Games that end when this one did (practically Sunday) always necessitate a shorter-than-average B&W discussion.  Hopefully I can expound a bit on some of these topics next week when (I presume) the noon game against NIU ends at a reasonable hour.

Best/Worst:  Stop Making This Hurt

There was a moment in Michigan’s first drive of the second half that was a microcosm of how this game must have felt for the Huskies.  Michigan had already run the ball 24 times for 165 yards (a healthy 6.9 ypc average) and had thrown the ball 10 times for 30 yards (a “did they lose the page of the playbook that described the forward pass” 3 ypa), and was holding 10-point lead that should have been 17 had college football stopped relying almost exclusively on the eyesight of 50+ year old lawyers and financial advisers who moonlight as conference referees.  A vocal smattering of Michigan fans had booed the predictable playcalling, and I have to assume that a key part of  Washington’s halftime adjustments was shifting formations and bringing safeties even closer to the line in order to dissuade Michigan from running the ball.  Even people who were very much content with the first-half playcalling (I count myself in that group) likely assumed Michigan would be forced, whether by gameplay circumstance, expected adjustments to counteract the UW defense, or sheer human nature to seek out variety, would switch up the playcalling a bit and maybe throw the ball around a couple of times.  It would be like making a full song out of a single riff – it’s gotta be unlistenable.

You would, of course, be wrong in this assumption –  we’ve got popular one-riff songs and Michigan proceeded to run the ball 7 straight times for 73 yards and a TD that felt like the end of the game with a half to play.  First it was Haskins just grinding forward for 4 yards, 4 yards, then ripping off a 20-yarder and then a run featuring him (and the rest of the line) turning a 6-yard run into 11 through sheer spite.  Corum followed that up with runs of 17, 6, 4, and 7 for a TD, each one featuring clockwork line blocking and surgical running.  By the end you could tell the Washington Huskies run defense was done – Haskins and Corum were both at or past 100 yards on the ground and were seemingly only getting stronger, and Michigan had effectively put the playcall on the Jumbotron to start the half and dared Washington to do something about it and they couldn’t.   Washington’s defense was bloodied and bruised, and I can only imagine they sat on that sideline silently wincing at the prospect of another 4-5 drives of large men running into them with little reprieve.  Even though Washington responded with a FG and a TD on the subsequent drives, Michigan was never seriously challenged from that point on.  the Huskies looked physically beaten at that point, not unlike Michigan teams of yore where the defense had fought valiantly to protect a flimsy offense but had run into a force they couldn’t contain.  Michigan followed that series up with another 14-play, 75-yard TD that featured exactly 1 ball thrown downfield and another 10-play, 56 yard TD drive without a pass, but those were mere emphasis on a statement already made. 

Michigan’s gameplan coming into the game was to run the ball as effectively as they did against WMU despite the jump in competition; they clearly didn’t want to throw the ball if they didn’t need to.  That made a fair bit of sense – UW’s collection of corners, headlined by Preseason All-American Trent McDuffie, are very good – and Michigan was already down the only established receiver they had in Ronnie Bell.  I’m also not sure how confident they were about the receivers and/or McNamara’s ability to get the ball to them against this defense.  They threw a couple of times early on with middling success – one long throw down the sideline featured Gordon in-step with Roman Wilson and the only long completion was a throw to Johnson that either he or McNamara didn’t run completely right because Johnson had to hit the brakes (with the corner stumbling past him) to pull it in.  But otherwise they didn’t try to test the ball downfield and my assumption is that once it was clear Washington couldn’t slow down Michigan on the ground any plans to continue pushing the ball downfield were shelved. 

That clearly drew the ire of some fans and I get it to a degree – watching a team play a style of football that doesn’t look like other top teams right now can be depressing after 6 years of hearing about how innovative Harbaugh and co. were going to be, and there remains the fog of uncertainty surrounding how UM will respond when they inevitably face a team that they can’t run for 6+ yards per carry against.  But right now Michigan has an identity, a style that suits them well offensively, and worrying about how they will respond when it stops working doesn’t feel particularly useful.  We’ll know it when we see it, and so will the coaches and players. For now, though, Michigan is currently 5th in the country in yards rushing and yards per carry and 4th in yards per game.  And unlike the other top teams in that ranking (Florida, Auburn, MSU), they’ve done so against at least one team with a good defense.  So I don’t know what the future holds for Michigan on the ground (I’m going to safely assume they won’t keep averaging 340 yards a game on the ground), but thus far it doesn’t look half-bad.

