All Quiet on the Western Front

LOOKS LIKE I PICKED THE WRONG DAY TO QUIT DRINKING

The long Labor Day weekend always lends itself to extra reflection on what is typically the first game of the season. Controversial endings—and debating that controversy—grab viewership, and in this day and age, that’s what matters most. So your algorithm is probably humming away right now, somewhere between “Michigan Cheats” and “Look at this redeeming clock replay sent over from the Big Ten office.”

The game ended, then it ended again, those two endings diametrically opposed. If Michigan was on the other side of this, I’d like to say I’d be screaming from the mountaintops. But the product probably wouldn’t have warranted it.

Extra second aside, Michigan was abysmal on Saturday. And while most of that opinion comes from the assumption that the opponent was MAC garbage, there were so many things that went wrong independent of the other team on the field that you wouldn’t have called that a gutty win if it had happened against Ohio.

Lucky. That’s what it was.

It was one of those common Sparty-over-Michigan-style victories. Run off the field for all but the opening drive and saved by a sloppy miracle. Dominated at the line of scrimmage. Lack of identity. Unforced errors. An early-season punch in the gut to the Michigan faithful who had belief in the hype machine and the one-liners, and belief in a coaching staff that was supposed to be the “adults in the room”—the ones who replaced a regime rife with side pieces and halftime booty-call DMs.

Though he was just one of many issues on Saturday, the lightning rod of it all is the quarterback. It’s difficult for me to give up on Bryce Underwood and what I have always viewed as the limitless ceiling of his talent. We’ve just seen none of it.

Improvement is important, of course, and given the investment (and the previous absent-minded staff), some patience was warranted. I’m just not sure whose will run out first: the staff’s or mine. Because I am damn close…and I know for many of you, it ran dry many, many games ago.

Tommy Carr looms, looking to replace a nearly unanimously voted-by-the-team captain who is first at practice and last to leave, and who cashed his second $2.5 million check that we wrote. What that might mean for the locker room—and the next few years of Michigan football—is a difficult question to answer. But at some point, the possibility of future negatives is overrun by unachievable goals and diminishing returns.

Bryce exudes confidence when the clock isn’t moving. But the bad taste left in my mouth as Bryce strutted and skipped around with an “I did it, I told you I’d do it” expression after he was bailed out by Buchanon all day…rough.

Joel Klatt, probably as Michigan-homer as it gets for a national pundit, took painstaking detail in not just picking apart his performance between the first drive and the Hail Mary, but also the first drive itself. It’s eye-opening.

I’ve got no idea what happens next. Benching Bryce is serious shit on a lot of levels. And based on the rest of the team’s play, I’m not certain it would matter this week against Oklahoma.

To be discussing salvaging a season after the first game—and a win in the first game at that—is disheartening, to say the least. But maybe, just maybe, they’ll surprise us.

Because no matter how much you think you know about what a group of 18-to-22-year-old kids will do when the chips are down, just remember that you just watched Michigan rush the field after a victory over a MAC school.