Down Bad In Ann Arbor
Believe it or not, I actually have been keeping an eye on things Up North. You can take the dude out of Threat Level but you can't take Threat Level out of the dude, and I've habitually watched pretty much every Michigan game this season with a special focus on a certain quarterback named Bryce Underwood.
Underwood has enormous potential and an enormous price tag, and in a freshman year in which he was pretty much Michigan's only option, he was fine. He was fine! Often he was worse, and rarely he was better, and that's how it played out on Saturday, too. Hell, that's the whole team: kinda good, sometimes. But also weirdly ass? About halfway through the 3rd quarter, Underwood rifled a pass to receiver Donaven McCulley for 26 yards, a throw that was impeccably timed and required elite arm strength to even attempt. You can imagine a version of Michigan that combines smashmouth football with a guy who can make throws like
that and think "damn, okay."
And then rewatching it after the fact, you notice that a) the pass was into triple coverage, b) was followed by a pass for zero yards, a rush for zero yards, and an incompletion, c) was part of a drive capped by an 11-yard punt, and d) less than a minute later Julian Sayin hit a 50-yard bomb to Carnell Tate to put the game on ice. Yeah, Michigan is dealing with some key injuries, especially in the run game. But so much of what they do relies on slamming their heads against a wall and looking for a crack.
Bryce Underwood could, with decent coaching, evolve into a really great quarterback. Michigan could, with decent coaching, maintain a position as one of the top five or six best teams in the United States. I can't see it happening with Sherrone Moore and company, who
seem hellbent on crafting a bespoke college football program made from fifty thousand variations of a single bash run play.
The Game will always be weird and have unpredictable outcomes because it exists in a dimension of paint fumes and coked-up opossums with knives taped to their paws. I've learned to accept that.
But I've seen the future of the Michigan Wolverines and it has a ceiling of losing in the first round of the CFP on the road at Tulane.