Michigan received sad news on Monday when Jim Harbaugh announced that freshman receiver Tarik Black would need surgery on his foot and potentially miss the rest of the season.
Fifth-year senior linebacker Mike McCray has been in a similar position, as the first three years of his Michigan career were marred by injuries. However, a lot of good actually wound up coming out of it.
“I gained a lot of knowledge and I grew as a person,” McCray said. “I sat back and watched a lot of film and saw a bunch of different things. It makes you think about your future outside of football.
“I’ll talk to Tarik eventually and give him some advice, like that he should stay focused and not let it deter him.”
Being one of the most experienced veterans on the team, McCray is one of the few elder statesmen that the youngsters can turn to. Though he’s soft spoken off the field, the fifth-year senior said he has given the younger guys on the team plenty of advice as they prepare for their first road game of the season.
“I tell them to stay focused,” he explained. “It can get a little rowdy sometimes, but it’s always nice to shut the crowd up. I love road games, because you can make the opposing crowd be quiet. They don’t want you to succeed, so it feels good to silence them down.”
One of the young players on the Wolverines’ roster who will be playing in just his fifth road game in a Michigan uniform is sophomore linebacker Devin Bush.
“I don’t know if I’ve seen a linebacker faster than him,” McCray said. “He has a lot of confidence, and playing some last year helped him. I actually try to mimic his pass rushing ability.”
Bush’s speed has been one of the many things that has made Michigan’s defense so stout in the early going, but McCray said that it can still be a lot better than it currently is.
“We’ve been good these first three weeks, but we can be a lot better,” he insisted. “We need to eliminate the little mistakes, such as the ones that led to Air Force’s big play [64-yard touchdown] on Saturday. We have the potential to be a better defense than we were last year — we haven’t gotten to that point of being great yet, but we’ll get there. You really don’t know you’re there until the end of the year.”
One of the things that makes a defense great is the ability to shut down any kind of offense. After facing the rare triple option of Air Force last week, Michigan will face the spread attack of Purdue this weekend.
“It’s a bit of a challenge,” McCray admitted. “We probably won’t see Air Force’s offense ever again. Purdue does run the ball some too, so we’ll have to get back into the mindset we have when we go against spread teams.”
Michigan’s defense currently ranks fifth nationally, only allowing 208 yards per game. It’s scary to think what it could look like if it reaches the level that McCray alluded to.
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