I thought DR looked good on Saturday. He's cut down on the stupid mistakes that he was making last year, and he's a legit running threat. His throws had a lot of zip on them, and he was reasonably accurate (although he wasn't asked to make any really difficult throws). I liked the pump-fake-throw that he made at the start of the fourth quarter. The OL looked good, too.
Now, with all of that said, reserve judgment on this team. It's clear that UCONN was not nearly as good as advertised. Their tackling looked like 2008 UM's tackling (that is, there wasn't any). Their DL couldn't do jack squat; DR frequently wasn't even touched until he was 5-8 yards down field. Moreover, UCONN gifted UM repeatedly with turnovers and refusing to punish mistakes (several times, UM dropped the ball and UCONN failed to recover). Michigan's DL isn't nearly as good as they were reported to be, and their secondary is just awful. If UCONN's receivers didn't drop a full 50% of the passes thrown to them, it's a different game. All of that notwithstanding, UM might have problems on offense. They showed absolutely no ability by anyone outside of DR. Even if he can hold up to the conference schedule - and that's a big IF - it's going to become easy to gameplan for him. Their running backs looked mediocre at best. Moreover, they only scored 30 points on what looks to be a really bad UCONN defense - shouldn't they be scoring in the 40's on a team like that?
I expected them to win 6-7 games this year, and I'm thinking that could get revised up to 7-8, maybe even 9 games. It's too early to make any snap judgments, though, especially in light of last year.
