Remember how, a few years ago, Ohio State found its offense in the hands of a redshirt freshman at quarterback, who, after some initial setbacks, ended up being a truly transcendent player that led the team to glory and set them up for a national championship?
The sun started to peek out from behind the clouds in Ann Arbor as Brandon Peters led Michigan on a touchdown drive.
— Kyle Rowland (@KyleRowland) October 28, 2017
So do Michigan fans. For years, their greatest desire has been to replicate, even on a small scale, the kind of success that Ohio State has had via young, inexperienced quarterbacks or rock star coaching hires or genius coordinators that can supposedly do no wrong. Except the success they've been able to obtain is like some tiny, warped version of what the Buckeyes have been able to accomplish. It's like in the movie Multiplicity, where each iteration of Michael Keaton gets increasingly weird and less competent.
I don't know if Brandon Peters is a good clone or a bad clone of the J.T. Barrett story (success-wise, anyway), but when your quarterbacks are changed as a matter of skill rather than a matter of injury, you've got bigger problems than solutions. Michigan beat Rutgers by 21 points on Saturday, which led to a lot of Wolverine fans getting just a little too high on their own supply on social media. We'll see in a few weeks if that means anything.
THREAT LEVEL
Remember back to earlier in the season when multitudes of Buckeye fans were calling for J.T. Barrett to be benched? This is what a team looks like that actually requires the benching of its starting quarterback in favor of someone with essentially zero college football experience.
On paper, the Peters Principle looked semi-effective, and a whole hell of a lot better than what came before it. Michigan got over 470 yards of offense (their highest output this season), and while only 137 of those yards came through the air, that's actually not even close to the worst passing performance this year by the Wolverines, so whatever.
Higdon and Isaac both had 100 yard rushing games, and Harbaugh, not keen on giving his new baby turtle of a quarterback a chance to lose a game against Rutgers, ended up calling 51 running plays that effectively put the game out of reach by halftime.
Defensively... meh? I got bit hard by saying that this was a legitimately great defense before the Penn State game, and a very good performance against a very bad Rutgers offense isn't enough to put my finger back in the gerbil cage. That probably won't happen until the end of the season against Wisconsin and the Buckeyes, so until then they'd better be pitching shutouts.
Look, overall this was a decent bounceback win with a new quarterback against a bad opponent. But the bottom line is that Jim Harbaugh is on his third quarterback of the year about 2/3rds of the way through the season. That's not a good sign any way you slice it, and regardless of the average Michigan Man's enthusiasm for Brandon Peters, if he's just as bad as O'Korn in the long run, they're out of options.
Beat somebody good! The Threat Level remains LOW.