Best:  Actual Thunder with Realistic Lightning

The first time I ever heard two running backs referred to as “Thunder and Lightning” was when Ron Dayne and Tiki Barber were both on the Giants.  Ron Dayne had been one of greatest running backs, at least statistically, in college football history, rushing for 2000 yards twice in 4 years and winning the Heisman as a senior.  Like most Wisconsin backs of that era he was a large man, purportedly over 250 lbs as a senior and probably more than that during his NFL career.  He was, at least in form if not function, a thunderous man to run into. And Tiki Barber was the “lightning” in that backfield, at least 50 pounds lighter than Dayne despite both being 5’ 10”.  Dayne was supposed to tenderize the defense so that Barber could come in and take the top off with his speed, and to a degree that’s how it worked early on.  Dayne ran for over 700 yards his rookie year while Barber eclipsed 1,000 for the first time in his career, and even though Dayne struggled to 3.4 ypc while Barber averaged 4.7, you could see how this combination of power and speed could work.  But Dayne was never in good shape and fell off while Barber emerged as one of the better backs of his era, retiring near his peak in 2006 due to exhaustion and a desire to explore career options off the field which, hilariously, included watching the Giants beat the previously undefeated Patriots for the title the very next year. 

But since then I have heard this term for a multi-back backfield used to describe everything from the Ronnie Brown/Cadillac Williams backfield on Auburn’s undefeated 2004 team to the Reggie Bush/LenDale White USC juggernaut to Georgia’s 2017 three-headed monster.  Heck, Michigan got into the act a couple years ago with De’Veon Smith and guys like Justice Hayes and Drake Johnson.  It doesn’t always work out (usually because one player is way more effective than the other), but when it does you can have some absolutely electric backfields.  I know it’s only been two weeks, but thus far the combination of Hassan Haskins and Blake Corum feels like we might be seeing another storm set in.  Both of Corum and Haskins are in the top 75 nationally in terms of ypc (and Corum is #20), and both of them are in the top 25 for total rush yards.  Corum has clearly emerged as one of the top home-run threats in college football this year with his combination of speed and power while Haskins has been the workhorse, carrying the ball 40 times while showcasing quick feet, a powerful running style, and an adroit ability to find holes in the defensive line.  Now, there’s definitely overlap in their games; Corum is 200 lbs and can run through tackles with the best of them while Haskins can smoke defenders in space, and we’ve already seen Haskins’s penchant for hurdling people rub off on Corum a bit, even if it didn’t quite go as planned.  And while Corum is the better receiver out of the backfield and Haskins is the better pass blocker, you can absolutely run the same playcalls with either in there and not feel like you’re demonstrably worse for it.

There’s always the chance that one emerges as the clearly better option going forward and carries shift his direction, but I’m not sure that’s either necessary or optimal.  Still, this remains a backfield where it doesn’t feel like either guy will cannibalize each other’s carries; it’s an efficient running attack in part because both guys complement each other but can serve any role on a given play equally well.  And for this particular offense to work you don’t want to rely too heavily on one style; the variety and differences are features, not bugs.  And thus far they’ve done a great job maximizing them both.

Meh:  Do Something Different

Now, I’m prone to frame complaining about a 21-point win over a P5 team because it wasn’t the way you wanted it to go as Peak Michigan fandom in 2021, but I do understand the argument that 15 passing attempts are fine as long as they are efficient.  That was decidedly not the case against the Huskies, where McNamara mostly threw ball at are barely over the line of scrimmage and didn’t try throwing downfield save for the two first-half shots despite Washington clearly selling out to slow down the running game.  For the game he was 7/15 for 44 yards, with 33 of those coming on the Johnson completion.  Washington clearly played a role in that, but you definitely got a sense that had the game been closer and the passing game was necessary to the move the ball Michigan would have been particularly excited about it.  I do think part of the concern lands on the receivers, who are short Bell and seemed a bit uncertain out there.  Like, there were times when McNamara looked downfield and pretty quickly checked down to a back or tight end, making me think he didn’t think his WRs were going to be open.  And even on the two long throws he did make both Henning and Johnson were tightly covered.  At the same time, McNamara also threw a couple balls short or late and was decidedly not on his game on that front.  He did, though, actually pull the ball on a late 3rd-down conversion, picking up good yardage as UW over-committed to the near side.  So there remains concerns that the passing game is limited (I don’t necessarily believe it’s a schematic one since last year’s team threw the ball 55% of the time with largely the same cast of characters) and those concerns will linger until they are dispelled or confirmed against another substantive defense.

