Washington 27, Michigan 17: Off the rails
This post is locked and can be read by premium subscribers only.
“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
After sneaking past USC by 3 points despite being outgained by 50+ total yards (and 250+ passing yards) and following that up with another 3-point win over Minnesota despite being outgained by 50+ yards (and 175+ passing yards), Michigan’s plan of attack for its first road game of the season (and a rematch of the National Championship Game) was to … run it back?
If you play someone at QB that can’t throw a forward pass, you’re eventually going to be punished for said decision. That bill came due for Michigan on Saturday night, and it was a bill with a lot of commas and zeroes in the form of two losses at the midway point of a season with a backloaded schedule.
Michigan started Alex Orji on Saturday. He threw for 15 total yards — an average of 2.1 yards per pass attempt. He only led three series. But by the time he was shown the bench and Jack Tuttle came in, it was already a 14-0 lead in Washington’s favor. And even though Michigan did momentarily erase that deficit and take a lead of its own, it’s a self-handicap that ended up being the difference in the game — a matchup against an unranked foe that a defending National Championship should win.
In the aftermath of last week’s Michigan-Minnesota game, I wrote a column titled “unsustainable.” It was about how Michigan kept playing with fire at the QB spot, and that if it didn’t make a change leading up to the Washington game, it was bound to get burnt. I excerpted that column in my preview of Michigan’s game against Washington, and led into my pick with the following prediction:
With said bye week looming, though, it just feels to me that the coaching staff will try and squeeze one more start out of Orji and give Tuttle two more weeks to get right. What’s that saying about playing with fire, again…?
Prediction: Washington 24, Michigan 19
The fact that I predicted Orji to come out and start was not an endorsement of the move. Far from it. Instead, it was a sign that I was already resigned to the predictability of what was to come. And since that prediction to start Orji was coupled with a prediction for Michigan to lose, I was well aware of what the consequences of that action were going to be.
Maybe it’s because I’m a dad now and I’m very well-versed in this type “I warned you!" behavior. But I’m very much in “I’m not mad — I’m just disappointed” mode when it comes to this Michigan football team right now. And that’s pretty terrifying. Because nine short months ago I was standing inside NRG Stadium with Maize and Blue confetti falling on my face in the afterglow of a National Championship. I promised myself I was going to let myself enjoy that title. I promised myself there would be gratitude for what that accomplishment entailed and just how hard it is for any team — let alone one north of the Mason–Dixon line — to win a National Championship. I promised myself I wouldn’t lose my mind if Michigan suffered a major regression as a dozen and a half key pieces of that championship team moved on to the NFL, along with what turned out to be half of its coaching staff, too.
I’m going to honor those promises to myself. But it worries me that the byproduct of that approach will be some form of complacency, with maybe even a little bit of apathy seeping in. And while being a fan is nothing like being a member of that team, I wonder if the human nature of “it’s all downhill from here” hasn’t subconciously reached members of the program inside Schembechler Hall, too.
This Michigan football team doesn’t come close to resembling any of Michigan’s last three teams. And while I don’t think it was fair to expect Michigan to be a top-4 program this year, which is was each of the last three, I also don’t think it was fair to expect the culture and identity of this program to disappear overnight — especially when you made the head coaching hire you did largely for the sake of program continuity (a move I overwhelmingly supported, to be fair).
Michigan does not deserve to be in the College Football Playoff mix. And after Saturday night’s 27-17 loss to Washington, a completely avoidable defeat against a team that was coming off a loss to Rutgers, that fourth straight trip to the CFP has gone from something that’s looking somewhere between possible and probable to something that’s the punchline of a cruel joke.
And the sad part about the loss is that Saturday’s game presented Michigan an opportunity to essentially hit the reset button on the first half of the season and make all of the struggles of the first six games essentially moot. When Michigan hosted Texas in Week 2, the Wolverines were the No. 10 team in the country. Despite getting trounced (a 31-12 final score is deceiving — the Longhorns took their foot off the gas in the second half and Michigan’s lone touchdown was with 114 seconds left in the game), Michigan was right back at No. 10 for its primetime matchup with Washington almost exactly a month later. The Wolverines were not only back where they were in the rankings, they were in position to be in an even better place nationally with so many upsets happening on Saturday, including losses by three teams in front of them in the rankings.
Michigan could — no, should — have been 5-1, comforably inside the top 10 with a conveniently timed bye week next on the horizon to get some injured players rested up, get the team’s new QB1 some time to prepare as a starter for the first time all season and give the team a chance to reset and refocus after a series of too-close-for-comfort wins.
But instead, a Michigan team that has now given up more yards than it has gained at the midway point of the season is looking less and less like a good team that stumbled out of the blocks and is struggling to find its footing, and more like the team it’s been showing us it is all season long: deeply flawed, with no real hope of an in-season fix.
The problems facing this team are far deeper than just the QB position. And I’ll go more in depth on the biggest of those issues later in this column. But Saturday night’s loss was completely avoidable, and a sign of the coaches failing the players — even if a lot of those players did more than their fair share to make Saturday’s quest for a primetime road win an unsuccessful attempt, too.
Michigan’s next game is a road contest against Illinois that Vegas expects to be within a field goal. A loss there, and you’re suddenly 4-3 with three games against currently unbeaten ranked opponents still ahead, not to mention a matchup with your cross-state rival that treats every game against you like it’s their Super Bowl. This thing feels dangerously close to going off the rails. In the meantime, the team’s last imaging for the next two weeks will be Washington fans climbing over rails — and storming the field.
After the paywall jump, let’s talk about who deserves the most blame, what to think about the Jack Tuttle era, Michigan’s many “what if” moments and what comes next. 👇