The morning after

1) I’ve always said that it is very tough to know how good or bad you are after one game.. Everything is based upon how good people expected you to be based on last season, returning starters etc. Notre Dame could be the best team in the country or they could be a 6-6 team- we don’t know. It appears that they are very good but we’ll see. Fans are always internally focused, i.e. because Mich upgraded at QB we should beat ND on the road at night in our opener, when in fact ND may well have improved just as much. Winbush certainly looks better than at any time last season. He made some big throws. The one TD our back-up safety was there and barely missed the ball- it’s a game of inches.


Some positives:

2) Patterson and in brief action, McCaffrey, looked better by far than our QB play last year. I guess Peters hurt his knee in practice this week.

3) Our defense after being shredded in the first half, gave up virtually nothing (less than 100 yards and 3 points) in the second half. Now some of that was probably Kelly going conservative with the lead. We played most of the game without Mettelus after the early targeting call.

4) An opening game on the road loss 24-17 to ND won’t kill us if ND is a 10 win or better team and we get better.

At this point it is all about the offensive line. With our schedule if they don’t get better we are probably looking at 7-5 or 8-4. If they do get better, 9-3 or even 10-2 is possible if the QB improvement is as good as it appears to be. MSU and PSU were not impressive at all. We at least will not be overrated for awhile now and its possible we will even be underrated.

The fan base will run around panicking and we’ll have to listen to some of them and Finebaum rip Harbaugh until we do win some big games. I have not lost faith.

Great points shoes ... my biggest disappointment was the discipline issues on a few plays defensively and the OL was not very good despite all the reports of improving. Yes Shea and DMac looked very good much better than the last two seasons. Lot of work to do but game one only and against a rival on the road in what was a 50/50 game ... Go BLUE !!!!

I think the home team has won every night game in the series. I hear you on discipline but late hit on Winowich was a very questionable call IMO.

O tackles are a huge concern! Might as well work in the younger guys and get them experience, can’t do much worse. I think scheduling a game like this on the road at night first game of the year is is not helpful. Much better to have a game or two to against a weaker non conference opponent to get settled in.

What's even worse is I heard that we we play ND mid-season when it's at home and on the road in the opener, going forward.

Yes I saw that, the ND AD is way smarter than ours.

umichfaninpa wrote:

Yes I saw that, the ND AD is way smarter than ours.

Well we've had 3 over the last 4 or 5 years...