Going on the road in the Big Ten is like sleeping in a haunted house. You’re fighting phantoms, all night long.
Just ask Michigan senior tailback Karan Higdon. He burst up the middle in the second half of U-M’s 20-17 comeback win over Northwestern, carrying out a perfect play fake. Wildcats’ linebacker Paddy Fisher wrapped him up and slammed him to the turf, perhaps the best tackle on the Michigan captain all night long.
Somehow, in the process of getting flung earthward, Higdon found a way to hold Fisher. Or at least a crew of Big Ten officials thought so.
In reality, Higdon held nothing but his breath upon hitting the deck. When he reached the sideline, he was in for a big surprise.
“I thought it was on someone else,” Higdon assured. “Then I got to the sideline, and the coaches were flipping out at the refs. I realized they must have called it on me. Why, I don’t know.”
Neither did Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh, who assessed the play with a measured bewilderment.
“I asked the ref, asked the side judge, so there wasn’t some different explanation days from now,” Harbaugh recounted. “He came back and said it was on the running back, holding the linebacker.
“The whole stadium saw that it was the linebacker tackled our running back. It was a zone read. Faked it to the running back, their linebacker tackled him and Shea [Patterson] ran for 28 yards. Then they tacked on 10 yards for holding [against] us. Phantom call.”
That phantom could have cost Michigan the game, in its rally from a 17-0 deficit to a 20-17 survival. Of course, there were plenty of other spooks to dodge, with the home team racking up two penalties for 25 yards, while Harbaugh’s ravaging renegades drew 11 flags for an even 100.
“Penalties should be tougher on the road?” Harbaugh deadpanned. "[Michigan athletic director] Warde Manuel told me to let him handle that and let him comment on that.”
Harbaugh complied … for a bit. But eventually he became a bigger Ghostbuster than Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd combined.
He knows the deal. He knows that winning on the road in the Big Ten involves a certain level of exorcism combined with blocking and tackling.
Here’s what else he’ll know, when he watches video of Michigan’s comeback win, if he doesn’t already. Several of those 11 flags were legit.
Michigan killed drives with penalties. The Wolverines extended Northwestern’s early marches with others, including the all-too-frequent flags for pass interference.
Defensive coordinator Don Brown’s crew will start playing bend-but-don’t-break when Harbaugh begins chugging skim milk (that’s never, for the uninitiated). But it has to begin defending man-to-man this season under less laundry, or it won’t come close to its dreams.
Northwestern, a 1-3 team with losses to Duke and Akron, delivered a flag-aided fright to the finish. Imagine what Michigan State and Ohio State might do, assisted by similar specters.
Michigan players keep talking about self-inflicted wounds. You inflict enough of them, you won’t stand a ghost of a chance in the rivalry games or the Big Ten race.
The Wolverines pulled it all together, just in time. Junior linebacker Josh Uche, who made two of Michigan’s six crucial sacks, said it perfectly.
“Obviously, we’re on the road, so we’re not going to get a lot of help from the refs,” he offered. “We don’t expect that at all. We’ve got to make it clear that there was no penalty, so there’s no gray, no in-between, for the refs to throw that flag.”
Well, sometimes there’s nothing but a phantom, and it gets called anyway. But not all the time. Not close to all the time. The Wolverines pulled it together on defense and didn’t allow a point over the final 42-plus minutes.
They still barely climbed out of the hole they’d dug.
“After halftime, we can’t give them any points,” Uche said. “That’s always been the mentality. This is a clutch game, a crucial game, so we had no choice but to pitch a shutout.”
Patterson had no choice but to play nearly mistake free down the stretch, running and throwing Michigan all the way back. He, like others, cited what the Wolverines overcame.
“You go on the road, in an environment like this, and it’s pretty much everyone against us,” Patterson said. “We don’t think we’re going to get a whole lot of calls. When they dropped into zone, dropped back, nobody really accounted for me. I just used my legs.”
The Wolverines can’t run from the fact that they’ll need to use everything they’ve got to survive the next few weeks unscathed. They have to prove they haven’t been living on smoke and mirrors and sub-par competition since a sobering night in South Bend.
They have to clean things up, or they’ll be haunted by what might have been.
---
• Talk about this article inside The Fort
• Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes
• Learn more about our print and digital publication, The Wolverine
• Follow us on Twitter: @TheWolverineMag, @BSB_Wolverine, @JB_ Wolverine, @AustinFox42,@Balas_Wolverine, @DrewCHallett and @Qb9Adam.
• Like us on Facebook
