Two games into the season, the Michigan Wolverines were playing near-flawless football. JJ McCarthy looked like he was poised to have a banner year, Roman Wilson was transforming into a touchdown magnet, and the likes of Junior Colson and Kris Jenkins were having their way with opposing offenses inside the trenches.
Well, the honeymoon is officially over. Even at a perfect 7-0, it’s clear that this Michigan team is far from flawless. The question now for the Wolverines is where does greatness lie in the eye of the beholder. This is a team that has given up 43 pts through the first seven games in the bookends quarters (1st & 4th), but only 13 pts in the middle frames (2nd & 3rd).
In Saturday’s home matchup against Indiana, the Wolverines trailed for the second time all year after giving up a first quarter touchdown to…wide receiver Donaven McCulley. The 6’5 junior was sent wide pre-snap, and then received the lateral from quarterback Brendan Sorsby. Before anyone in the Michigan secondary knew it, McCulley had a wide-open Jaylin Lucas streaking into the endzone for a 44-yard touchdown pass.
To make matters worse, Michigan had gone 3 and out on their opening two drives before the Hoosiers scored…with both instances sporting a sack of JJ McCarthy and no completions in the passing game. And if not for an ill-advised throw from Tayven Jackson (who started at QB for the Hoosiers) in the red zone on 3rd & 12, which led to Sainristil tipping the ball and Rod Moore hauling in a pick, Michigan could have found themselves down by more than just 7 points with time still left in the first quarter.
OK. Deep breath. Let’s pivot to the positives for a minute. After giving up the game’s first score to Indiana, Michigan would go on to find the endzone on their next five consecutive drives; putting up a gaudy 38-0 in the second and third quarters. And the Wolverines are currently outscoring opponents 186 – 13 in those aforementioned middle frames.
That is dominant. No other way to put it.
Maybe what should excite fans is also what might scare them the most. When JJ is cooking, he can absolutely break a defense’s spirit. And while a lot of that explosive, game-wrecking talent comes from when the junior rolls out of the pocket and shows off his legs – the kid will also deliver darts in pinhole windows that would make the likes of Matthew Stafford blink.
The Wolverines’ surge back into the game took shape on one such throw, where McCarthy hit Colston Loveland on 3rd & 10 with a ball that came on a beautiful line, just out of reach of both the defender in coverage and a safety coming underneath. Moments later, early into the second quarter, he would hit Cornelius Johnson on a slant where – I just don’t even know where you find the fortitude to time and deliver this ball when you’re trailing in the game. The window only presented itself for less than half a second, and really, when the margin is that small, it’s hard not to think that a more athletic or savvy defender in the secondary would have come away with a big time pick.
But that’s the beautiful thing about football. It doesn’t deal in ‘ifs’ – either you hit your mark or not.
It also doesn’t care about ‘slow starts’ when you go on to score 52 unanswered points to close the game.
After getting pulled at the goal line near the end of the first half (Harbaugh is on the record that he likes having Corum in these situations, and Michigan was only up 14-7 at the time), Donovan Edwards would finally find the endzone in the fourth quarter – his first touchdown of the season. At the postgame press conference, the talk of the room – both from Harbaugh and his teammates, had to do with a pesky jar of olives.
“When things are stuck, you haven’t gotten something in a while, sometimes I use that analogy with turnovers on defense,” Harbaugh professed, “The olive jar analogy is the olives are packed in so tight, they’ve got the big screw in top, it’s wide and you unscrew it and you turn the olive jar over, nothing would come out because they’re packed in so tight. If you can just get one to shake loose, then they all just start plopping out.”
“That’s what I said to Dono, ‘Hey, now you’re in.’”
Meditations on patience, hope, and persistence can come off as overly quaint – but in this Michigan locker room, with these players, they’re working. Heck, if you get close enough to the locker room after the game, you’ll even hear them singing ‘For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow’. The man they were singing to on Saturday, senior linebacker Mike Barrett, offered an insightful comment when asked about Joel Klatt’s ‘boa constrictor’ observation.
“My favorite thing is watching their hopes slowly go away,” Barrett said. “Watching that fight just kind of diminish away from them and just kind of get to the point where they’re just like, ‘Let’s go home.’ That’s kind of my favorite feeling.”
Michigan travels to East Lansing next Saturday for an in-state rivalry matchup against Michigan State.
