From the Depths of Despair ... (Michigan-Rutgers 2020)
I watch the highlights of the 2020 Rutgers game fairly often, though of course wincing while I do. Fun to look back and see, in that game more than any other, the kernels of the dominant 2021-22 teams start to reveal themselves. Sainristil (on offense). Blake Corum. Ronnie Bell. Hassan Haskins. Dax Hill. Cornelius Johnson. Even, sort of, via the repeated misses of Quinn Nordin (not all his fault), the need for Jake Moody.
And, of course, most significantly, Cade McNamara, brought on for the first time to relieve a disappointing Joe Minton and engineer an astounding comeback victory.
It's a terrible game, with crazy swings (down 17 early, up by 8 with less than 35 seconds left, plus additional insanity during the OT), and being in that situation against Rutgers really illustrates how bad things had gotten that crazy/Covid year, but ... I can't stop myself from enjoying watching Cade appear for the first time and sling that ball around.
Here's the link to the highlight package, if you're interested. Good times ... in very bad times.
Typo. Milton. Whoops.
“I said Joe Mantegna.”
Late season 2022 Milton gave Tennessee the same types of unrealistic expectations thst 2020 Minnesota game Milton gave us. Fortunately we didn't have to wait too long to have that bubble popped. Tennessee on the other hand has had a whole off-season to load up the hype train. Lord have mercy
Joe Milton, top ten Heisman candidate. /s
I’m one of those fans that doesn’t like to go back and watch our team struggle to beat Rutgers in one of our worst seasons in recent memory during the year COVID made everything awful for everyone but I’m glad it works for you, my friend. To be fair I don’t watch many highlights of old games at all but if I did I think it would be 42-27
I never say never or always, NP. Like you, I do not find it necessary to poke a sharp stick in my eye for analysis . . . and my favorite highlights are the same as yours:
But....but.... it was snowing. The proof is in the photo.
are there any pics of this cat from 45-23?
I pretty much haven't missed a Michigan game since 1989. Except, in 2020 I had to be somewhere with no internet or TVs for the Indiana game. At 1-2 with two games cancelled for COVID, I couldn't watch another game that season. We were all in a dark place, but I just couldn't take watching Michigan lose to bad teams. It was only 3 games, but man we lost to frickin' Indiana after losing to MSU. Had 2021 not happened I might have had to have found a personality or talked to my family. Thank God Harbuagh got us back on the right track.
I'm one of those fans who set up a playlist for every year since I started really watching Michigan football (2007). Last summer I watched highlights of every game 2007 - 2021. I've never viewed myself as a masochist, so watching those earlier games is more of a nostalgia hit than anything, but it's also interesting to see the evolution of this team over the last decade and a half.
Will I do it again? No. Shit was exhausting. You don't want to play too much with past trauma.
People need to get over it.
It wasn't a real season and there were clear Covid outliers.
Everyone was praising jackasses like allen and fitzgerald. Both followed that season being the worst teams in the conference.
Michigan had a few of it's best players opt out (Nico Collins is about the only guy that didn't run back to school like every other team's best players).
The biggest issue with that team was us having kept Don Brown. He couldn't scheme against Day. To allow him to still have his job after a second laughable defensive effort (which included his defensive signals being stolen because he was too lazy to change them) was ridiculous.
I think most have moved on from 2020, but it did happen and it did affect people.
But I can’t upvote the Don Brown sentiment enough. And am I the only one who didn’t know about the defensive signals?!
I can’t bring myself to rewatch the 2016 or 2006 losses to OSU, but after 42-27, I rewatched the 2018 and 2019 ones. It was worse than I remembered; it was worse than watching it live, just to see how badly the defense played as a whole. Those 6 quarters (second half of 2018 and pretty much all of 2019) were just brutal.
Nope, you're not alone on the D Brown revelation but damn that sure does make a LOT of things make sense now. If OSU was stealing our defensive signals they would know exactly how to attack us on every play.
Sorry dude, if 2020 wasn't a "real" season then why did Michigan bother to play? If Michigan had won the National Championship in 2020 would you say three years later it wasn't a "real" championship?
One last point: I get this isn't apples to apples, but when Juwan's job security (or lack thereof) is brought up, lots of people bring up the bang up season he had in 20-21. Funny though, wasn't that a Covid year? I don't get why so many people on here pretend like the Covid created a bunch of problems for the football team (which every other team apparently didn't have to deal with) thus it "doesn't count" yet the basketball team had it's best year under Juwan, which is rightfully celebrated.
it was a “real season” in that it existed in the realm of reality. but there was nothing remotely normal about it.
