[Upchurch]

Standing near the entrance of Crisler Center’s media room, Chase Winovich spoke a simple, cruel truth.

 

“Yeah, I think we out-hit them today,” Winovich said. “I’m interested to see if maybe he has a different opinion of it.”

 

The he, as you may already know, is Scott Frost, who found a dubious silver lining in UCF’s 51-14 loss to Michigan two years ago. There was no such silver lining for Frost’s Nebraska Cornhuskers on Saturday after a 56-10 shellacking that, really, wasn’t even as close as that.

 

Michigan out-hit Nebraska. It out-ran Nebraska. It out-played Nebraska. It nearly ran Nebraska out of the stadium, onto I-80 and back to Lincoln.

 

[After THE JUMP: 2016 vibes]

 

“After the first series, we went back out there and just knew they wanted to give up,” Josh Metellus said. “You could see it in their eyes.”

 

“It just seemed like they didn’t really wanna be out there at some points,” Winovich added. “I know that’s gonna come off as very controversial. It’s just, at some points, I don’t know. I’m gonna stop myself there.”

 

After another question, he kept going.

 

“There’s something about this game, especially, there’s an energy to it that how you just feel, you look at the person across from you. Whether it’s their playcalling or how operate, how they move about, they just — I just didn’t feel like they wanted it as bad as we did.”

 

After a 32-yard jump-ball completion to Stanley Morgan on the Cornhuskers’ first third down, Nebraska didn’t pick up another play of more than 10 yards until the first quarter was nearly over and the Wolverines held a 20-point lead. Between those two plays, Michigan sacked Adrian Martinez twice, picked him off once and had him running for his life on what seemed like every other drop back.

 

To put it bluntly, the Wolverines mauled the Cornhuskers at the line of scrimmage. It wasn’t a fair fight. Nebraska tried sprint-out passes —those usually ended in disaster. It tried to have Martinez stand in the pocket — Michigan tore through the Cornhuskers’ offensive line like tissue paper. They tried options — Rashan Gary blew them up in the backfield. Martinez, a running quarterback, finished his day with -12 yards rushing.

 

“The discipline in the rush lanes was evident today,” Jim Harbaugh said. “They didn’t run by the quarterback, they didn’t let the quarterback get out on the scrambling. The rush lanes were really condensed and they were on the quarterback fast.”

 

It’s worth noting that Martinez probably wasn’t fully healthy, that a walk-on quarterback played the second half for Nebraska, that the Cornhuskers seemed to have one of those days where everything that could have possibly went wrong — including a fumbled punt that would have been returned for a touchdown if not for an objectively bad rule and an illegal forward pass in the end zone leading to a safety — did. At this point, it may just be the case that Nebraska is really, really bad.

 

But Michigan’s defense, fueled by Frost’s two-year old comments on top of its ever-present ability, beat the hell out of the Cornhuskers. It finished the game with four sacks and an absurd 14 tackles for loss, holding Nebraska to 132 yards, 71 of which came in the fourth quarter, with the game beyond out of hand. And the Wolverines’ defense has been at or near this level, essentially, since the third quarter of the Notre Dame game.

 

It’s no revelation that Michigan’s defense is good, or even that it’s great. It was great last year and brought back nearly every starter. It was supposed to be great. This is the expectation that the team, the media and fans alike hold.

 

After beating SMU in a routine win with a few too many unforced errors last week, Winovich was less than satisfied.

 

“It just felt like (we) had a lot of mistakes and stuff that we needed to address,” he said.

 

This week?

 

“This is the most 2016 vibe I’d say we have,” Winovich said. “Just going to work and maturity-wise, everybody’s accountable for their position, you have ballers on every level. And it’s a great feeling.”