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.