That all said, I didn’t understand the argument being made that Michigan needed to throw the ball to maintain some sense of balance or to keep Washington on their toes.  The key reason offenses diversify their offense is to keep defenses at bay, to try to win as many rock-paper-scissors matchups as you can to maximize your chances of a victory.  But when one team keeps throwing paper and the rock just smashes through it, there’s in-game need to throw a scissors in there.  All that does is throw off your rhythm and (possibly) increases the risk of a turnover in exchange for a couple of additional yards.  If anything, one of the few consistent themes I’ve gotten watching Michigan’s offense this year is that they absolutely want to stay on schedule.  They have given up only 5 TFLs all year, and most of them have been for minimal losses (in this game they gave up 3 TFLs for a total of 6 yards).  They’ve been able to run the ball so effectively in part because they are usually getting positive yardage on each play, which in turn feeds the cycle that allows them to keep running the ball because they aren’t staring down 3rd-and-longs very often.  Plus, it gives them an incentive to try for a 4th-down conversion because usually the yardage is quite short (they were 2/3 in this game on 4th down, including the fake punt in their territory that preceded Corum’s long TD run. 

Beyond that more general discussion, it also felt like the right choice in this game.  UW feels a bit like those MSU teams toward the end of the Dantonio era where they were stout defensively and awful offensively.  MSU’s offense needed its defense to put itself in advantageous situations to score, and so any turnover or good field position you gave up to the defense was huge for them.  It felt the same way for large swaths of this game; UW couldn’t run or pass the ball consistently for much of that first half and Michigan was moving the ball well on the ground.  In that context it made a ton of sense to keep the ball in the sure hands of your backs and not give UW a short field to work with. 

Also, Michigan isn’t just “bullying” their way down the field, trying to out-athlete the opposition.  These are designed runs with intricate alignments and movements; I’m interested to see how the UFR shakes out because this is the second week in a row where Michigan surgically picked apart a team that was selling out to stop the run.  I’m not a line coach but on numerous runs you saw Haskins and Corum follow their blockers as they sealed off tackles and getting to linebackers with regularity.  This was a planned demolition, with Moore’s linemen working in sync to best execute the offense.  It’s not necessarily flashy but it’s extremely effective.  I liken it to what you see when amateur wrestlers or MMA fighters grapple for position – it’s a lot of slight feints and subtle shifts in leverage that don’t always look like they’re doing much but in fact is an intricate chess match between two competing forces.  Honestly, the line looks much more cohesive than last year’s unit under Warinner, and while having a full offseason clearly helped I do get a sense that they’re on the same page from the jump and are executing these plays well.

Michigan is not going undefeated this year, and there’s no offensive wrinkle that will change that.  Nothing is likely unlocked for this team if they throw the ball 50 times a game, and thus far it would likely be at the expense of a really good rushing attack.  So while Michigan will absolutely need to throw the ball effectively to win games this year, I don’t think their unwillingness to do so here was a bad decision. 

Best:  Welcomes The Pressure

Another week, another great performance by this defense.  Washington came into the game with a limited offense but even with that caveat Michigan absolutely decimated much of what they wanted to do.  On the day the Wolverines picked up 4 sacks and 7 TFLs to go along with 5 QB hits and 8 PBUs, with Aiden Hutchinson leading the way.  The raw numbers catch your eye (2.5 sacks, 1 QB hit) but that doesn’t even tell half the story; Hutchinson so pulled the offensive line’s center of gravity toward him as the game progressed that guys like David Ojabo and Josh Ross were able to harass Dylan Morris all night.  On top of that, the interior of the defensive line spearheaded a sterling run defense, limiting UW to 50 yards on 32 carries and stoned a couple of short 4th-down attempts when it seemed like Washington might have been close to converting. 

Now, I saw some people concerned about the secondary, as UW threw for nearly 300 yards and a TD.  But a lot of those yards came later in the game when Michigan was clearly in the driver’s seat; UW had 111 yards on 15 attempts heading into the half, with 42 of those coming on UW’s 12-second drive to end the half when UM was giving them a ton of space to run the clock down.  And most of UW’s other long completions were extremely difficult catches against tight coverage; this 45-yard completion when the score was 31-10 is illustrative of this point.  Michigan’s corners and safeties do appear to not quite get their heads around on pass plays like they should; some of that is coaching and some of that may just be bad timing, something they’ll keep improving on as they get more comfortable in the defense.  Similarly, I expect the hole that Morris was able to exploit in the zone will also disappear as the secondary gets more comfortable with it and, I hope, replaced with an increase in turnovers.  Because honestly, they’re getting close. 

