I am no stranger to bad football, and, given site metrics on our usual audience, you likely aren't either. We watched for years as Jim Tressel's teams frequently underwhelmed against inferior opponents, but in more of a "funeral dirge played on a kazoo" kind of way, instead of the more baffling but entertaining "cute lil' snail powerbombs a grizzly into a 10000 gallon aquarium" screw-ups of the Urban Meyer years.
And to be clear: Tresselball (the practice of valuing field position over points and leaning on your defense to make a three point lead feel like a three touchdown lead while staring directly into the sun), even though it was almost always successful, could be pretty excruciating to sit through.
I revisited several of my favorite Tresselball bangers, and I think the best is this 16-3 win against Purdue in 2008, where the 2-4 Boilermakers outgained the 12th ranked Buckeyes by 76 yards and the only touchdown scored was on a punt return three minutes into the game.
But hey, they won, right? And that's all that matters, right? So Michigan giving up 21 fourth quarter points to Minnesota and escaping on a terrible offsides call is the same thing, right?
Alex Orji 16 yard pass pic.twitter.com/jStQumdQrc
— blashdril (@blashdril) September 28, 2024
I wrote last week that Tresselball was the aspirational summit for this Michigan football team, and maybe some kind of ersatz version of that is still technically in play for them. There's a possible future out there in which the Wolverines keep winning ugly all the way to the Playoff as I get increasingly angry while trying to write this article every week.
But now I'm convinced that it's just slide whistles all the way down.
SOMEBODY PLEASE BEAT THIS INCREDIBLY STUPID TEAM
Texas already did, of course, but in a way that seemingly reinforced how good the Longhorns are instead of underlining how crappy Michigan is.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Michigan beat Minnesota, 27-24, in a game that at one point they were leading 24-3 thanks to some combination of dark magic and animal sacrifice (and bad officiating). Alex Orji (who finished 10/18 for 86 yards) showed occasional flashes of competence, in the same way that you clap your hands when a toddler considers a fistful of dirt and decides not to put it in their mouth. Kalel Mullings (24 carries, 111 yards) was good when he wasn't being actively bad, as half of his carries went for just a yard or less.
But in the first half against the Golden Gophers, that was enough. P.J. Fleck and company turned the ball over a few times and had a punt blocked, in between being somehow befuddled by the idea that yes, Michigan really was going to run the ball 70% of the time. The Wolverines were up by 17 points going into the end of the half, and that's when they decided to stop playing football.
A WINK AND A NUDGE
Nothing much worked offensively for Michigan after halftime (Orji threw a terrible interception and Mullings was limited, failing to convert on a crucial third down near the end of the game), but one of the more baffling decisions by the Wolverines on Saturday was defensive coordinator Wink Martindale repeatedly calling up man coverage while missing his best defensive player, injured cornerback Will Johnson.
One of the more baffling reactions to that baffling decision was Minnesota waiting until the second half to throw the same little curl and slant routes that have been carving up the Michigan secondary all season. Eventually they did, as the majority of Gopher quarterback Max Brosmer's 258 yards passing came in the fourth quarter on two long touchdown drives.
As you can see above, that final Minnesota touchdown came while driving into the teeth of a raucous Michigan student section, who... wait, what the hell?
That's better.
Anyway, after not being intimidated by the 20 or 30 Michigan fans who braved the light drizzle, Brosmer and company scored to get them within a field goal. All that remained was the extremely easy task of recovering an onside kickoff, barring any officiating shenanigans.
This was called offside. Judge for yourself, and if you come to any other conclusion than "Minnesota was not offside" I just want to gently tell you that you are dumb and wrong. There's a 100% chance that the Gophers score a winning touchdown after that recovery. I refuse to believe otherwise.
A lot of the Michigan chatter that I saw after the game was some shade of desperate reflexive whining like "the ball hit a Minnesota player before it went ten yards" (it didn't) or "Minnesota committed another penalty on the play that the refs missed, so it's fine" (they sort of did but it still isn't), which kind of lays bare the overall point that this is a crappy Michigan team that is poorly coached and did not deserve to win.
They know it, I know it, and now you know it (if you didn't already).
THREAT LEVEL
Will be dropped to GUARDED, in large part because Michigan's "success" this season calls into question the sanity of ranking any team before October. The Michigan Wolverines are somehow a top ten college football squad despite getting annihilated at home, looking intermittently terrible against inferior (???) competition, and being road dogs against a 3-2 unranked Washington Huskies team that just got Schiano'd in Piscataway.
That ranking is completely unearned, and what's really, really, really irritating is that unlike Jim Tressel's most Tressellian teams, Michigan simply doesn't have the stones or the talent to beat most other squads with a pulse. They've been bailed out by opponents playing down to their deeply ridiculous level twice now, and I'm looking forward to watching UW stuff them into an improbably scenic locker somewhere in the Cascades this week.
