Opening statement

I'm never discouraged by our players. I thought the effort was there. I thought we had a good week of preparation and practice. I thought the guys were wired in, and we knew what we were up against, what we had to do today to be successful. Credit our opponent; they did a good job of setting the tone and made it difficult for us in offensive and defensive phases, special teams maybe not as much, but they did a good job there. As crazy as it may sound, from where I stood, I thought our guys played hard and I saw some growth in our football team. Time will tell. We'll go from there. We'll look at the tape tomorrow. We'll go back and lick our wounds a little bit, hopefully learn and grow. We'll move forward on Monday, and that's our plan right now. We have a bye week coming up after this, and we've known that, and our request to our players is be focused on these six weeks, the six-week block, and we'll figure things out afterward, and that's our plan, and I'll open it up for questions.

On Michigan's rushing attack and Blake Corum

He's an outstanding back, first and foremost. Really good football player. That didn't surprise us. You look at film, you can see that. And then they're good up front. Those guys last year and this year are really blocking well. They have good tight ends that block well. The other part of the equation is they threaten you outside. They have really good receivers and a quarterback that can get it out to them. You have to choose your poison a little bit defensively, and if you load up too much in one area, you're going to be vulnerable in another spot.

On not getting any traction defensively

We couldn't get off the field, and if you can't stop the run, it's tough. It's easy to call plays when you can run the ball, and not minimizing what they were doing, but again, the pressure they put on you from my vantage point, you see both those receivers last week running by DBs, so if you match up on them one-on-one, you're living dangerously there with a guy who can throw it. It's a lot of cat-and-mouse, and it's tough, but they did a really good job, and it looked like they were executing very well, too.

On the offensive gameplan

I guess I look at it differently. I'm thinking about a run that we hit off left tackle on -- was that the first holding penalty where it looked like a pretty clean play and we gained 20, 25 yards. So you go from moving the ball down the field 20 yards, let's say it was 20, and now you're back -- you guys were at the game. It changes the complexion of everything you do. We don't have a lot of good calls for 3rd and 20s. It's just really tough to come up with something that's going to be good. Yeah, those little negative yardage plays impact whether it's lost yardage plays, sacks or certainly -- not only penalties but 10 yards or 15-yard penalties. It's hard to overcome that offensively. So I'm just telling you what I saw. I thought we grew and we did some things better today. Time will tell. I may be totally crazy.