Washington took part in Saturday night’s game at The Big House with the intention of stopping the race very particularly. Well, 343 yards and four touchdowns surrendered later, it didn’t work out exactly that way.
On the other side of the ball, Washington seemed to try to run until Michigan had the game in hand, but again, the Huskies couldn’t get what they set out to achieve.
After the game, UW head coach Jimmy Lake did not excuse what happened in Ann Arbor.
“We got into that trying to run football and the goal was to stop the race,” Lake said. “We didn’t get it and Michigan did.”
Although the Huskies gave up 13 72-yard gates during the first quarter, Lake was pleased with the work his defense was doing. That is, until Blake Corum, second-year runner-up, exploded by a 67-yard score, putting Washington 10-0 up in the second quarter. From there, the wheels began to fall, he says.
“At first we did a good job,” Lake said. “They are a talented team. At first I think we did a good job of stopping it. And then they played that big one. And you only need one career. It was a 60-yard touchdown run in the second quarter. And then I think we have to play as a team. For us not to score any points at all and for our opponents a reason to throw football and they can only keep beating us, it’s a good way to win football matches. Yes, it’s team football, we have to score points, we have to make sure that our opponent can’t give up football and win the football match “.
Michigan particularly broke Washington’s back in the second half when he ran an eight-and-73-yard game, all running playing. Lake says the defense was exhausted and from there he couldn’t do much against the Wolverines ’offensive front.
On the other side of the ball, while UW seems to have had a decent game in some respects (the Huskies finished with 293 yards of passing, albeit with a 54% clip), the running game couldn’t coming out against Michigan’s new look under coordinator Mike Macdonald.
The Wolverines managed to keep Washington at just 50 yards on 32 gates, averaging 1.6 yards per run.
Lake says the Huskies really had to go to the pit when trying to figure out what Macdonald’s defense would look like, noting that western Michigan, in which he ran a week earlier, did few favors to his team in revealing what he and UW could have seen on Saturday night.
“Yeah, we had to study a lot of the Baltimore Ravens,” Lake said. “We had to study their defense a lot to see a lot of what we were going to see. Western Michigan only lined up in a pool of staff for most of the game, so we only structurally saw what they would do in that group. : that group of staff So there was still a lot of mystery about what they would do to our staff teams that we would do.But we had a general idea and we would defend and attack well, and they did a great job bottling up and stopping the race and pressing our quarterback “.
Next to Michigan, it will host another MAC team, this time Northern Illinois (1-1), which they won against Georgia Tech in week 1, but lost to Wyoming, 50-43, in week 2.