4B — October 7, 2019
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
SportsMonday

I 

don’t know about you all, but 
I’m exhausted.
Saturday, a pretty-good-
but-flawed 
Michigan 
team beat a 
pretty-good-
but-flawed 
Iowa team, 
10-3, in a game 
that clearly 
highlighted 
both team’s 
merits and 
shortcom-
ings. The Wolverines were favored 
by 3.5 points — and that seems 
about right. Their defense shone, 
their offense sputtered. The for-
mer outlasted the latter, and so 
Michigan is now 4-1 instead of 3-2. 
It was the fifth top-15 win of the 
Jim Harbaugh era, none of which 
have come away from Michigan 
Stadium. That’s a game Michigan 
wins at home and might not on the 
road.
And that’s all it was.
We’re five years into Harbaugh’s 
tenure now, and all of these narra-
tives follow a remarkably consis-
tent path. It’s time to stop treating 
every “big” game as a referendum 
on the Harbaugh era. This Iowa 
game, that coming Notre Dame 
game. Hell, even this Ohio State 
game. In all likelihood, none of 
it will bring about the “breaking 
point” that so many in the national 
media ecosystem seem to clamor 
for.
Some, like Fox Sports analyst 
Joel Klatt, billed this Iowa game 
as such. “I believe that Saturday is 
the defining moment of the Har-
baugh era,” Klatt said on The Herd 
with Colin Cowherd. “… If they do 
(win), there’s at least hope. If they 
don’t, they’re in trouble. I think 
it’s in-defendable if they lose this 
weekend.”
This is not to pick on Klatt 
specifically, who is merely one in 
an assembly line of analysts who 
recite similar tropes.
This specific team has some real 
flaws, no matter if its coach wants 
to acknowledge them, publicly 

or otherwise. Asked to assess his 
offense — which gained 267 yards, 
totaled under four yards per carry 
for the fourth consecutive game 
and failed to score in the final 53:33 
of the game — Harbaugh said: “I 
really do think they’re hitting their 
stride. Got great faith in our play-
ers and our coaches.” 
Some diagnosed the charac-
terization as wrong and tone deaf 
or — undoubtedly worse — correct 
and indicting. Others dismissed 
it as a defense mechanism for his 
players, who will face the brunt of 
criticism this week for an offense 
that looks lost.
Criticism is wholly warranted 
right now. This offense, billed as a 
bale of goods has, instead, been a 
bundle of mediocrity. No spin will 
change that. But what the head 
coach says publicly doesn’t matter 
if the actions behind the scenes 
dictate otherwise.
What it shouldn’t be, as every-
thing seems to funnel back to 
these days, is a commentary on the 
future of the Michigan football 
program, and specifically on the 
Harbaugh era.
Michigan is a top-10-to-15 
football program in the nation. 
It is a good program that almost 
always wins the games it should 
and almost never wins the games 
it shouldn’t. The latter is what 

prohibits upward ascension. That 
boils down to recruiting, execution 
and, yes, coaching. No, the momen-
tary satisfaction of removing the 
head coach would not be the salve 
to vault this program into that elite 
upper-echelon. 
This doesn’t seem to be the year 
that move happens, if it ever does. 
As it turns out, that leap is quite 
rare and quite difficult to sustain 
— particularly when your primary 
rival is among the best programs in 
the nation.
We’re five years in now. This 
is what it is. Not every game is 
“Harbaugh’s breaking point.” Most 
are not. When Michigan goes to 
Penn State, it will have a chance 
to win a road game of the ilk it has 
yet to do under Harbaugh. Take it 
to the bank that some commenta-
tors — national media, in particu-
lar — will bill it as some form of a 
breaking point. An inflection point. 
A moment of truth. Choose your 
cliché.
Win or lose, there will be some 
wildly reactionary narrative that 
will stray to one polar end. Then, 
we’ll gear up for Notre Dame 
weekend to do it all again. 
Sometimes a mid-season home 
win over Iowa is just that — no 
more, no less. Let’s stop pretend-
ing otherwise. Because I’m getting 
pretty tired of it.