If Michigan had won the national title that year I’d be ok with putting a big fat asterisk next to it. shit was fucked up man, the whole world was fucked up
The basketball season started in November of 20. The football season started in October of 20. How was the football season "f'd up" and the basketball season wasn't?
Michigan had a very successful basketball season and I don't remember a single person that said one of the main factors of success was the chaos of covid. Yet, Michigan football had a disastrous year and everyone blames covid.
If you want to put an asterisk by the 20-21 basketball season go ahead but let’s not try to say it was the same as football. Football had no spring or summer practice and started 2 months late. All the conferences played different amount of games with no OOC. Basketball on the other hand started 2 weeks late with an OOC slate. While it wasn’t normal it was much closer to an actual season than football.
Entire teams and conferences opted out. It was pure garbage. I watch more football than any sane person should and will never forget how ridiculous that season was.
2020 seemed more like the NFL preseason; actual football but with scrambled rosters and a sense of unimportance.
If Michigan won the Natty in 2020, I 100% would have thought it wasn't a real season. It would have felt cheap and unearned. Forever asterisked.
Everyone was playing by different rules depending on state laws and responses to COVID.
I dont remember watching a single game live that season. I DVR'd the sparty game because my kids had soccer games that day but I just couldnt watch anything that year. The empty stadiums, the masks wearing outside, the fake crowd noise. You had msu and psu playing in quiet Big House. It was just a fake season.
It's crazy how Tennesee is being regarded as this potential contender this year. Joe Milton is bad bad.
A lot of it is poor decision making & his obvious "lets throw it to another planet" arm.
He stepped out of bounds on a 4th down passing play on the last play of a UT game - I know that happened a while back but... I don't see how a P5 player can *experience* his way out of a brain that does THAT.
You do realize that young football players can get better over time and cut down on mistakes, right? Especially when they have a new environment to thrive.
I think Tenn overachieved last year in a top-heavy SEC and even then, they wilted down the stretch with injuries and bad play. I bet they revert to the Vols of old sooner than later. But that doesn’t mean Milton can’t succeed elsewhere.
I’ll root for Joe and hope he puts it all together. I’ve developed a soft spot for all of the Pahokee boys and wish for them to succeed.
Same here. I live in Knoxville and will go watch a couple of games just to see Joe. By all accounts he seems like a great kid. UT's fast pace essentially one read offense should work really well with his skill set. Plus they do a lot of fly routes and if he can learn to put a little more air on the ball there is no doubt he can throw is a mile.
It did not work out at Michigan for a lot or reasons, but I hope he has a great year for UT.
Shit man I've had brain farts worse than that....just not w millions watching.
Pressure can make for lots of brain flatulence...
People shit on Joe, but don’t consider exactly how bad the 2020 team was. The roster was bad bad. Y’all act like he was o’korn. Joe showed real promise that year. See his UFR from the Indiana game.
Mayfield got hurt. Nico left. The offensive line came into the season with a combined 2 starts.
Our top 6 receivers came into the season with a total of 75 career receptions. 56 of those were Ronnie Bell. So that’s 5 non Ronnie Bell receivers with 19 career receptions.
Erik All dropped more balls than he caught.
We had a log jam at running back with 4 nfl players. Gattis tried to force the run game presumably to keep each of them content. We faced 3rd and long after 3rd and long because of it.
I can’t think of a Michigan qb thrown into a worse situation expect for maybe Threet.
You can make whatever caveats you want, but Joe had an objectively better 2022 than cade. He will have a better 2023 than cade. Joe won the orange bowl mvp and it was well deserved. He did it without his top two receivers. He addressed the deep ball and accuracy issues. 65% completion rate, 10 tds and 0 ints.
Most importantly look at how each left Michigan and handled adversity. Joe thanked the team and staff. He lost the job at Tennessee and then went on to become best friends with the guy who beat him out.
Cade quit on the team and refused to talk to JJ from the spring through his official departure despite being named a captain.
But of course facts don’t matter to some of you. #michiganlegendcade #teamfreebeer4cade4life
Wow, you really seem to have a love for Joe and hate for Cade. What is driving that.
Like it or not stats don’t matter, only wins and losses do. Cade and JJ have them and Joe didn’t.
I have nothing against Joe, I wish him success, but to see him hyped for the Heisman with a non existent track record is ridiculous. Cade and his year at Michigan should be better Heisman credentials. The only difference is that Tennessee will throw the ball 3 times more than Iowa so Cade will never be considered even if he ends up 10 and 1.
