11/8/2014 – Michigan 10, Northwestern 9 – 5-5, 3-3 Big Ten

College football is for remembering. It stands alone in its brevity—even the NFL has you play your division-mates twice. Every year you play a team and then you have glory or death until next year. You can pick any game of remote interest and your friend will say "oh, THAT game" because it is also lodged in his brain.

This happens in other sports but as you add in more and more games, more and more of them are thrown down the memory hole. Hell, even last year's highly memorable basketball season has a number of events in it that I couldn't tell you anything about without looking it up. We beat Stanford? I guess we did.

In football the only things that disappear like that are the tomato can games. Others are notable only in the context of some guy's career. If I say "the Jerome Jackson game" you know it's that Iowa game Michigan won in overtime. "That one time Alain Kashama did something" was the Citrus Bowl win over Ron Zook's Florida. There are of course the titanic battles whose aftershocks rattle down the centuries, and depressing blowouts and fun blowouts and etc.

And then there's this game. This game will also rattle down the centuries, for… reasons. You will poke your buddy and say "hey man remember the M00N game," carefully enunciating the zeroes, and your buddy will either laugh or give you a sharp punch on the arm, depending on his mood.

Immortality comes in all kinds of ways.

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FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUU [Bryan Fuller]

Well, I'm in this to be entertained. And I cannot deny that Saturday was highly entertaining.

By the time the teams had exchanged boggling turnovers at the end of the first half I was giggling. The field goal block sent me into chuckles. The fumble of off Funchess's hip got me up to a guffaw, and when Northwestern followed a boggling Gardner interception by going backwards 30 yards and punting into the endzone I had to lie down and remember to breathe.

It was disappointing when M00N ceased being a potential final score, but at least it came on a terrible error—a muffed punt. Anything skillful breaking the deadlock would have been unjust. My wife was peeved, because she is not a True Fan™ and wanted to see a 0-0 regulation. I kind of did, too. Not every day you see something like that.

It is every day that Michigan finds itself in a football game hardly recognizable as sports. When you bring up the M00N game to your buddy you will probably be making a point about the descent into unwatchable dreck that was the last two years of the mercifully short Hoke era.

This is Hoke's version of RichRod's gloriously futile 67-65 win over Illinois. Both games were narrow, pyrrhic victories over bad opponents punctuated by two-point conversion stops. Both showed off the abilities of the team's good unit against an overmatched opponent and the total lack of ability of the team's miserable unit. And both were the same kind of delirious fun that sees you wake up naked in a haystack the next morning, with no idea where you are or even what month it is. Or where your hair is.

Nothing about that Illinois game changed Rodriguez's trajectory, and this won't move any needles either. Michigan's been plunged into a disaster of their own making and shows no signs of climbing out. That they've encountered a couple of teams even more BIG TEN(!) than themselves of late says more about the league than this outfit. It's no surprise that the other two teams Michigan's beaten in Big Ten play faced off in one of the ugliest games of the year immediately before M00N.

At least we've got a symbol now. Any time anyone wants to reference how far Michigan's come since they led the nation in TFLs allowed and somehow got worse the next year just needs two letters and a couple zeroes.

HIGHLIGHTS?

Via MGoVideo:

[After THE JUMP: but what if Hoke wins out?]

OTHER BITS

Hoke back? Pat Fitzgerald handing out hot dogs has an equal chance of being Michigan's coach next year [Bryan Fuller]

Par for the course. With much of last week given over to insider types saying But What If Hoke Wins Out (Or Makes A Bowl), I guess we have to talk about But What If Hoke Wins Out (Or Makes A Bowl).

It doesn't matter. Or, at least it shouldn't matter.

Michigan's wins this year are over Appalachian State, Miami (Not That Miami), a sanctions-crippled Penn State, Indiana down to its fifth string QB, and now Northwestern. They have been blown out in four of their five losses, with the fifth coming against Rutgers. There is no combination of results left that looks like anything other than a huge regression in year four, and nobody is going to buy the narrative of improvement after wins like Saturday's. Even if Michigan plays like an entirely different team against Ohio State and beats the Buckeyes, it's still over.

