Ahead of Michigan’s rivalry game against Ohio State Saturday, here’s a look around the Internet to see what people are saying about the Wolverines
“Michigan should take the words of Yoda with it to Columbus on Saturday, because simply trying to win won’t be good enough. The Wolverines must win, or a successful season crumbles into dust. They must win to take the Big Ten East for the first time, to play for the Big Ten title, and to remain in the College Football Playoff hunt.
But more specifically, Jim Harbaugh must win.
This is why they paid him all that money to come home and resurrect the alma mater. This is why they indulged him with foreign trips and facilities and gave in to his every eccentric whim. This is a moment all Wolverines fans wished had happened earlier, but now it has arrived at last.
This is what a Harbaugh-led Michigan team is supposed to do. When it has the better team, and Ohio State is the opponent, and Urban Meyer has beaten That Team Up North six times in a row, Michigan must win.
This is the first time Harbaugh has the better team against the Buckeyes. In 2015, in a talent mismatch, an Ohio State team that would put five players in the first round of the subsequent NFL draft romped in the Big House, 42-13. In 2016, with so much on the line, the Wolverines outplayed the Buckeyes most of the day but lost a 10-point second-half lead and were controversially defeated in double overtime — the game that produced Harbaugh’s famed “bitterly disappointed (24)” press conference. Last year, a flailing Michigan team put a scare into Ohio State, jumping to a 14-0 lead and taking a 20-14 advantage deep into the third quarter before the Buckeyes took over.
Now? Things are different.”
“Two years ago this week, 10-1 Michigan met 10-1 Ohio State at the Horseshoe in an epic, double-overtime thriller with College Football Playoff hopes on the line for both. Urban Meyer’s second-ranked Buckeyes edged Jim Harbaugh’s third-ranked Wolverines 30-27, at which point you could envision years to come of similar high-stakes showdowns between the rivals.
Sure enough, here we are again — 10-1 Michigan at 10-1 Ohio State. And yet this one feels not remotely like that one.
Despite having lost 13 of their last 14 meetings with the Buckeyes, the fourth-ranked Wolverines are favored in Columbus for the first time since 2004. FOX Sports analyst Joel Klatt has seen the discrepancy between the rivals while calling two of each team’s games this season.
‘It feels like Michigan is very comfortable in its own skin. This is the style and vision they want to play with, and they’re executing it,” said Klatt, who will be on the mic again for Saturday’s game. “With Ohio State, this is not the style they’re accustomed to. It’s been difficult for that staff to adjust to a guy (Dwayne Haskins) that’s not a running quarterback, and it’s been really tough to adjust to some personnel on defense that’s not second-, third-, fourth-round draft picks.’
After regressing to 8-5 in Harbaugh’s third season, Michigan is back and indisputably better than that 2016 team that started 9-0 before losing three of its last four. This time, he has a difference-making quarterback, Shea Patterson, and an efficient offense to go with yet another dominant defense.
But the attention being paid to Michigan’s 2018 “Revenge Tour” pales in comparison to the season-long soap opera surrounding its nemesis to the south.”
“The Wolverines’ offense has rounded into form. They are up to 23rd in Off. S&P+, easily the high mark of the Jim Harbaugh era (they were 38th in 2015, 41st in 2016, and 85th last season). They have pulled off this improvement while still looking like the offense Harbaugh wants.
They’re among the most run-heavy non-option teams in the country. They run 68 percent of the time on standard downs, 20th in FBS and nearly nine percentage points above the national average.
They move at a snail’s pace — 124th in adjusted tempo.
They don’t move backward — 11th in havoc rate allowed, 25th in sack rate allowed, 30th in stuff rate allowed (run stops at or behind the line).
However, their run game still isn’t all that efficient. They don’t move backward, but they’re still only 66th in rushing marginal efficiency and 89th in opportunity rate (percentage of carries gaining at least four yards). And while they’re excellent at avoiding third-and-longs (only 35 percent of their third downs require seven or more yards to go, third in FBS), they’re not all that great in short yardage. They’re 70th in power success rate and and 56th in third-and-short success rate.
Big plays are becoming scarce as well. While the Wolverines have 20 rushes of 20-plus yards (36th in FBS), only three have come in the last four games.
That offers Ohio State an opportunity. The Buckeyes are 19th in opportunity rate allowed and fifth in stuff rate. The trio of linemen Dre’Mont Jones and Chase Young and linebacker Tuf Borland has combined for 37 run stuffs. Big plays have been a massive issue for the Buckeyes, but play-to-play run defense has not.
If they can leverage Michigan behind schedule, they’re in potentially excellent shape. In the passing-downs marginal efficiency, the Wolverines are 76th on offense, while the Buckeyes are 45th on defense."
Stewart Mandel, The Athletic: Stewart Mandel’s Week 13 college football picks
“I’ve seen enough Michigan-Ohio State games not to assume the favorite will roll. But it’s hard to picture the path to a Buckeyes win. They’re likely going to struggle to run the ball against Michigan’s physical defense, and asking QB Dwayne Haskins to throw it 50 times against Don Brown’s No. 1-rated defense is asking for trouble. Michigan won’t rack up 75-yard TDs like Maryland, but it should be able to follow its usual offensive blueprint to victory. Michigan 26, Ohio State 21.”
Dan Wolken, USA Today: If Michigan beats Ohio State, Jim Harbaugh is national coach of the year
“Forty games into his Michigan tenure, what had Harbaugh really accomplished aside from a resounding win over eventual Big Ten champ Penn State in 2016, beating Jim McElwain twice at Florida and irritating SEC Network host Paul Finebaum?
But if 10-1 Michigan does what it’s supposed to do on Saturday and beats Ohio State, it will be time for a narrative correction. In fact, it should be good enough to make Harbaugh the national coach of the year.
Though his job was never on the line, nobody in college football was under more pressure to deliver than Harbaugh, whose norm-breaking, self-promoting style has not only gotten under his opponents’ skin but made him a target for derision over the first three years of his tenure when the Wolverines did not do better than third place in the Big Ten East.
It’s quite possible that was by design. Harbaugh, who is anything but dumb, inherited a Michigan program that was largely in disarray and badly in need of a modern identity to freshen the staid tradition that the school always had relied on.”
Josh Planos, 538.com: Michigan-Ohio State Is Actually Worth The Hype This Year
“Like nearly every entry in this rivalry, the stakes Saturday are high — and there will be no shortage of talent on the field. So to check this game’s true matchup power, we looked back at the Elo ratings for Michigan and Ohio State at the time of each meeting since 1897, and we averaged those Elo ratings using the harmonic mean.
This year’s chapter, which pits twin 10-1 programs against each other, checks in with the fourth-highest harmonic mean, trailing only the 1975, 2006 and 1997 showdowns. It’s the best matchup between the schools during the College Football Playoff era. Among the nine other epic showdowns in the top 10, the results have been mostly spilt: Ohio State winning five, Michigan winning four.”
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