Brandon Peters injected more than intrigue for Michigan’s stretch run. He delivered an extra measure of hope, the Big Gulp in a potential November desert.
Head coach Jim Harbaugh on Monday wouldn’t commit to the redshirt freshman quarterback starting in the Saturday Night Frostbite Special against Minnesota. He didn’t have to. Harbaugh’s counterpart, P.J. Fleck, presumably owns a DVR and is planning accordingly.
Peters delivered the football over and over against Rutgers on Saturday, more skillfully than Michigan fans had witnessed all season long. Touch passes, timing routes, a fastball over the middle — Harbaugh handed Peters the keys, and the kid didn’t drive the SUV into the ditch.
Quite the opposite.
“It was time for Brandon to play,” Harbaugh stressed.” He went in, acquitted himself well. He will play again this week.”
It says here he will start this week, barring a slip in the shower, an alien abduction or someone accidentally dropping the Little Brown Jug on his throwing hand.
The second-year Wolverine received a ton of help in his first serious action. Michigan piling up 334 rushing yards tends to boost any quarterback, and Rutgers pitched in by … well, being Rutgers.
Peters wasn’t perfect on his way to completing 10 of 14 throws. He fired one over the middle that probably should have gone for six the other way, had a Scarlet Knights defender not looked like he was wearing full armor in attempting the pickoff.
But for the most part, Peters moved the offense crisply, a feat far too unusual all season long.
“He gives us a big boost,” junior tailback Karan Higdon said. “We’ve got pieces, and he put those pieces together. Seeing how we produced was tremendous.”
None of that automatically carries over in the battle for the Little Frozen Jug. Fleck’s Gophers have spent the Big Ten season underground at 1-4, but they were not completely out of any games, having lost a pair by a single touchdown and to Michigan State by a field goal.
They come in with the no-longer-unthinkable notion of taking the jug back to the tundra, having possessed it twice in the past dozen years. Before that, they’d secured the near-mythical crockery just twice since 1967.
The latest jug thievery occurred in 2014. It serves as the perfect reminder of why it’s so important that Peters and the U-M offense stage a late-season surge.
In a 2017 campaign of simmering discontent over a (not unexpected) retooling time for the Wolverines, senior captain Mike McCray offered a reminder of how bad it can really get.
McCray recalls seeing the Little Brown Jug ripped away from the Michigan sideline, carried off into the heathen lands of the northwest.
Michigan director of athletics Dave Brandon and head coach Brady Hoke were soon to follow. The Wolverines were making national headlines for concussion protocol, a blow that would knock out many.
“That whole year was awkward, and weird,” McCray acknowledged.
That whole year, Hoke’s last, spiraled down into 5-7 misery. No game served as a lightning rod more than the Minnesota mess. Not only did the Gophers reel off 30 straight points after Michigan took a 7-0 lead — producing an eventual 16-point margin of victory Minnesota hasn’t exceeded since 1962 — they won amid disarray by the Wolverines.
Staggered quarterback Shane Morris reentered a game from which he’d been driven by a devastating, head-hunting hit, in part because a backup QB couldn’t find his helmet. Those were the days of the occasional 10-man punt team, and the culmination of a seven-year stretch in which the Wolverines went 46-42.
In the two-plus seasons since, they’ve gone 26-8, with six of the eight losses occurring by an average of 3.3 points. No, they haven’t won a Big Ten championship under Harbaugh and won’t this year, barring a miracle.
No, they haven’t made the College Football Playoff. But they’re a long, long way from that angst-and-anger-ridden afternoon when Morris hit the deck, the Jug hit the road, and the nation hit Michigan with an inescapable and unwanted spotlight.
They’re worlds away from a 3-9 transition season, and spotting the ball only to see it spotted again, eight or nine yards back, on the succeeding play. Harbaugh still has some work to do, and he knows it, especially on the offensive side of the football.
But 6-2 with one of the nation’s youngest teams represents a gopher hole beside those canyons.
“If we win out, we go 10-2,” fifth-year senior center Pat Kugler optimistically reminded. “That’s a 10-win season, a helluva season. You never know what can happen in the Big Ten. People can lose. We can still end up with the Big Ten championship, if we get some luck. We’ve just got to ride it out.”
For one game, they rode harder and faster with Peters leading the way. He’ll ride again, and if he continues producing Magnificent Sevens, he’ll keep on riding.
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