The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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michigan football to do in my position is maintain your perspective and understand what you have to do to get better," offensive coordinator Al Borges said. "If you want to change your situation, change your attitude. Yeah, you might beat your head against the wall a little bit, but you can't keep beating your head against the wall, because there's another game to play. "Right now, we're struggling with pass protection and running the ball. Those are two major things, and they go hand in hand. If you can't run the football, and you're dealing with as many long down and distances as we are, you run into some issues. "Any time we haven't played well — not just these last couple of games, but even before that — any time we've struggled, it's because it's second-and-12, second-and-20. You start looking at your play call sheet and you go, 'What do I call next?' You have those on your sheet, but there aren't a lot of third-and-24 calls that are good calls." In the first seven games, Gardner had four rushes of 20 yards or more and 520 rushing yards total, but he had only one long run against MSU, Nebraska and Northwestern, finishing those three contests with negative-59 yards after being sacked 19 times by those three foes. "Good defensive coaches put the fire out quickly, or stop the bleeding," Borges said. "If you hit them with something, generally there will be something done to almost overcompensate for that, and what you have to be able to do is execute the counterpunch to that." Michigan's lack of explosive plays the past few weeks dropped U-M to fifth in the Big Ten in 20-yard gains with 4.9 per contest. Indiana, which ranked second in the league Michigan 20-Plus-Yard Plays Compared To Rest Of Big Ten Per Team GP Rush Pass TotalGame Indiana 102347707.0 Wisconsin 103528636.3 Ohio State 103031616.1 Illinois 101243555.5 Nebraska 102229515.1 Michigan 101435494.9 Northwestern 101524494.9 Minnesota 101926454.5 Michigan State 101524393.9 Penn State 101029393.9 Iowa 10825 33 3.3 Purdue 10220 22 2.2