Michigan and Illinois play a very similar brand of football on both sides of the ball. Both programs want to run the ball down your throat, control the time of possession and create havoc on the defense with multiple looks.

In this case, the game will very much come down to which program out Michigan's or out Illinois' the other.

This doesn't mean the Wolverines are trying to reinvent the wheel when it comes to game-planning for the Illini. Co-offensive coordinator Sherrone Moore isn't planning on making wholesale changes for Saturday.

Instead, the plan will be to do what the Wolverines always do.

Play Michigan football.

"We can’t really go out of the box and do something completely different," Moore told reporters this week. "We’ve got to be us, and attack them how we’re going to attack them. They’ve got a really good defense. They’re fast, they’re physical, they don’t do a lot, but what they do they do really well. So it’s gonna be a great challenge up front, great challenge with our wideouts. So it’s gonna be a fun one. Offensively, I know we’ll talk about that but they’re a good football team, we watched the crossover.

"So we know what they do and see what they’ve done from a running game standpoint, especially with the running back, he’s a really good player. So I know they’re excited for the challenge as well."

While co-defensive coordinator Jesse Minter wasn't asked about the Illini specifically, he was asked what he would like to see the defense improve down the stretch run.

U-M knows what is looming but understands that the focus needs to be squarely on what's in front of them.

There's no better opportunity to start working on improvements than this week.

"To me, it’s every little detail," Minter told reporters. "So we still want to attack the football a little bit more. We want to get the ball. We want to set our offense up on shorter fields or score on defense. Those types of things. We want to take better angles to the ball and not have any missed tackles. We want to make sure that we’re communicating at a level that it’s going to take for us to play our best over these next couple of weeks and then and then just not lose sight of—it’s really just the small, like the core values of how we want to play that have allowed us to play that way.

"So it’s how we block destruct. It’s how we run to the ball. It’s how we communicate, how we attack the football. Focusing on those key things as we get to the stretch run here."