The Wolverine: Covering University of Michigan Football and Sports
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inside michigan athletics "I saw a defensive team that played very potent football against a team that had been averaging 35 points a game," Brandon noted, starting with the positives. "They'd been averaging over 400 yards of offense. We cut all of that in half. But I saw defensive coaches that were really disappointed, because we had a chance to win that game at the end. "One stop … and frankly, we had them stopped. We made a couple of really, really unfortunate mental errors with some young kids that put us in a position where we didn't get that stop and it cost us the ball game. But defensively, I thought they played very well. "Offensively, hey, we all know we're not running the ball, we've got to protect the quarterback better, sometimes the quarterback's got to make better choices. You can go back and look at every play and see we're just a little bit out of sync. It's costing us, and we've got to get that corrected." At the same time, Brandon noted, the Wolverines could easily be 9-1 right now, by making a field goal in overtime against Penn State and a fourth-and-two stop versus the Cornhuskers. Those losses took the Wolverines out of the Big Ten race, and that's certainly a disappointment, he admitted. It shouldn't be something that spirals Michigan's confidence downward. In his estimation, it has not. "A big part of this confidence, everybody's out there, naysayers are out being critical, trying to diagnose the problems and figuring out somebody to blame for their disappointments, and some of that translates, or can translate, to the kids," Brandon said. "If they start losing their confidence in their ability to play, then you've got a whole other problem. "What I look for when I go to practice is, is there energy? Are they crisp? Are they working hard? Are they approaching this with a positive mental attitude? Based on what I saw this week, all things considered, they're in a very positive place." He insisted Michigan's recruiting stands in a very positive place, and that will produce the raw materials of future U-M powerhouses. He's confident that Hoke and his coaches will be able to mold those players into future Big Ten champions. "We knew going into November that we had five games in a row that were going to be really, really tough," he said. "We needed to play our best football as we got into November, and so far, we haven't done that. We know that." Future Novembers will be a different story, Brandon believes, and this one isn't over. Certainly the win over Northwestern lifted spirits, along with the announcement that the Iowa game would feature a noon kickoff. That alone provided some relief, for an athletics director who is seeing more and more night games and 3:30 to 5 p.m. kickoffs. "I will always prefer a noon start," Brandon said. "I will spend the rest of my career here trying to convince people that they don't let me set the game start times, because if they did, we'd play them all at noon."