But whenever UW started to get anything going Michigan just brought more pressure and the Huskies struggled to adjust.  Now, that approach won’t always work but I trust that McDonald has other ways to respond as necessary.  And thus far the defense has looked markedly better in all three phases from last year, and definitely don’t look at how Don Brown is doing at Arizona for comparison. 

Best:  Everyone Else Has Issues Too!!!

Like I said, this will be brief, but I would be remiss if I didn’t touch on a couple of other interesting results from the weekend.  Obviously, the big one is that Oregon went into Columbus and beat the Buckeyes 35-28.  And honestly, the game wasn’t even that close for long stretches.  C.J. Stroud feels like a volume passer at this point; he’s got so many playmakers at WR, and that offense is so designed to get the ball out quickly to them, that he can put up 54 passes for 484 yards and it feels like a bit of a letdown because he still left yards on the field or just missed open receives.  Oregon’s defense was also down a couple of key contributors, including a likely top-5 defensive end, so it’s even more impressive Oregon was able to stymie the Buckeyes as much as they did.  And OSU’s secondary continues to look bad, a trend we saw somewhat last year despite having highly-rated players at all spots.  This in no way portends Michigan being as successful when they play the Buckeyes – I’ve seen this horror pick enough times to not get my hopes up.  Still….Oregon was able to establish the run and pick on OSU’s corners enough to consistently move the ball, and if you squint you can see Michigan being able to at least tread water against the Buckeyes if they get some luck.

Beyond the Buckeyes losing, lots of traditional “blue blood” programs had rough second games.  Texas got absolutely blasted by Arkansas 40-21, at one point being down 33-7 and didn’t crack 200 yards of total offense until their final drive of the game.  I don’t know if Arkansas is for real or not but Texas looked flat coming off a big win over Louisiana to start the year and couldn’t move the ball in the air at all.  Of note, Xavier worthy led the Longhorns with 41 yards on 2 catches but I have to wonder if he’s excited about UT’s QBs as this point (and yes, I see the irony of a UM fan crapping on another team’s passing attack).  Florida State followed up an OT loss to ND with last-second loss to Jacksonville State, which featured a game-winning hail mary that was caught at the 20 yard line between two defenders only for both of them to just whiff on tackling the receiver.  I mean….the win probability chart probably explains it best:

Mike Norvell’s explanation that the team wasn’t in prevent because he was worried about JSU calling a TO with 6 seconds to go and 50+ yards was…dubious, and more troubling it didn’t seem like FSU was that much better athletically than the Gamecocks, which isn’t something you expect from FSU.  I don’t think there’s a program in America that has fallen as far as fast as FSU has, and that includes schools like Nebraska. 

Speaking of recent Notre Dame opponents, they needed a last-minute TD drive from ol’ busted-finger Jack Coan to prevent blowing a lead late to Toledo a week after nearly doing the same to the aforementioned Seminoles.  This feels like one of those years where Notre Dame gets into the top 5 or 6 in the country based on early-season hype but get smashed by teams with a pulse; they’re about to embark on a rough series of games against PSU, Wisconsin, Cincy, VT, USC, and UNC, all of which could be disastrous for the Irish. 

And finally, Iowa State lost again to Iowa, bringing Matt Campbell’s record against the Hawkeyes to 0-6.  On paper this game should have been closer (ISU outgained Iowa 339 to 173), but the Cyclones turned the ball over 4 times and ISU seemed to lack urgency toward the end of the game when they had a chance to at least make it interesting.  ISU will likely bounce back but after two weeks they don’t look close to the team people saw last season, and that’s surprising since they basically returned all of that squad.  I’d also add that Iowa is absolutely going to be in the playoff conversation this year and you should all be prepared for it.  They aren’t likely to keep up their +5 TO margin for the whole year but they play the type of defense that can fluster teams and they are good enough offensively to make you pay when you mess up.  Like a cicada Ferentz is due one of these years, and I’m just happy UM doesn’t have to play them so I can enjoy the surrealness in peace. 

Next Week:  More Huskies

Michigan next plays the NIU Huskies, featuring former Spartan Rocky Lombardi at QB.  The Huskies lost against Wyoming this past weekend 50-43, a game featuring nearly 900 yards of total offense and 4 turnovers, including 3 picks by Lombardi.  NIU did beat Georgia Tech earlier in the year so they shouldn’t be overlooked, but this feels like a game where Michigan will again run the ball quite a bit and throw when necessary and get a lot of touches for the backups.  I’m looking forward to this game for no other reason than it’ll end before the sun goes down.