform this into some greater morality play between two teams and their players, especially when the tact taken is the most reductive one possible.

 

Best:  Zoning

One of the few negatives to come out of this game offensively for Michigan was their continued “struggles” in the redzone.  On the day Michigan made 5 trips to the MSU redzone and left with 2 TDs and 3 FGs.  That came on the heels of 2 TDs in 6 redzone attempts against PSU.  The announcers noted that while such a paucity of touchdown conversions were fine in games like this they wouldn’t work against Ohio State, who are one of the most efficient offenses in the country.  And in one sense they’re right; in conference play thus far Michigan has scored a TD on 50% (12/24) of their redzone possessions while OSU is at a 75% clip (21/28).  The latter is terrifyingly efficient and big trouble for a team like Michigan that (thus far) hasn’t shown the ability to win a fire fight with a high-scoring outfit.  But dig a bit deeper and against the 3 shared opponents (Iowa, MSU, and PSU) OSU’s TD rate goes to 63% (10/16) and UM’s goes to 47% (7/15), with the main difference being OSU going 5/5 against MSU while UM went 2/5.  Michigan’s offense hasn’t been great in the redzone (and likely points to some concerns at WR and/or QB when it comes to effective operation in close quarters) but they do seem to be pretty opponent-independent when it comes to scoring near the goalline, and OSU hasn’t been quite as good against the better defenses they’ve seen this year.  Do I hope Michigan improves in that department in this second half?  Absolutely.  But I’m also not overwhelming bothered about their redzone issues moreso than I am about their offense generally.

 

Meh:  A Broken Record

I’ll keep this brief – for what feels like the umpteenth time this conference slate Michigan didn’t ask J.J. McCarthy to do a ton throwing the ball downfield and instead he operated efficient in the short and intermediate passing game while giving them a dynamic runner at the QB spot when plays break down.  His TD “pass” to Corum was basically a forward handoff but otherwise he threw the ball to a wide-open Schoonmaker (who absolutely couldn’t be covered by Jacoby Windmon or any other of the MSU defenders) or Ronnie Bell and stayed within himself.  The numbers weren’t great throwing (15/25, 167 yards, 6.7 ypa) but he managed the contest and didn’t make any mistakes, and at this point it’s becoming clear that Harbaugh and Weiss don’t want to put too much on his shoulders to drive the offense vertically if they don’t have to.  honestly, maybe my favorite throw of McCarthy’s was the one he didn’t make by trying to force a throw to a very covered Wilson on a flea flicker, instead escaping some pressure and finding Bell for 13 yards and a first down.  I do think Michigan’s passing game has struggled more during this conference slate than many expected, and part of that is probably scheme and play preference but another part may simply be that beyond Bell and Schoonmaker you don’t have a ton of consistency down-to-down.  Johnson and Wilson have looked great in spurts but particularly Johnson has had some consistency issues that have limited the team vertically. 

I got not wanting to challenge Iowa’s and PSU’s secondaries; those are elite units in college football.  But Michigan rarely went after MSU’s corners in this game despite them being objectively awful, and so it does feel intentional at this point.  I guess we’ll see if they try to spread it out more against Rutgers.

 

Best:  Adjustments

Like I mentioned up top MSU had 2.5 successful-ish drives in that first half and you could see a path wherein they stayed in the game with guys like Coleman and Reed beating UM’s secondary while holding up against the pass rush.  But as he’s done now a couple of times, Jesse Minter made adjustments in the second half and absolutely shut down MSU until the game was well in hand.  Against PSU two weeks ago it was giving up a single FG drive but otherwise shutting down the Nittany Lions, and this week it was cutting off those throws to Coleman and otherwise suffocating Thorne in the pocket.   Payton Thorne didn’t have a great game anyway but at least in the first half he was able to semi-consistently move the ball (10/13, 134 yards, 1 TD plus 1 12-yard scramble), while in the second he looked lost (7/17 for 81 yards, 1 pick, and 2 sacks).  Minter, much like MacDonald before him, seems able to make those subtle adjustments that great DCs make at halftime to make your opponent fight left-handed, and he’s doing it against a variety of teams and styles.  Hell, MSU had some early luck tempo’ing Michigan’s defense in that first half but were noticeable less successful in the second.

Given the teams coming up in the next couple of weeks it may be hard to see a ton more innovations on defense but I do have some hope that he’ll have a viable game plan for OSU at the end of the year and, perhaps more importantly, the ability to pivot and adjust as necessary.

Quick Hits:

• It’s becoming routine but Blake Corum had another monster day and further solidified his status as the best RB in the country.  He carried the ball 33 times for 177 yards and 2 TDs (on receiving) while only having a long of 17.  He also repeatedly spun, shimmied, and bounced his way to big gains against an MSU defense that set out to slow him down.  He’s already cracked 1,000 yards on the season and it’s hard to imagine him not continuing this performance against teams like Rutgers and Nebraska coming up.
• Jake Moody nailed all of his FG attempts in this game, including a 54-yarder, and it really feels like he’s going to repeat as the Garza winner, something that hasn’t happened in the award’s history.

Next Week:

It’s a road game at Rutgers.  It’s exactly as exciting as that sounds.  If you told me it was a bit of an emotional letdown for Michigan I wouldn’t be shocked, but the Scarlett Knights are a decent team who have played UM close recently.  But this still feels like a comfortable win and a game I won’t find myself staying up too late to finish watching.  Go blue.