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Since Big Ten Week 1, we’ve highlighted three voices in the college football world on a week-to-week basis. Two of them were more than kind after the Minnesota win, but we’ve seen them get progressively more unkind to Jim Harbaugh & Co. as the season has gotten more and more out of hand for Michigan football.
And that unkindness is certainly with merit.
So we return with this Sunday’s roundup, as the college football world watches the Wolverines fall apart with mouth fully agape.
USA TODAY Sports columnist Dan Wolken:
Michigan: Just two years ago, on Wisconsin’s last trip to the Big House, the domination by Michigan was so complete that you could finally start to see how Jim Harbaugh might eventually win a national championship. That 38-13 win, in fact, might have been the best Michigan performance in the Harbaugh era, notable for holding Wisconsin to 100 passing yards on 7-of-20 attempts as the Wolverines ascended into the top 10. As it turns out, beating good teams is an outlier for Harbaugh. Losing to Wisconsin 49-11, as Michigan did Saturday, is probably an outlier as well. But which one has more resonance? Unfortunately for Michigan fans, it’s the latter because it continued a string of pathetic performances that has left the Wolverines 1-3 with little hope of salvaging something from this season. This game was never close, never competitive. Michigan trailed 28-0 halftime, its largest home halftime deficit since Michigan Stadium opened in 1927. The offense is bad and the situation on defense seems to be getting worse each week. Harbaugh said he’ll evaluate everything. But Michigan fans’ evaluation of the situation and who’s to blame is already complete.
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Yahoo Sports’ Pete Thamel really piles on:
Michigan football remains the horror show we just can’t stop watching.
The Wolverines’ 49-11 home loss to Wisconsin provided new depths for this season of existential Jim Harbaugh crisis, as he suffered the largest margin of defeat in his tenure. The Badgers were coming off a long layoff after two postponed games from COVID-19, but any worry of rust or synchronicity were quickly washed aside thanks to Michigan’s putrid offense and Charmin defense.
Wisconsin led 28-0 at halftime, the final touchdown of the first half revealing perhaps the most puzzling part of Harbaugh’s season of torment in Ann Arbor. Nakia Watson’s 10-yard touchdown run featured him essentially waltzing up the middle of the field with a remarkable lack of resistance from the Michigan defense.
The lack of effort from Michigan epitomizes perhaps the most troubling aspect of this season for Harbaugh. At previous stops at San Diego, Stanford and the San Francisco 49ers, Harbaugh’s best coaching ability was being able to foster a competitive spirit among his team. (Remember the upset of USC as a 41-point underdog in 2007?)
Harbaugh had the ability to bore into the souls of his players and push them to believe. But it’s safe to say after another non-competitive performance that this Michigan team has no tangible competitive spirit. The Wolverines were pushed around by 1-3 Michigan State, bullied by Indiana and now swallowed alive by Wisconsin. Or, as Harbaugh put it after the game: “Thoroughly beaten in every phase, really did not do anything well.”
At 1-3, Michigan heads to Rutgers next week with a legitimate chance to lose the game. Last year, they beat Rutgers 52-0. Harbaugh said Michigan is in “not a good place” as a team, and that responsibility “falls on me.” He added that he needs to find players who want to “fight like hell for Michigan.”
The free fall of the Michigan program really began with a blowout loss at Wisconsin last year, which Michigan also trailed 28-0 at the half. In the past two years, Wisconsin has outgained Michigan 718-140 on the ground.
By the end of the game, Wisconsin’s social media trolled Michigan by tweeting out the lyrics to “Bored in the House,” a play off of Big House. But the reality is that Michigan flailing has become so reliable that it’s not surprising anymore. We’ll tune in next week to see if the Wolverines can muster up a fight.
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Perhaps the least brutal review came from ESPN’s David M. Hale:
And then there’s Michigan. The good news is, after Graham Mertz was nearly perfect in Wisconsin’s opener, he looked entirely pedestrian against the Wolverines’ defense. The bad news is, Michigan needed to use a quarterback too. Wisconsin won easily in another brutal performance from Harbaugh’s team, and while the next three games — Rutgers, Penn State, Maryland — are all entirely winnable (even for Michigan), it’s hard to see how the unrest in Ann Arbor is quieted short of a miracle against Ohio State. On the upside, the New York Jets might be hiring soon.
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The good news is exactly as Hale notes: Michigan essentially has a middling non-conference-like in-conference slate midseason — say that five times fast — with each of the next three contests going from likely the easiest to hardest. That said, the Wolverines certainly could lose all three just as much as they could win all three, given the current state of the team.