Michigan football isn’t built to blow teams out

At halftime on Saturday, the then-No. 12 Michigan football team led Minnesota 21-3, and everything was going smoothly. The Wolverines finally looked like the dominant team that a top-15 squad should be against an unranked opponent at home — the type that goes up big early and coasts from there. 

Then, the Golden Gophers scored touchdowns on three consecutive drives in the second half while Michigan managed two field goals. It required an offside penalty on Minnesota’s successful onside kick and junior quarterback Alex Orji scrambling 10 yards back to recover his own fumble for the Wolverines to stave off catastrophe. Michigan won, but it took what should have been a dominant win and twisted it into a nail-biter.

Saturday was far from the first time that the Wolverines have done that, too. 

Against Fresno State, the Wolverines took a 13-point lead before giving the Bulldogs the ball in the fourth quarter with a chance to take the lead. Against Arkansas State, they turned a 28-3 game into a 10-point win. And against No. 11 Southern California, they needed a remarkable drive from graduate running back Kalel Mullings to win a game that they had led comfortably at halftime. 

Michigan still won all four of those games, albeit some more leisurely than others. The 10th-ranked Wolverines sit at 4-1, their only loss coming to arguably the best team in the country in No. 2 Texas. All things considered, they’re about exactly where people expected them to be at this point in the season — but it doesn’t feel like that. 

By turning every comfortable win into a tight game, Michigan is playing with fire, even if it hasn’t been burned yet. But the Wolverines also don’t have the tools to snuff out that fire, because they simply aren’t built to blow teams out.

It’s easy to point to playing poor second halves as the culprit for those struggles. The Wolverines have been outgained by 90 total yards in second halves this season, while outgaining opponents by 56 yards in first frames. That’s not a huge difference, but placed in conjunction with the fact that they’ve outscored opponents 69-36 in the first half and been outscored 71-55 in the second, it looks all the more striking. Michigan’s five second-half turnovers haven’t helped matters, either. 

And the Wolverines know their recent second halves haven’t been good enough — just ask them: 

“I think we all know that the end of the game, especially the second half, wasn’t up to the standard that Michigan football has set in the past,” Orji said postgame Saturday.

Added Mullings: “We just have to find a way to strain in that second half and strain to finish teams.”

If only it were that simple for the Wolverines. But their poor second halves are a symptom of the way the team is currently constructed, and as currently constructed, they don’t have the capability to just “find a way” to finish teams. 

On offense, when opponents are nearly 100% certain that Michigan is going to run in an attempt to keep the clock turning, they’ve been able to stop it. The Wolverines averaged just 2.3 yards per carry while leading in the second half against the Trojans and just 3.4 against the Gophers. Orji hasn’t shown the ability to take advantage of the increased focus on the run game, either, missing multiple open targets on Saturday via errant throws or not seeing them. 

And on defense, Michigan has tons of talent but little depth to back it up, stretched even thinner by recent injuries. That has left the Wolverines playing their first- and second-stringers more often and deeper into games than they might otherwise like early in the season, in fear of replicating the Red Wolves’ late-game scoring spree that occurred when the backups came in. But when the offense struggles to move the ball in the second half, and keeps the defense on the field, that leads to cracks late in the game. 

Altogether, Michigan is left as a far cry from last year’s “boa constrictor,” instead closer to the team that watches its own life get drained away. 

So thus far, the Wolverines have held on, but they’ve held on for dear life — and a team that keeps letting lesser opponents back into games is bound to let one win eventually. Whether it’s due to a lack of second-half adjustments, the lack of a trustable passing game or the lack of defensive depth, Michigan seems unlikely to regularly shut the door fully. 

More likely than not, it’s only a matter of time until leaving the door cracked actually costs the Wolverines.

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