I can guarantee none of this. The last time I guaranteed anything based on common sense I was promising everyone Brady Hoke had a 0.0% chance of being hired. Not so much. And we know nothing about Jim Hackett.

But you know what just went out? Season ticket deposit letters. You know what's not getting sent back immediately? Way more of those than usual. That more than anything else will demand a change.

In case you're Marcus Ray. Ohio State just annihilated Michigan State's defense to the tune of 49 points to take a commanding lead in the division race. They did this with:

• A redshirt freshman QB
• Two sophomores in the backfield
• An OL with 11 collected years on campus compared to Michigan's 10

The only area in which OSU is more experienced than Michigan is at WR, where they have a couple seniors in Evan Spencer and Devin Smith plus a fifth-year TE, and even there Michigan has third-year players.

This is not Rodriguez's fault. Hell, the OL has gone two weeks without allowing any pressure at all. And it's not Devin Gardner's fault that there's no quarterback on the roster who's even vaguely plausible as a replacement.

The final play. Michigan had it dead to rights. Clark bolted for the corner on the snap; the America's-rollout-out guy was bracketed, and Delano Hill had the throwback option to the tight end:

Northwestern had run a similar play on a third down conversion earlier and had a two point attempt in last year's game that was pretty close; Michigan was prepped for it. Mattison has pulled out the right playcalls in critical situations against Northwestern—remember the weird 3-3-5 that stuffed Northwestern's triple option a couple years back?  

WTFunchess. Two flat-out drops that hampered the Michigan offense even more than usual. He doesn't seem to be there mentally… though I can't say he's 100% checked out after watching a replay of the second Gardner interception and seeing him run 80 yards just to hit Campbell as hard as possible. But he's not playing at all like the guy who's supposedly a first round draft pick.

OL tho? No sacks and very little pressure for a second straight week; the run blocking was okay. I did not think the OL had a good outing against Indiana on the ground, but they did pick up a ton of six man pressures. I don't think that's going to mean too much against OSU's rampant DL, unfortunately.

Smith undoubtedly ground out three more yards here [Fuller]

Smith vs Johnson. Michigan's battle of the running backs with the generic names went to Smith. Smith's prime ability is grinding through piles of limbs to pick up two more yards after contact than is reasonable to acquire and it was on frequent display in this one. He's real slow and has those vision issues, but he was pretty effective in this game.

I don't really blame him for the fourth down stuff since he's in a situation where he needs six inches and a bounce, while profitable in retrospect, is much more variable. If AJ Williams doesn't fall over we aren't talking about this because Michigan gets a first down. Yes, he's slow. He can't do anything about that.

Meanwhile, Michigan tried to get Johnson outside. He got a lot of counter stuff and other plays that test the edge as Michigan deployed his speed. That was dubiously effective once Northwestern figured it out, and then Johnson fumbled.

Hayes disappeared again and like… whatever man.

Interceptions. The Butt one wasn't the worst thing in the world. Ryan's pick was pretty horrendous on Siemian's part, and then Gardner's second interception was just… wow. Northwestern had busted hard and left Bo Dever wide open just next to Canteen; Gardner did not read it.

The play of the game. Mason Cole got over to cease Campbell's INT return, thus saving Michigan a full seven points despite that tackle coming on the 20.

Frank Clark & Jake Ryan. Hi guys. Sorry you have to be on this team instead of one with a functional offense.

HERE

Best And Worst:

It was just a terrible game.  And it just sucked all around for both teams, particularly on offenses.  Devin Gardner had the worst passing performance this year against the Wildcats, and that includes an under-fire Christian Hackenberg, the yipp-tacular combined efforts of Wisconsin QBs, and whomever was the 8th-string walk-on Poli Sci QB who took the last three snaps of NW's preseason scrimmage.  He threw 2 really bad INTs, had a couple more passes that should have been picked (including one that should have been taken to the house to end the first half), and never looked comfortable with any of his receivers.

