Was it ‘pretty’? Certainly not — but Michigan is 4-0

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Michigan beat Rutgers 20-13 Saturday in a game that treated excitement as if it were the newest variant. That’s who the Wolverines are these days. They are as thrilling as Jim Harbaugh’s khakis. They run the ball on offense, and they read and react on defense and, waiter, a round of vanilla ice cream for everyone.

When it works well, as it did on the first three Saturdays of September, Michigan wins easily. The Wolverines may not be the best team in the Big Ten, but they have been the most consistent, which is about as exciting as khaki and vanilla.

And then came the fourth Saturday of September, when, before a Homecoming crowd of 106,943 at Michigan Stadium, the Wolverines lost their consistency the way a starting pitcher suddenly can’t find the strike zone. Michigan raced to a 20-3 halftime lead, then left their momentum in the locker room.

Michigan gained 233 yards in the first half and 42 in the second. An offense that has scored seven touchdowns of at least 50 yards had a total of 42 yards in the second half.

An offense that began the game with a 17-play, 74-yard, six-first-down, will-this-drive-never-end touchdown drive made a grand total of two first downs in the second half, one of them thanks to a Rutgers face mask penalty.

And yet Michigan’s defense kept the Scarlet Knights at bay, forcing field goals on consecutive second-half trips into the red zone, then, when Rutgers had third-and-1 at Michigan’s 38, forcing a turnover on downs with 5:24 to play.

The Scarlet Knights’ final possession even ended in a turnover, the offense’s first in 290 plays from scrimmage this season.

“It was a gritty game,” Harbaugh said. “When they started making a space for ‘pretty’ on the scoreboard, then we’ll worry about that. It doesn’t go up on the scoreboard.”

In the second half, Michigan put nothing up on the scoreboard. The Wolverines won a game with 275 yards of total offense, something they haven’t had to do since 2014. You remember 2014, Year 1 BH (Before Harbaugh), when Michigan went 5-7 (and if you must know, two of those five wins came with fewer than 275 yards of total offense).

Harbaugh came to the rescue of his alma mater and made Michigan matter again. He attracted attention. That Harbaugh slept on a recruit’s couch, and took his team to Europe, and made $9 million a year.

But then the Wolverines got blown out by Ohio State in consecutive seasons, and then they went 2-4 in the pandemic season of 2020, and then Harbaugh got his salary cut to $4 million, and then Harbaugh remade his team. Michigan runs the ball now, in part because it has a deep well of running backs, led by Hassan Haskins and Blake Corum, the nation’s leader in all-purpose yardage, and in part because the passing game is barely passable.

In last week’s 63-10 rout of Northern Illinois, the Wolverines didn’t punt in 11 possessions, and Harbaugh played six quarterbacks. You know what they say — if you have six quarterbacks, you really don’t have one.

Rutgers did a good job of bottling up Corum, who rushed for 68 yards on 21 carries. His (and Michigan’s) longest run went 13 yards. Haskins rushed for 34 yards on seven carries on that opening drive, then ran five more times for 7 yards in the rest of the game.

Rutgers stifled the running game by stuffing the box and quarterback Cade McNamara failed to make the Scarlet Knights pay. McNamara, who has been, yes, consistent all season, finished 9-of-16 for 163 yards, which is decent. But he went 1-of-5 for 7 yards in the second half, bouncing a couple of passes toward open receivers.

“We just really couldn’t find a rhythm,” McNamara said. “That’s really the first time that’s happened; at least when I’ve played in a game, we haven’t done that as an offense. Obviously, that’s frustrating. We’ve got to do what we can not to let that happen again. . . . We’re super proud of our defense. They played really well and bailed us out.”

After last season, Harbaugh parted ways with his longtime coordinator, Don Brown, and his man-based scheme. Brown’s replacement, Mike Macdonald has this defense read and react, and keep things in front of them. They don’t make the exciting plays that Brown’s defense made, but they don’t surrender the exciting plays that Brown’s defense gave up.

This Michigan defense made Rutgers dink and dunk, forced the Scarlet Knights to drive methodically down the field, a difficult task in the first weeks of a college football season. Rutgers has been good at not beating itself this season, but in the end, it didn’t have the skill to push through a defense led by linebacker Nikhai Hill-Green, who had eight tackles.

“What was important was coming out with a win, making key stops we needed down the stretch,” Hill-Green said. “Today wasn’t good enough. We know that on both sides. We’ll get it fixed.”

When this season is over, and the Rutgers game has been subsumed by the second two-thirds of the season to come, what transpired at the Big House on Saturday will be long forgotten. But in the moment, with consecutive road trips to Wisconsin and Nebraska next, Michigan fans yearn for the Wolverines to regain their consistency, their efficiency, their vanilla and khaki.