Did I say anything that was untrue though?
You left key things out. You made a lot excuses for Joe.
We all experienced Joe vs Cade leading the team and it certainly appeared that Cade could get more out of the same team. Joe also lost out in the battle to start so I trust Jim’s judgement on that. Don’t you?
As far as how they acted after they left, Cade was certainly more bitter. But Cade felt he earned the starting job from his performance Joe didn’t earn anything from his performance. I do agree Cade could have been more diplomatic
I'm no expert but in their bowl game against Clemson last season he looked pretty damn solid. Not sure if it was an outlier or Clemson was slacking but watching him play in early '21 was laughable in comparison.
Exactly, people have the vision of meltdown still locked in their head when Milton was struggling to hit anything wearing a Michigan Uniform.
Without Nico, we had one rec running decent routes, Ronnie Bell. Our wr play was bad, really bad to be honest. Drifting on routes, not cutting on the correct foot, never set up a route, slow off the snap. Not reading the ball, coming back to the ball, no fight for the ball in the air, letting db's beat them to the ball. There was no effort from rec's, It was bad. My biggest issue with Gattis is, that was his position to coach and the receivers were far better coached under McElwain than Gattis ever coached them!
Idk who coached the rec's at Bama, but Gattis took over well coached rec's and somehow didn't mess it up because he sure as heck never got it right here with receivers!
He obviously wasn't great here but he certainly has an arm and I wish him well this season.
He was always a project but he had more raw talent than most QB recruits I've seen. UT runs a system that will allow him to thrive more than he did here. That plus 2 years of development since we last saw him in a Michigan uniform could add up to a really good QB.
I doubt he's really in the Heisman race late in the season, but he could be a problem for SEC defenses.
Joe Milton had to learn to be a qb just like the majority of big arm qb's out of hs. Had to learn how to use that cannon with accuracy, touch, velocity as needed. He was coming along but I think what threw him off was he went to see the qb coach that summer of 2020 and was so different than what our former qb coach was doing imo it really messed him up or set him back. That and imo our former qb coach was not very good, the coach prior to Matt Weiss.
That said, Milton need time and after the Minnesota game he lost his confidence. But more than that, before the season started he lost Nico Collins! Imo our receivers were not ready and tbh I was never a fan of Gattis coaching rec's.. McElwain was far better rec coach!
This was the only game I enjoyed from that season. I don't remember another half of football where the offense looked organized and like it had a plan. It was also the only effective two minute drill that worked under Harbaugh up until that point. On the other hand, that defense made me want to vomit. That very average wr from MSU looked like Randy Moss against this scheme.
Probably the biggest sin of the Harbaugh era is not canning Brown after the OSU game in 2018. Even if he felt that was premature (it wasn't, I'll get to that in a moment) it should have been done the following year after the OSU game at minimum. Brown was best against teams that didn't have a very good to great offensive line and/or teams that were not effective throwing the ball. In fact, he pretty much owned every team that fell into that category. However, if you want to be a premier team you have scheme your defense to slow down the great offenses, not pave the cupcakes of the world.
Strike one for the Brown era was the Penn State Game in 2017. Any play call that resulted with a linebacker that ran a 4.76 forty manned up against the premier running back in college football (who ran a 4.4 forty) without safety help should have resulted in an immediate tongue lashing to the highest degree. On top of that, barring one bad pass, McSorley did whatever he wanted that day.
Strike two for the Brown era should have been Haskins coming off the bench against Michigan in 2017 and throwing only 7 passes yet averaging 13.4 yards per attempt. With Haskins starting the next year, it was clear OSU was moving more towards the passing game....
I'll give a little bit of a pass for the first half against ND in 2018 but strike three surely could have came against OSU that year. Just as it was against PSU the year before, Brown's arrogance torpedoed this game from the start. OSU did nothing creative in this game; they simply told their WR that ran a 4.32 40 to run until he got open against a slower corner knowing: 1) Michigan didn't play zone, or if they did they never practiced it and 2) it wouldn't take long for him to get open and whatever pass rush / blitzes Michigan had would not be effective in that amount of time. The result? Campbell goes 6-192-2, Michigan gives up 55 points on defense (I won't tack on 7 more for a blocked punt return) and Michigan got drilled in a game they were favored to win. There is not one great program in the country that would allow 55 points to be scored by their primary rival and not have heads roll but yet we soldiered on...
The end result was getting paved by Wisconsin in 2019, singling up Hamler with a safety against Penn State for what was the game winning score and getting destroyed once again by OSU. I don't even want to discuss 2020.
