Texas 31, Michigan 12: Reality check
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For the first time in more than 1,000 days, I’m writing a newsletter that contains the following sentence: Michigan just lost a regular season college football game. Though to be fair, “lost” might be soft-selling things.
You know those games where you stay up late at night and wonder “what if” long after the final whistle was blown? The types of games where you play things over again and again in your head and convince yourself that had a play gone differently or a call have gone the other way, things could (and likely would) have gone much differently?
Yeah … this wasn’t one of those games.
Michigan was on the receiving end of an ass-whooping, pretty much right from the start on Saturday. A game that required a near-flawless approach from the underdog Wolverines was met with anything but precise, mistake-free football. Instead, Texas won the battle in the trenches — yes, on both sides of the ball. Michigan lost the turnover battle, 3-0. And the Longhorns were able to convert on third down conversions of all shapes and sizes seemingly at will, while Michigan drives were essentially doomed once the those sticks on the sidelines flipped from a 2 to a 3.
This isn’t going to be a fun game to relive. But unless your plan is to jump ship on the defending National Champs two games into the quest for an encore, there is still plenty of value in revisiting Saturday’s blowout and seeing what can be learned from it.
So let’s rip off the band-aid and do just that. After the paywall jump, I’ll be taking a crack at shining a light on the biggest issues from Saturday’s loss. And since I’m a sick human being, I might even take a shot at identifying a few potential bright spots, too…
