I gotta give it up to Shari Lewis. From the 1950's until her death in the late 90's, the lady made a pretty solid career out of entertaining kids with a variety of sock puppets and ventriloquism. Lamb Chop's Play Along may not have been high art, but it was easily digestible fun that also featured an ending song that was probably responsible for more parental rage than anything this side of Barney.
Right now Michigan's schedule is the Preseason That Doesn't End. They're a good team that has played two very, very bad teams, a trend that will continue until... what, mid-October? When literally Maryland is your biggest threat for the first half of the season, you know that you can coast. Sometimes that's a problem, sometimes it isn't, but hey: at least Michigan got a quarterback out of the deal.
THE OFFENSE
Beating Hawai'i 56-10 isn't an accomplishment. It isn't just that the Rainbow Warriors are the worst team in college football, it's also that they're hanging on by a thread as a program in general. Their previous coach, Todd Graham, was described as a "tyrant" as over a dozen players (including the starting quarterback) decided that playing football in the island paradise of Hawai'i just wasn't for them. Things got so bad that the state Senate got involved, and that's before we talk about how their home stadium got condemned so they have to play home games on a glorified practice field.
Anyway, that's a roundabout way of saying that any stray Michigan fan reading this and hoping for effusive praise from yours truly about the Wolverines averaging 8.1 yards per carry or J.J. McCarthy having a near-perfect game (11/12, 229 yards, 3 TDs) against a beaten down team that had to fly 10 and a half hours just to get their ass kicked is going to be disappointed.
Also J.J. McCarthy won the quarterback competition, if it ever actually was that. Cade McNamara never made the most of his opportunities in the first few games, exemplified by failing to move the offense and tossing an INT against, again, the worst team in America.
THE DEFENSE
Hawai'i had less than 50 yards of offense at halftime, and that should tell you about all that you need to know about how this game went.
However, one funny thing is that the Rainbow Warriors were able to sustain drives against Michigan's second-stringers, and finished the game going 9-17 on 3rd down. That doesn't actually mean anything, but I can imagine a similar situation in Ohio Stadium leading to many tweets with some variation of "WHAT IS JIM KNOWLES DOING???"
Oh, and the Wolverines only had one sack. Hawai'i had two. Makes you think!
WHAT DID WE LEARN?
Well:
Jim Harbaugh: J.J. - he had a near flawless performance well start J.J. Next week.
— Isaiah Hole (@isaiahhole) September 11, 2022
Other than that... nothing. What I find weird about the Michigan quarterback situation is that McCarthy was always going to be the choice. There were reports that McNamara was having a better fall camp, but it has been clear who the more dynamic player has been from the first time the two appeared in the same game.
The issue is that games against Colorado State and Hawai'i and UConn aren't really going to tell Jim Harbaugh much, if anything, about who J.J. McCarthy, starting quarterback, really is. These are bad teams that won't be able to exploit potential offensive line issues or consistently force difficult throws into tight coverage or require McCarthy to make difficult reads. Will that eventually matter? Maybe, maybe not. But it feels like Harbaugh could've made this choice without necessitating the embarrassment of a team captain, and that might matter sooner than he'd like.
But let's be clear, Michigan is still a very good team, and the Threat Level will remain HIGH. I just wish we had more data to back that up.
