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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Michigan didn’t have a lot of bright spots when it came to the Ohio State game again this year, but if there was one, it completely neutralized star defensive end Chase Young.
Young was considered by many to be the best college football player in the country, regardless of position. He finished fourth in Heisman Trophy voting this year, which has become seemingly more of a glorified quarterback award as of late — still a credit to just how disruptive Young has been up front.
Essentially no team had been able to slow or stop him all season — that is, until he played Michigan.
The only stats that Young registered all game was two quarterback hurries, and the Buckeyes only managed 2 sacks all game — tied for the second-lowest all year, as OSU only managed one sack in both the Northwestern and Rutgers games and only got two in the Big Ten Championship against Wisconsin.
Some analysts have described Michigan’s effort against Young as being an all-out affair, with notions that the Wolverines frequently triple-teamed or held him, but that’s not the way that senior left tackle Jon Runyan Jr. sees it.
“We had a game plan going into it about how we were gonna block him,” Runyan said. “We were gonna mix things up to him, slide to whatever side he was on. Some plays we’d slide away, kinda catch him offsides. People liked to say we were triple-teaming him, but I disagree that we were triple-teaming him. (We tried to set him up) to having him on the weakside, that’s the position that he plays. We were sliding that way. We were able to have the guards helping the center for a second or two. If the tackles get in trouble, then the guards would come out if the tackles were getting beat inside. I think me and Jalen did an excellent job handling him. It also helped having the running backs chip sometimes on their way out to the outside.
“The talk of us triple-teaming him is kind of blasphemous. Yeah, there was some plays where there were three guys touching him, but it’s not like that was our game plan going in there. Triple-teaming a single man. Yeah, it’s just a credit to the game plan that Coach Gattis put in, putting us in the correct situations and having the confidence in us to go one-on-one with him. We executed and that’s all you can ask for.”
Michigan now has fully moved its attention away from the Buckeyes as they look to face Alabama in the VRBO Citrus Bowl. That game is set to take place at Camping World Stadium in Orlando on Jan. 1 at 1PM EST.