A Loss Would Have Been Less Embarrassing Than Michigan’s Win Over Western Michigan

Even before it slipped into janky comedy in its dying moments, you wouldn't necessarily say that Michigan's season opener against Western Michigan on Saturday was "a good football game." But also just making such an assessment would be missing the point to an extent. It was certainly shaping up as a very specific type of college football game. It's one in which a power conference team playing poorly loses to a MAC team—it has to be a MAC team; that's the type of game it is—that makes fewer mistakes. This is not necessarily a fun kind of game to watch, although if you're on social media at the moment it can be fun to watch other people watching it. But it is absolutely a type of game that happens, and one of the gnawing anxieties that would confront a FBS team—especially one fresh off a bunch of queasy and humiliating scandals, with a new coach and a bunch of new players—is that they have become a team that this type of game would happen to. UMass breaking a 16-game, 677-day losing streak against Rutgers last week is the most degrading possible version of this type of game, even before the Greg Schiano aspects of it enter the equation. Western Michigan defeating Michigan, at Michigan, on the strength of four field goals from a rosy-cheeked backup kicker named Dieter Kelly, would have been something like its apex. And while the game was not a thriller by any stretch, there was some formalist satisfaction in watching it drearily assume the form of the type of game that it was revealing itself to be. Michigan QB Bryce Underwood fumbled the second snap he received, and while he recovered on that play thanks to a circus catch from transfer WR JJ Buchanan and led a touchdown drive on that possession, Underwood and the Michigan offense were basically never in rhythm or especially close to scoring again after that. They were 3-for-10 on third-down conversions, and Underwood—a big-ticket recruit furnished to the program by leathery cultural villain Larry Ellison as a gift to what the Wall Street Journal described as "his mystery wife"—was wobbly and over-aggressive and generally doing too much in ways that could have made things even worse than they were; he was called for a holding penalty in the third quarter that negated a long Michigan gain, lost a fumble, and only escaped throwing a pick-six at the end of the first half when a replay review showed that the Western Michigan's Dillon Moore had stepped out of bounds on his return. This is foreshadowing.

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