PARADISE VALLEY, Ariz. — While most college football media personalities and fans are keen on the Michigan football defense against the TCU offense in the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl, perhaps just as key of a matchup will be the Wolverine offense against the Horned Frog defense.
While the maize and blue don’t have what many would see as an explosive offense, per se, the Wolverines still have the No. 27 unit in the country in terms of yards per game — 12 spots behind TCU at No. 15. TCU’s defensive coordinator Joe Gillespie likens what he’s seen from Michigan on film to a team he’s seen twice this year: Kansas State.
“Yes, they are. Then there’s some aspects that are very similar to a K-State and some guys like that, because what Kansas State did to us. We unfortunately fell short to them in the Big 12 Championship game,” Gillespie said. “But from the big personnel packages and running the ball and really controlling the clock and moving the sticks and stuff like that, there’s a lot of resemblance from that aspect.
“It’s going to be quite a bit different from what we’ve gotten to see week in and week out. But I also feel like there’s some differences that we’ll bring to the table as well. I think it’s going to be a great matchup.”
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Comparatively, Kansas State is the No. 42 team in total offense, though it is, like Michigan, relatively balanced in terms of run-pass yardage.
Both teams have had nearly a month to prepare for each other, and with Gillespie’s unit running a 3-3-5 stack, one wonders if that’s not the best way to approach a Michigan offense that is predicated on running the football with a power blocking scheme. Big 12 defenses are generally set up to defend passing attacks, given the conference is more likely to attack through the air than on the ground. That has Gillespie mulling how he’s going to defend the maize and blue, wondering how much to change things up versus keeping things the same.
“We’re kind of getting to the point right now, when you’ve got a month to sit there and prepare you’ve got to be very careful about what you do, because you start trying to defend too much,” Gillespie said. “And so we’ve tried to be very methodical in how we install this game plan. You gotta be careful as coaches and as players, too, because the more you watch, and more you take in, the more you want to put in, the more you try to defend.
“I just kind of gotten to the point, been in this business where for a minute, I’ve reached out to several people that — I’ve never been in this position, and, at this point in the season, at this level — and so reached out to several people that have. Just trying to gain a little wisdom, and what did they learn from being in this same spot. One of the common denominators of all of them was: the bigger the game, the smaller the plan.
“And so I think you got to be very careful in what we do coming into this, because you can get yourself into a problem of trying to defend everything, and what we want to do is dance with who brought us there, and what got us there, don’t try to sit there and reinvent the wheel now.
“But at the same time, Michigan is different from what we’ve gotten to see week in, week out throughout the course of the season. We’re gonna have some things in the end that we probably haven’t done through the course of the season. And, right now, it looks good on paper, looks good on the marker board, looks good in practice, stuff like that. You’re gonna have to go out there and put it on the field and see how it fares against Michigan.
“The other great thing that’s happened through the course of the season is, man, we got an unbelievable staff that — we’ve had to make adjustments, quick adjustments on the sideline. And our guys are tremendous students of the game. And I think the biggest thing that they’ve done that’s allowed us to make some of those comeback wins, they made those adjustments and then gone out on the field, and they’ve executed it and executed it very quick. So, you know, feel quite certain that’s going to happen again.”
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The best rushing attack TCU has seen all year was Texas, and the Horned Frogs held the Longhorns to 28 yards on 22 carries. Gillespie says if he was Matt Weiss and Sherrone Moore, he would be looking at that game as the one to try to understand how TCU might defend Michigan’s vaunted run game.
”If I’m Michigan’s offense, on the offensive side of the ball, then that’s certainly one of the games that I’m going to study quite a bit,” Gillespie said. “And obviously, from a defensive, from a team standpoint, it was a big win for us. From a defensive standpoint, trying to stop Bijan (Robinson) and everybody else that they got, I think they would go back and really study that and try to figure out some of the things that we did to do those things and so you can you can correlate a little bit. But Michigan is still Michigan from a different standpoint, and so we’re gonna have to do a few things that we know we certainly didn’t do there, haven’t done.”
That could, perhaps, be bait, as no coach is going to share how it’s going to play the team that’s next on the schedule. Still, Gillespie is confident in what his game plan is for the Vrbo Fiesta Bowl, especially given how his team has battled late with the game on the line.
“Well, I guess we’re about to find out. We feel very confident with it,” Gillespie said. “Obviously, the question was brought up earlier. This is a little bit different personnel package and from what we’ve seen through the course of the season. But we also feel like we’ve got some things within our defense that we can go into.
“But again, just like I was saying, I think it has to start up front. If we can sit there and control at some point, and at some parts of the game, control the line of scrimmage and do those things, then we’re going to have to win on the early downs and put them in some predictable situations hopefully.”
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