The Wolverine

December 2019

The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports

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8 THE WOLVERINE DECEMBER 2019 You get better, or you get worse. T hose seven words encapsu- lated the operating philoso- phy for Michigan football over many years, through many championships. In a way, the cautionary challenge remains in place. Jim Harbaugh frequently brushes aside bigger-picture pro- jections to insist his Wolverines get 1 percent better each week, each game, each practice. It's a method of controlling what's controllable. Keep improving, keep push- ing, look to maximize the mo- ment and sort out the results later. Harbaugh's crew has gotten better over the course of the 2019 season. And it needed to do so, badly. From the smoking rubble of an ill-fated ambush in Wisconsin, the Wolverines crawled out and brushed themselves off. Don Brown's defense figured out run fits, brought younger players along and became a force once again. Josh Gattis' offense might have suffered from a bit of too much, too soon, in his initial crack at running the show. But the Wolverines turned off the turnover spigot, ramped up their running game and charged into No- vember much better off. What does that mean for the ul- timate bottom line? The toughest month of the season will reveal it. They've gotten better within the season. How they finish will say plenty about how they've improved as a program. For some, this shaped up as a Big Ten championship-or-bust campaign, a feeling fueled by getting tagged by conference media as the early favorite. Those dreams likely slipped through their fingers at Penn State. Michigan dug a 21-0 hole that ulti- mately proved too much — barely. The Wolverines needed to make a couple more plays, or not be subject to officials whose vision clearly became temporarily whited out. Had either or those scenarios played out, they'd have entered No- vember at 8-1, ranked in the top 10 in the nation and controlling everything about their fate. They didn't. They entered looking to get better and not worse, whatever that may mean. "There have been growing pains and times it has gone slow, but if you watch the film, there's always some- thing moving forward," senior cap- tain Ben Bredeson said. "You can see as of late, we've progressed a lot, at a quicker rate. As long as you're going forward, moving in the right direc- tion, it's all going to work out." By the time these words hit the dens of many, Michigan State will be in the rearview mirror. Improve- ment means the Spartans sporting tire tracks and footprints all over their gaudy highlighter uniforms, having been driven over by the Wolverines and figuratively scuffed up by the spirit of a footloose Devin Bush Jr. That would be two in a row and three out of four versus Gang Green, which entered Michigan Stadium on a four-game losing streak. The Spartans spiraled down faster than Mark Dan- tonio could say "Pride comes before the fall," and a loss to them at this point — by almost anyone — ranks as a disaster. Indiana? At Indiana? Under Har- baugh, that's meant packing to work overtime (or double over- time). Michigan hasn't lost to the Hoosiers since 1987, but there hasn't been anything easy about extending the streak in recent years. Improvement in that series seems clear cut: Beat the Hoo- siers sans extra sessions. Maybe even smack them down in the fashion that used to have their fans looking longingly over the back wall of Memorial Stadium at Assembly Hall and asking if there's a basketball scrimmage going on. Then, of course, there's the rampaging evil elephant in the room. Ohio State churned toward mid-November undefeated, near the top of the College Football Playoff rankings and averaging a healthy 51 points per game. They'd crushed the same Badgers that bullied Michigan. They look like some sort of dark forces resurrection of the 1969 Buckeyes, who onlook- ers insisted should have been pitted against the NFL's best to generate a competitive game. You know what happened to them, of course. But that was then, and this is 50 years and countless ups and downs later. Right here, right now, the 2019 Wolverines must take care of their own business. They can get better. Or they can get worse. Of course, it would be tough to get worse than last year's 62-39 loss, in a game ushering a favored U-M team into a Buckeye buzz saw. "They better be careful now, be- cause we're hitting our stride, too," U-M defensive coordinator Don Brown said of the Buckeyes on Jon Jansen's 'In The Trenches' podcast. "This is a two-way street, and I know our guys will be ready in three weeks." It needs to be a two-way street, not a four-lane, one-way freeway to misery. Making it the former marks better — way better. ❏ Editor John Borton has been with The Wolverine since 1991. Contact him at jborton@thewolverine.com and follow him on Twitter @JB _ Wolverine. WOLVERINE WATCH   JOHN BORTON Better Is Best For Harbaugh's Crew Since falling to Wisconsin 35-14 Sept. 21, Jim Harbaugh's Wolverines outscored its foes 208-77 over the next six games, which included three opponents ranked among the nation's top 15 at game time (No. 14 Iowa, No. 7 Penn State and No. 8 Notre Dame). PHOTO BY LON HORWEDEL

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