I cannot stress how bad of a performance this was; I will always defend Devin Gardner in aggregate, but in this game Michigan could have replaced him with a trebuchet made out of Gatorade bottles, athletic tape, Ro*Tel cheese, and Haas avocados and gotten a more complete performance out of a field general.  I hope something comes out during this off week that he's injured, that he lost a contact in the first quarter and didn't have a free pair, that an international cabal is holding someone he cares hostage, something to explain how he went 11/24 for 109 yards and 2 interceptions, resulting in a QBR rating of 5.2.  To put that into perspective, Joel Stave's 8/19-115 yards-1 TD/3 INT performance against NW was a 10.1.

Inside the Box Score:

Michigan's defense held Northwestern to 95 yards total for their first 13 drives. 95 yards in 51 plays; that's less than 2 yards per play. (I is good at math.) One drive lasted 9 plays. One drive lasted 7 plays. No other drives lasted more than 6 plays. So, of course, on Northwestern's last two drives, they go 95 yards in 19 plays and 74 yards in 14 plays. 169 yards in 33 plays. That's better than 5 yards per play after demonstrating complete futility all game long. Of course that happened, because this was the Michigan-Northwestern game.

ELSEWHERE

Hoover Street Rag:

In the end, Michigan won.  Michigan has lost just four times to Michigan in their last 35 meetings.  I have clear and vivid memories of each of those four losses:
2008: Fandom Endurance III
2001: A-Train Fumble
1996: We just lost to you LAST YEAR!
1995: Luther Van Dammit
The only other team that I have this precise a memory of losses to is Minnesota, and that is mostly Jug related.  If you'd like to make the argument that Michigan should be 0-3 against Northwestern over the last three years, you'd very well be on to something.  And yet, here we are.  Football is a strange game, deserving to win does not assure that you will.  Northwestern did everything they could to give this game to Michigan, and Michigan did everything they could to give the game back to Northwestern.

M Go Girl:

It's that love/hate/respect fine line you could feel during the Schembechler years that we're missing now. I don't feel we need a carbon copy of Bo or Woody or Bear or Ara to be great again. We need someone who's going to be tough, sometimes hated, often loved, and always respected. Who that is, I don't know. Jim Harbaugh would certainly have some of those traits. I'm sure there are others who would, too.

Touch The Banner:

Offensive line improvement. Michigan fans may not like to hear it, but this offensive line is getting better. The Wolverines did a good job of keeping pressure off of Gardner, and they were opening up decent-sized holes in the running game. Northwestern did not get a ton of penetration, and while they don't have any huge playmakers on the defensive line, this still represents a step forward for Michigan. Fans who want head coach Brady Hoke and offensive line coach Darrell Funk gone after this season are not gathering convincing evidence on the field from the offensive line. Of course, Michigan's skill players aren't doing much with the holes provided, either.

Sap's Decals:

DE’VEON SMITH – Now you know why coaches like Bo and Bill Parcells loved to have a strong running game. When you can close out a game, or at least milk the clock, it puts pressure on the opposing team to either use all their timeouts late in the game or drive the length of the field to win. Smith has given the Michigan offense the strength and stability it desperately needs – especially when U-M’s QB is basically playing on one leg.

The Daily's Alexa Dettelbach:

…most glaring of all, in Michigan’s ugly, ugly, ugly 10-9 win Saturday, was that Brady Hoke wasn’t doing much clapping during the game. And when Hoke isn’t clapping, you know you have a problem. The players certainly seem to recognize that much.

Pat Fitzgerald is feeling some heat now. Northwestern fans are wondering about kicking the field goal from the four, for one. At least the third down wasn't, like, supposed to be a checkdown:

Fitz said that the seemingly inexplicable short throw on third-and-goal before the field goal was a max blitz and Trevor Siemian checked it down. Siemian confirmed it was a checkdown. "Probably should have just thrown it into the endzone and given our guys a chance."

Lake The Posts:

By now you can imagine how nuts my own wife thinks I am. After tailgating all morning and lugging our three girls to a marathon of a Northwestern-Michigan game at Ryan Field she has had more than enough. My 9-year-old daughter turned to me before the start of the fourth quarter and said “Daddy, I think these are two pretty bad teams playing a very bad game”.  I didn’t know what to say other than “I agree”.

Michigan is playing with "nothing to lose," which is… accurate. More on the last play from Clark.

Basketball? Basketball.