End the Harbaugh whiplash
Defense puts together ‘masterpiece’

With 1:35 left in the fourth 
quarter, 
Michigan’s 
offense 
asked its defense to step up one 
more time. 
The unit had been bailed 
out all afternoon — the offense 
mired in a bewildered mess, 
the 
defense 
responding 
emphatically. 
Rinse, 
repeat. 
The whiplash hadn’t hindered 
defensive 
coordinator 
Don 
Brown’s unit. To that point, 
Iowa had a single rushing yard. 
Its quarterback, Nate Stanley, 
had been picked off three times. 
The Wolverines were flying. 
Eight sacks. Twelve tackles for 
loss.
Up 10-3, they just had to do it 
one more time. And, really, was 
there ever a doubt?
“When the game’s on the 
line, that’s what we want,” 
said 
senior 
defensive 
end 
Mike Danna after the game. 
“We wanted the defense up. 
Everybody on the sideline had 
juice. The coaches had juice. It 
was all about energy, and that’s 
what we want. We wanted our 
backs against the wall. We had 
the opportunity and came out 
on top.”
Despite advantageous field 

position and a fourth-down 
conversion to keep their brief 
hopes 
alive, 
the 
Hawkeyes 
succumbed to the Wolverines’ 
swarming defense one last time. 
With Iowa’s hopes growing 
ever 
fleeting, 
faced 
with 
a 
fourth-and-10 
from 
the 
Michigan 44-yard line, Stanley 
dropped back once more and 
quickly felt the heat of multiple 
incoming 
pass 
rushers. 
He 
somehow managed to release 
a left-handed prayer to his 
checkdown 
back, 
who 
was 
stopped well short of the line 
to gain. It was a fitting capper 
to one of the best defensive 
showcases of the Jim Harbaugh-
Don Brown era.
“Obviously 
that 
was 
a 
defensive 
masterpiece,” 
Harbaugh said. “Our defense, 
Don Brown, the coaches, the 
players. Don called a great 
game. They were very well 
prepared. Player-wise, it was 
just obvious from play one to the 
last play of the game, everybody 
was hustling and running and 
playing with great effort.”
Michigan’s 12 TFLs marked 
the 
18th 
time 
in 
Brown’s 
tenure the defense registered 
double-digit TFLs in a single 
game. Perhaps most notably, 
the 
Wolverines 
held 
Iowa’s 
purportedly vaunted bruising 
rushing attack to one yard, just 
the fourth time in recorded 
history the Hawkeyes had been 
held to one or fewer rushing 
yards in a game.
The latter point underscores 
the progress this defense has 
made since the 35-14 drubbing in 
Wisconsin two weeks ago, when 
the Badgers marched through 
this defense with remarkable 
ease. The 358-yard disparity 
between those outputs tells the 
entire tale.
The players knew coming into 
the week that Iowa would try 
to mimic some of the looks that 
gave them fits two weeks prior. 
Brown challenged his defense to 
rise to the challenge. There’s no 

parsing the obvious: Challenge 
accepted.
“I think we all just played 
our asses off on the defense. 
We knew it was power Iowa, 
the big dogs who just run 
it down your throat,” said 
sophomore defensive end Aidan 
Hutchinson, with a noticeable 
chide when rehearsing those 
cliches. “We showed ’em what 
kind of run defense we had.”
Added 
Harbaugh: 
“Don, 
during the week, he said he 
might jump off a tall building 
if some of those isolation plays 
work. They really thought they 
had them, and really thought 
the players had a great week of 
practice, and knew exactly what 
to do, how to do it, and did it 
with great intensity and great 
effort. 
“To hold a team to one yard 
rushing, that’s a masterpiece.”
The running game wasn’t the 
only facet which the defense 
emphasized in the lead up 
to the game, though. Stanley 
came into the game without 
having thrown an interception 
all season — and having been 
sacked more than four times 
only once in his career. Brown’s 
defense picked off Stanley thrice 
and sacked him eight times.
“We knew Stanley, coming 
into this game, didn’t throw any 
picks,” Hutchinson said. “After 
watching all the film, you see 
he never really got hit. After 
today, we smacked him and that 
showed what happens when you 
apply pressure on that guy.”
And still, in spite of a 
thoroughly-dominant defensive 
effort, 
Michigan’s 
defense 
stepped onto the field with just 
over a minute and needed a stop. 
They’d been on the field for 32:27 
to that point. They’d allowed just 
six of 17 third- and fourth-down 
conversions. They’d played 13 
drives and allowed 17.6 yards 
per drive and three points.
In short, they’d done all 
they’d been asked. So what was 
one more?

