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MADISON, Wis. — The fans slowly filled into Camp Randall Stadium, the student section still half-full at kickoff.
The Badgers, and their fans by proxy, are used to seeing winged helmets bowed in defeat once 60 minutes of game time have concluded. But on Saturday, Michigan would not be denied.
Bolstered by a new-look, aggressive defense that made a typically stout offensive line look pedestrian, at best, the offense had to find a way to match. A week beforehand, against a seemingly improved Rutgers team, it had stalled, sputtering its way to culmination, relying on a bending, but not breaking, defense to carry the day.
On Saturday, that wouldn’t be the case.
Though it took a moment to get going, the offense came out swinging. This was a different version of body blows than the 2018 offense, which slowly and methodically wore down defenses over the course of a game. This wasn’t even the same offense that rumbled for 300-yards rushing the first three weeks of the season. Against Wisconsin, the nation’s top run defense, despite midweek confidence that they’d be able to move the ball on the ground, the stodgy nature of the staff wasn’t going to stubbornly and perpetually run into a brick wall in an attempt to stick a square peg into a round hole.
It appeared that might be the case to some degree early, as a dive play on the second fourth-down attempt on the first drive was stuffed at the line of scrimmage. But once the defense stood tall, forcing four-straight three-and-outs, the offense was determined to put the game away early and for good, striking first and often.
“Felt great. Wisconsin, on film, they’re known to stop the run, so we knew going into this game that we were gonna throw it a little bit more,” quarterback Cade McNamara said. “I thought overall the offense did a good job.”
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So how much of a conscious strategy was it for the Wolverines to change things up? To suddenly shift gears after a third of the season’s identity had been forged?
In the preseason, Michigan reportedly was intent to strike a 50/50 balance between the run and the pass, but a funny thing happened on the way to The Big House — the run game was good. Real good.
The next week, with a stout Washington defense coming to town, Harbaugh noted that the pass defense was too stellar to try and win the game through the air. Fans grumbled, despite a dominant performance in the trenches and on the ground — not because the 31-10 win wasn’t good enough, but because this trip to Madison loomed. Because there are defenses in the Big Ten predicated on stopping the run. If you haven’t proven that you can pass and you can’t run, what do you do?
So the Wolverines came into Madison, a place it hadn’t won in 20 years, and flipped the script. The narrative was changed at the outset, even if the drive didn’t end in points. But the offense came to play right out of the gates.
“Yeah, we threw the ball on the first play of the game!” head coach Jim Harbaugh said. “That’s what — we’ve been striving to be balanced, throwing the ball and running the ball. Had a very similar approach this week and a team that has a really good run defense. Yeah, it was well-mixed. We really believe in our quarterbacks. We believe in our receivers and our tight ends. We believe we can throw the ball well. We believe we can run it well.
“But, yeah — we’re gonna do both. There’s two ways to travel, right?”
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Gone was the stoic approach to football. Yes, many of the plays were the typical pro-style variety with spread concepts mixed in as we’ve seen in offensive coordinator Josh Gattis’ tenure. But with McNamara hitting short plays and missing them, alike, that’s when Michigan decided to get on the board in a hurry.
McNamara handed the ball off to running back Hassan Haskins who tossed it right back to him. Wide receiver Cornelius Johnson crossed the field, initially lined up on the right side, but streaking towards the left corner of the end zone, where he had a beat on the coverage. McNamara hit him in stride and put seven on the board.
These things have been in the Wolverines’ arsenal, but we’re just now seeing them for the first time, in a big, must-win game if the overall narrative of the season, itself, has truly been flipped.
“The flea-flicker is something we were practicing throughout camp — fall camp, August, September,” Johnson said of his first of two touchdowns on the day. “We got to bring it out of our bags. We got to dig into our toolkit and bring out the right tool for the right moment. That one we were able to execute.”
Though the offense had just put three on the board to stretch the lead, 13-3, as the first half waned, Graham Mertz and the Badgers weren’t intent on being dominated. With seconds left, Wisconsin drove the field as Mertz hit Chimere Dike twice for 54 yards, which included a perfect strike in the end zone, threading the needle to where Michigan safety Daxton Hill couldn’t reach it.
Previous Michigan teams would have entered the locker room befuddled and downtrodden, down on their luck. But this version, on both sides of the ball, was determined to change their fate.
The defense stood tall, knocking Mertz and Badgers tight end Jake Ferguson out through impressive physical plays. And the offense responded by putting together a five minute, 29-second drive that culminated on a J.J. McCarthy fourth-down, goal line keeper which put the Wolverines back up two scores.
It took until the next quarter before Michigan put the Badgers away for good, but they eventually did, and they did so with impunity.
“We just wanted to make sure, coming into the locker room, that we had a good plan going into the second half,” Johnson said. “We practiced a lot of plays over the course of this past week coming up to this trip we took to Madison. We wanted to make sure that all of the plays we practiced during the week we were able to bring out in the second half and execute those to the best of our ability.”
For this offense, though, it all started on that first drive, when Harbaugh kept them out there for two consecutive first downs on the wrong side of midfield. The first one made it, the second didn’t.
Still, they knew that Harbaugh and the offensive staff had confidence in them due to the faith of making such gutsy calls so early in the game.
“The playcalling was amazing,” wide receiver Roman Wilson said. “Just on fourth down, I feel like a statement — a statement play. We’re not gonna back down.”
For once, we saw Michigan refusing to rest on its laurels. It entered Saturday knowing it was elite at running the ball. But with Wisconsin’s strength matching the Wolverines’ strength, Harbaugh chose not to take the road less traveled and instead take the path of lesser resistance.
“I kinda knew going into this game that it would be difficult to run the ball,” McNamara said. “I accepted the challenge. We got the dub. So next. That’s all I got!”
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