Michigan vs. Minnesota reactions: Uneven effort hangs over Little Brown Jug win
The Michigan Wolverines took down the Minnesota Golden Gophers by a score of 27-24 on Saturday afternoon in Ann Arbor, having to hold on late after jumping out to a big lead earlier in the game. U-M played with fire a bit and did not get burned, but plenty needs to be cleaned up heading into the first road trip next week at Washington.
TheWolverine.com’s Anthony Broome and former Michigan defensive lineman Ryan Van Bergen discussed the victory on the postgame show live from Regents Field in Downtown Ann Arbor.
“Played good, solid football in the first half, and I don’t think too many people would probably disagree with that,” Van Bergen said. “I like that we tried to get Orji to be a little bit more dynamic, or at least have the appearance of being more dynamic and having a couple first down passes, getting him going with some easier throws. And for the most part, especially just breaking it down by half, I thought he played a pretty good first half of football. Defensively, I thought we played really solid. We had some takeaways that we’ve been looking for. I think our defense has played relatively decent for the majority of the year so far, but I thought you saw that next step being taken.
“We’ve talked about progression over the weeks of football. And one of the things that the defense has been lacking is the turnovers. And you see an outstanding pick by Jyaire Hill. A great play by [Zeke Berry] to rip the ball away and come away with that football. And so defensively, I think this is going well. And offensively, it’s not going poorly. We’re doing well, but I think the, tale of two halves is the right analysis. I feel like we come out of that second half, we have the ball and we should make a statement. And we don’t make a statement.
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“To me, that shows where this team is five weeks in and gives them, I hope a little bit of a jumpstart because it’s going to sound not very humble, but when you’re a really good team and you’re winning 21-3 at halftime, you expect to score and make it a four-score game at the beginning of the half, it’s really easy to get in this mindset of, ‘let’s shut it down, save some energy. Let’s not keep the gas pedal all the way down.’ And I’m not saying that that’s what happened, but if you were to just look outside looking in, that’s what happened in this game. I hope this team now realizes that they are not good enough to run on four cylinders and beat Big Ten teams. They’re not good enough to let off and expect the team to just go away.
“Credit to Minnesota for continuing to battle and fight. But I hope they had the alarms ring that you’re going to have to play four quarters of good football to win some games this year. I don’t have any alarms going off to the same degree that some people do, because I think that the damage was self-inflicted. Minnesota didn’t do anything special. We just kept screwing up and shooting ourselves in the foot. And I don’t want either of those things to happen. But when you’re shooting yourself in the foot, you can always take your finger off the trigger and stop doing it. I have some trust and some faith that we can get some things cleaned up from the second half. But I understand the concern with how the second half of football played out.”
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