News & Views: Jim Harbaugh On Ronnie Bell, Erick All & More
Michigan Wolverines football head coach Jim Harbaugh met the media Monday to give his take on a number of topics. We give our own on several of his responses, in News & Views format:
NEWS: Michigan got the short end of the stick on several calls at Penn State, including a defensive pass interference not called on a first-quarter throw to Tarik Black, a no-call on an offensive pass interference on a first-quarter PSU touchdown and the phantom offensive pass interference on Nico Collins in the second quarter.
HARBAUGH: “There were some, definitely. You have the human reaction of what your human reactions are and sometimes it's not fair. I've said for a long time, the only fair is the county fair.
“Respect it. You can be disappointed sometimes. We looked at those, make no excuse and move onward.”
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VIEWS: Two of those calls erased likely field goals, at the least, for U-M, and the offensive PI not called on PSU could have resulted in a field goal attempt instead of a touchdown.
Any one of those could well have made it a different game. Instead, it was too much to overcome given the plethora of other mistakes, including blown coverages and dropped passes.
No, officiating didn’t cost the Wolverines the game, and there have been contests in this series in which the Nittany Lions felt they got the short end of the stick. This time around, though, U-M deserved a better fate. The fact that the Wolverines still could have won — they were a dropped touchdown pass from sending it to overtime — shows just how much this game was there for the taking.
Both the Wolverines and conference officials need to be better.
NEWS: Sophomore wide receiver Ronnie Bell took some heat for dropping the last ball in the end zone, a great play by senior quarterback Shea Patterson to find him.
HARBAUGH: “We would take as many Ronnie Bells as we could possibly get on this team. How far he’s come, what he does for our team, the way he played in the game … he was one of our top performers.
“He has consistently, game in and game out, been tough as nails. Mentally, he’s as tough as anybody we’ve got; physically, the same.”
VIEWS: He’s been the best receiver Michigan has put on the field this year, bar none, in terms of what he’s accomplished as the leading receiver and top hustling player in the group. He’s not the “NFL guy” of the bunch, though pro scouts have said they like him a lot — and he doesn’t talk about it … he just is about it.
Bell will be a future captain at Michigan, and Patterson won’t hesitate to go back to him again during a big play. He’s always going 100 percent, running good routes, putting his all into every block. There are a number of higher-rated players on this team over the last few years who could learn from not only him, but fifth-year senior linebacker Jordan Glasgow.
Heart can’t win every game, but it can win a lot of games.
“It's almost not a human-like quality that you never see any kind of flaw or weakness; just a steady jackhammer at all times,” Harbaugh said of Glasgow. “He’s just about getting the job done and doing it the best to his God-given ability every single time.
“That's what I admire about him most. We will take as many Jordan Glasgows that we can take, too.”
NEWS: Freshman tight end Erick All laid some more incredible blocks in Michigan’s 28-21 loss at Penn State.
HARBAUGH: “He is coming along. When he knows who to block, he blocks them. He gets it done. He attacks it. He has great physicality and hustle; as he keeps progressing and [learns] some of the nuances of different schemes, who his man is and how it could change, the sky is the limit for Erick.”
VIEWS: He’s got contact courage like the tight ends we used to see in the late 1980s, Derrick Walker and Jeff Brown. When All gets bigger, he’s going to be dominant in that respect … assuming he learns the offense, as expected. As Harbaugh noted, it’s typical of a freshman to get lost at times.
But that makes senior Sean McKeon huge in Saturday night’s game. Redshirt junior Nick Eubanks just isn’t a consistently good enough blocker physically to do what U-M wants to do on offense, and All too often doesn’t get the assignment.
McKeon’s return would be a shot in the arm.
NEWS: U-M put its best three quarters of the season together after falling behind 21-0 at Penn State. Harbaugh was non-committal about what it meant going forward.
HARBAUGH: “Win our next game, that's our goal. We've got a really good plan for this week … practice it and go out and execute. I feel like our team is as optimistic as ever that it's hitting its stride.”
VIEWS: Which is fine, but we have no idea what it really means. We’ve seen good games from the offense before (John O’Korn at Purdue, for example) and been disappointed going forward. It could just be that Patterson and Co. caught lightning in a bottle.
If the Wolverines put a good game together Saturday night and play well, we’ll feel pretty good about the remaining games. Notre Dame is tough, though, and U-M won’t win if it’s played the way it has for most of the season.
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