There are members of the staff of Eleven Warriors dot com, who shall remain nameless, that are intensely skeptical of the 2018 Michigan Wolverines football team. They do not believe that the fighting Jim Harbaughs are worthy of the either the hype or adulation that they've received from the media, particularly the defense, which they don't think as great enough to cover up some pretty obvious offensive deficiencies.
This is a fair take; since the Notre Dame game, Michigan hasn't exactly played a murderers row of offenses nationally, and teams like Wisconsin and Penn State have drastically underperformed from where most people thought they would at the beginning of the season.
But this weekend's Rutgers game, which an incredibly disinterested Wolverines team won 42-7, was vintage 2018 Michigan. Tied after the first quarter, they just leaned on the weight of their defense and sat on the Scarlet Knight's chests until they cried uncle.
Sure, a better offensive team might be able to kick them off before that happens, but no one has been able to accomplish the feat in nine weeks.
THREAT LEVEL
I tend to harp on how awesome Michigan's defense is, but by their standards against Rutgers they had a thoroughly mediocre first half of football. Sure, they held Artur Sitkowski to only 59 passing yards for the game and created a couple of turnovers, but the Scarlet Knights also ran up nearly 200 rushing yards by the end of the contest as Isaih Pacheco had a field day, going for 142 yards on 16 carries. That's the best individual rushing performance against Michigan all season.
So what exactly did Michigan do to beat Rutgers?
Managed third down. The Wolverines were 9-14 on converting third downs, and despite Karan Higdon not having a good day rushing the ball, they got running yards elsewhere (Chris Evans had 75 yards, Tru Wilson added another 58, etc.).
Shea Patterson turned in another very good performance (260 yards passing, three touchdowns), and hey guess what, that adds up to an easy 35 point win. Everyone looked bored, and Jim Harbaugh forgot Chris Ash's name:
"That's a team that's very close to breaking through and winning multiple games, consecutive games," Harbaugh said. "Rob does a really good job with them. They've got a good plan offensively and a good plan defensively."
Next week Michigan will be equally disinterested as they play a very meh Indiana team coached by Bob Tallen. The Threat Level remains SEVERE.