Reliving this just made me mad. I really wish we could replay those 2018 / 2019 OSU games with the defensive scheme we have now.
Weird thing too is that Don Brown’s 2019 defense held Alabama to its lowest scoring output of that season.
If I recall correctly, this was due to Alabama throwing the ball a lot with their backup QB instead of just handing the ball off to Najee Harris and letting their 5 star interior line plow our overmatched DT’s… which is finally what they did in the 4th quarter to put the game away.
Such good points made across the board. Brown came in as DC at the perfect time to "buy some misfortune" in the future. His 2016 defense allowed him to do basically anything he wanted. He had Peppers who could do a bit of everything in the back-7. They were 2-deep at each Defensive Line position where each player was at the very least a quality B1G starter; with the upper-echelon being All-B1G/AA level. In addition, he had Jourdan Lewis who was the best cover corner in America and he could trust him on an island all game long.
2017 the defense again was loaded with a fully weaponized Hurst and more experienced Gary and Chase. In addition, he had Devin Bush the best MLB in America. Still, with that, Penn St was able to embaress us. A lot was excused for Brown (aside from McCray on Saquan) that season because the offense was so putrid with O'Korn and Kekoa Crawford as our #1 WR. We should have beat OSU, because to Brown's credit he did have the horses and scheme to stop JT Barrett and that offensive style. 2018 opened with ND blasting us from the start. We made it close but again we got burned on the QB scramble to a guy who lost his job two weeks later. We managed to work through a pretty meh schedule where we didn't really face an offense that great (Penn St was decimated by the time we played them), and then the Brandon Watson chasing Paris Campbell game happened. Again, we come up laughably short vs good offenses.
2019, the Wisconsin game was it. That was a pathetic scheme that allowed free lanes to the best RB in America all game. Penn St, OSU, and Alabama all do things with ease vs Brown's D.
2020, yeah the stubbornness of Brown vs MSU was just inexcusable. And Wisconsin? The most embarrassing game as a Michigan fan that exceeded the Rich Rod days. Wisconsin wasn't even trying, and our defense looked like they were picked up off the street and told to play a football game.
With the scheme and players we have now and the focus of the culture and the program, I would say this year's team could name the score on those previous teams. What a mighty rise indeed in such a short time.
My sense about that Wisconsin game was that, from the very opening kickoff, it looked like Michigan just didn't want to be there. I don't think I've ever seen a game in my life where it looked like we just ... knew they were going to run over us, and didn't have the will to stick our feet in the turf and stop them.
I know that's feelings-ball, and I'm sure smarter people than I can pick out tactical mistakes we were making. Still ... I felt from the very first drive of the game that the team — or at least the defense — didn't have the stomach for it. Painful to watch.
Funny thing is, I felt the same during much of that subsequent Covid season. That's still an absolute mystery for me. Yes, we were missing players. But so was everyone else! Are you really telling me that a team with McNamara, Chris Evans, Cornelius Johnson, Giles Jackson, Hassan Haskins, Blake Corum, Erick All, Dax Hill, etc. etc. was ... overmatched? Against Rutgers?
It seems to me the people waving off the results of that year have to be saying that the kids weren't motivated and didn't want to play, but ... isn't that Harbaugh's job? Didn't the other coaches face the same challenges?
Sorry. Not meaning to relitigate this. It will remain a mystery to me, but obviously Harbaugh righted the ship quickly and powered up for 2021. Full credit!
Minnesota was a fun game that season.
Yup. The next game wasn't.
As far as I'm concerned, Minnesota was the only game of the season.
Yep. Unfortunately, it got all of us feeling a little too cocky. Wasn't the line on the MSU game something like 3 TDs, and the consensus of the Michigan crowd was that the spread was too low? If you want a textbook case of hubris, try listening to the MSU preview on the MGoPodcast or (even worse) The Bucket Problem podcast. Or better yet, just don't.
It was fun in real time. Night game (even in California by the time it got to OT). Built Cade’s confidence. The season was by then already lost. But that game wasn’t
Has Michigan ever played at Rutgers during the day? It seems theyre always playing a night game.
I'm sure we have in Ann Arbor, but it does feel like every game in New Jersey has been at night
Edit:
2014 - 7:00
2016 - 7:00
2018 - 3:30!
2020 - 7:30
2022 - 7:30
Of course! Rutgers puts their NC game in prime time, baby!
I remember thinking we had a good passing QB in Cade after that game. Makes me feel like how we call our offense really limits QBs growth, but then again it's Rutgers and Cade's skillset is what it is so maybe it was just a flash in the pan game