Harbaugh: Offense is hitting stride

An hour after a game in which 
Michigan scored just 10 points, 
averaged just 4.5 yards per play 
and gained less than 300 yards 
total, Jim Harbaugh sat behind 
a microphone and declared that 
his team’s offense was “hitting 
our stride.”
There are a lot of ways to 
deflect criticism after a game 
like Saturday’s. Harbaugh might 
have pointed to Iowa’s defense. 
He might have said things are 
still working into place under 
offensive 
coordinator 
Josh 
Gattis, that even in the second 
month of the season, it’s OK to 
be working out kinks in a new 
system. He might have reiterated 
what he had said five minutes 
prior — that the Wolverines 
took what was there against 
an 
opponent 
whose 
games 
always look like Saturday’s 10-3 
Michigan win.
It’s hard to sell that the 
offense actually played well. It’s 
harder to sell that this was some 
kind of peak.
Because if there’s even an 
inkling of truth to it, then the 
Wolverines have a long eight 
weeks ahead.
Whatever good will built up 
since Michigan’s 52-0 demolition 
of Rutgers a week ago — the first 
time Gattis’ offense seemed 
to have a clear, well-executed 
plan of attack — evaporated into 
confusion 
and 
consternation 
against Iowa. After a solid first 
few drives in which the run game 
seemed to get some momentum, 
senior 
quarterback 
Shea 
Patterson found junior wideout 
Nico Collins on a jump ball and 
freshman Zach Charbonnet ran 
for a two-yard score, Michigan 
failed to string together another 
coherent set of plays until the 
start of the fourth quarter.
When that finally happened, it 
ended in Jake Moody missing a 
34-yard field goal.
While the defense played to 
the moment, showing the kind of 
urgency needed to win against 
a top-20 opponent, the offense 
looked listless and disinterested. 

Patterson finished 14-of-26 for 
147 yards with an interception 
and no touchdowns. It added 
up to a 93.6 rating — worse than 
every game he played last season 
in an offense that was accused 
of being antiquated and out of 
style.
“Once we hit that (pass to 
Collins), they started to back 
off a little bit and we started 
to take our underneath reads,” 
Patterson said.
In other words, the Hawkeyes’ 
defense dictated what Michigan 
could and couldn’t do. Gattis 
has 
said 
he 
wants 
exactly 
the opposite to happen in his 
system, 
one 
predicated 
on 
putting players in conflict, so no 
matter what choice they make, 
it’s wrong. And yet, his unit 
has been the one forced into 
impossible choices repeatedly — 
and it happened all day long on 
Saturday.
“I thought Shea in particular 
took 
what 
was there and 
sometimes 
there 
wasn’t 
anything there,” 
Harbaugh 
said. 
“And 
managed 
the 
game 
extremely well.”
But Harbaugh 
didn’t 
recruit 
Patterson as a 
game-manager. 
The nervous tension in the 
building when Patterson took 
a seat next to Harbaugh at 
Crisler Center for a basketball 
game two years ago, and the 
explosion of joy in Ann Arbor 
when he eventually committed 
wasn’t because Michigan had 
secured another Brandon Peters 
or John O’Korn. Patterson came 
here to fix an offense that, in 
2017, looked a whole lot like the 
offense we saw on Saturday. One 
that couldn’t keep a drive going, 
get opponents to respect the 
passing game or take advantage 
of the talent on the field.
For 
a 
year 
in 
between, 
Patterson’s first under center 
in a Michigan uniform, things 
were not perfect, but they were 
markedly better. The run game 

hummed as the offensive line 
overperformed 
expectations. 
Patterson proved to excel at 
creating 
something 
out 
of 
nothing, running around out 
of the pocket with a knack 
for 
finding 
whoever 
would 
inevitably break open. It didn’t 
look great against Ohio State, and 
Florida stopped the Wolverines 
in their tracks, but it’s hard not 
to acknowledge that Michigan 
might have spent this offseason 
trying to fix something that 
wasn’t broken.
The first five games of this 
season are the result. The 
Wolverines managed to win 
four of those on the back of their 
defense. But every opponent left 
is either on the road or ranked, 
and most of them won’t commit 
the comedy of errors Iowa fell 
victim to at times on Saturday.
“That’s just kinda football. 
That’s how it goes sometimes,” 
Patterson said. “You’re gonna 
have days like 
that. And when 
the defense is 
playing 
lights-
out like that, just 
stay patient.”
It would be 
much 
easier 
to buy that if 
Michigan hadn’t 
waded the last 
five 
games 
of 
the season like 
a team searching for an answer. 
Or if they seemed any closer to 
finding one against Iowa than 
they were before.
“I really do think they’re 
hitting their stride,” Harbaugh 
reiterated when pressed on his 
answer. “Got great faith in our 
players and our coaches.”
He was asked in exactly what 
ways that might be the case.
“In every way,” he said. Then 
he repeated himself. “In every 
way. That’s what I see.”
Harbaugh knows far more 
about football than most people 
on this planet. But it doesn’t take 
a genius to realize what anyone 
can see with two plain eyes.
If this is Michigan’s stride, 
then 
Michigan’s 
offensive 
reclamation has failed.

MAX

MARCOVITCH

MAX MARCOVITCH
Managing Sports Editor

ETHAN SEARS
Managing Sports Editor

ALEC COHEN/Daily
Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh’s program has yet to make the leap so many national commentators expect it to.

FOOTBALL

I really do think 
they’re hitting 
their stride. ... 
In every way.

