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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Supposedly, Michigan defensive coordinator Don Brown spent every waking moment thinking about one number.
62.
But the number 56 wasn’t supposed to be the response.
It doesn’t matter if Ohio State came into The Game ranked No. 1 in the country. With the top scoring offense in the nation.
No, the Buckeyes eviscerated the Wolverines up front, en route to 577 total yards. En route to a 56-27 walloping. En route to OSU’s eighth-straight victory over rival Michigan.
In last year’s three-game gauntlet, Brown seemed to work magic. After Penn State ran and passed all over the maize and blue, Brown’s defense held a high-flying Nittany Lions offense to next to nothing. That was supposed to be the plan this year for the two teams that beat the Wolverines in 2018.
Mission accomplished with Notre Dame. But the whole thing is now moot, null and void, with a worse performance statistically in this year’s edition of The Game.
264 yards rushing allowed. 313 yards passing. 9-of-15 on third-downs.
Michigan’s offense had its fair share of self-inflicted wounds, and despite a staggering seven-straight drops by Shea Patterson’s targets, he played well enough to win the game. The offense gave it a shot, but the defense couldn’t hold its end of the bargain.
The fifth-year in Jim Harbaugh’s tenure. And the third blowout loss to the Buckeyes.
Sophomore defensive end Aidan Hutchinson couldn’t quite pin down what Ohio State did, per se. He says they were never surprised by Justin Fields and J.K. Dobbins, who combined for 538 of the 577 total yards.
Yet, that couldn’t stop the Buckeyes. It didn’t even stall them. It did next to nothin.
“I don’t know — I just don’t think we executed well in not a lot of things,” Hutchinson said. “We’ve just gotta be so much better. There’s nothing we hadn’t seen before. It was all as expected. We just gotta execute better and all do our jobs, and we didn’t and it hurt us.”
“I didn’t see this coming,” Hutchinson later continued. “We just didn’t execute like we wanted to.”
After the game, Fields told reporters that the Buckeyes care more about the rivalry than Michigan, and while that’s easy to say after so many wins in a row, it doesn’t mean that it’s true.
But it looks like it.
Two teams prepared for this one, but one looked focused. Even as Michigan’s offense occasionally carved through the Buckeyes defense like a hot knife through butter, what did it matter?
In the end, what did it matter that Michigan receivers treated the football like a hot potato? It didn’t, when it had a defense that refused to stop, stall or stymie OSU’s offense.
Hutchinson looks back at a team that was well-prepared, sure, but certainly had a lack of focus. An inability to tackle as Dobbins careened off blocks, streaking down the field with tenacity. An inability to get to the quarterback, supposedly hobbled, as he made play after play.
The OSU offensive line dominated up front for the second-straight year, allowing just one sack, shared by linebacker Jordan Glasgow and defensive tackle Michael Dwumfour.
But that’s the problem with the defense. No pressure equals no opportunity to win. And Michigan got close to no pressure, with just two quarterback hurries to go along with that singular sack.
“I thought we prepared well,” Hutchinson said. “We knew everything that we saw. We just gotta be better, that’s all it is. It’s not scheme. We just gotta execute, that’s it.”
As the sullen and hoarse Hutchinson sat down on the dais in Crisler Center, he glanced at the white piece of paper sitting before the microphone. He pulled it near and looked over its contents, paused and shook his head, in disbelief of what he was seeing.
You have to go back to 2007, when Dennis Dixon and the Oregon Ducks came to Ann Arbor and pounded Lloyd Carr’s Wolverines to find a number higher than 577. This season, the most Michigan had given up was 487 at Wisconsin.
“It’s hard to look at,” Hutchinson said. “We’re just a better defense than this. We’re a better team than this. We’re a lot better than the numbers on this sheet.”
But they have to prove it. And no matter what Michigan does in its second or third-tier bowl game, it will do little to console those maize and blue-clad fans who had to endure yet another ‘OH-IO’ chant echoing through an emptying stadium. A sea of red clashing against vacant blue bleachers.
But to prove it — guess what? Gotta wait again until the last Saturday in November. Again.
“We’ll see — we gotta dig down next year, see what we got,” Hutchinson said. “You’re not gonna win ballgames when you’re letting up 50 or 60 points. It’s not gonna happen.
“We gotta get better.”
Next year, the proposition of taking down the Buckeyes remains difficult. Fields returns, while Patterson doesn’t. Whichever first-round NFL Draft picks Ohio State loses, it’ll just replace with high-end talent that will go in the first-round the next year.
Michigan may have just lost to the best team in the country. And blowout losses comes with the territory when it comes to going up against the best of the best. But that’s not what this is supposed to be, not this game.
The discrepancy on the scoreboard shouldn’t carry over to the decade-long wins and loss column, but here we are, closing in on two decades of Ohio State dominance over Michigan. U-M still has the lead in the series, 58-51-6, but it just lost the overall college football winning percentage, thanks to the Buckeyes, who now have those bragging rights.
If Auburn can rise up and snatch one every once and awhile from Alabama — and as of this writing, it’s still in a fight with the Crimson Tide, nursing a 3-point lead late in the fourth quarter — the Wolverines should accidentally be able to find a way to beat the Buckeyes.
But maybe that’s proof that Justin Fields is right. Maybe OSU does care more. Because if Michigan can’t execute in the biggest game of the year — as it is every year — while Ohio State never seems to come even close to blinking, there can’t be any other explanation.
The Game deserves better.
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