Michigan Football vs Rutgers: Game Balls from A Smackdown of Biblical Proportions

Michigan football played with a chip on its shoulder Saturday night and the Rutgers Scarlet Knights paid the price in a 78-0 defeat.

After a long, stressful slog against Wisconsin that resulted in a 14-7 win, hanging 78 on a hapless Rutgers team was really just a prolonged exhale for Michigan football.

Related Story: UM Defense Dominates, Wolverines Embarrass Rutgers

Rutgers is Rutgers to begin with, but after injuries to Janarion Grant, Darius Hamilton, and Quanzell Lambert, this game didn’t really seem fair from the get-go.

Michigan football won by a score of “why are the starters still in” to “how is this team in the Big Ten?” while rushing for 481 yards and a school record 9 (!) touchdowns, allowing 39 (yes, 39) total yards and two first downs.

It wasn’t close.

There are plenty of game balls to hand out.

This is as good an opportunity as any, though, to take a second and remember how pitiful the program was the last time Michigan was in Piscataway and marvel at how far it’s come since then. The team was in disarray with little light at the end of the tunnel: a week after the Shane Morris debacle against Minnesota, Rutgers was favored by 3.5 over the staggering Wolverine squad, and, hey, Michigan covered! (They lost).

If the writing wasn’t on the wall for the Hoke/Brandon era before the 2014 Rutgers game, it was by the time the game was finished. Gary Nova roasted the defense to the tune of 404 yards and 3 touchdowns with no turnovers while his counterpart Devin Gardner–worn out and ready to get the hell out of that toxic situation–threw for 178 yards and a pick. The leading rusher was Derrick Green, who’s no longer on the team. The whole team looked lethargic and uninterested. Look at this mess:

That is a collection of defeated players playing for an inept, bumbling staff that itself was toiling under a cynical and aggressively irritating administration.

Two years later and the program’s unofficial mantra is “who’s got it better than us?” and the team is putting up 78 points on the same field on which Brady Hoke’s fate was sealed. No matter what happens this year, it’s nice to know that there’ll still be light on the horizon, because it didn’t always seem that there would be.

Jabrill Peppers

Harbaugh pretty much summed it all up in his postgame presser:

Statements like that seem less and less like hyperbole as the season wears on. He ran for 73 yards and two touchdowns on three carries. He was looking to throw the ball on his third carry. He added another half a tackle for loss to his total along with a crushing (in every sense of the word) QB hit in the second quarter. He blew up two screens.

He was playing in front of his hometown crowd and holy hell did he put on a show. His best highlight was a punt return that was called back:

https://twitter.com/abdulamemon/status/784903075777523712

He’s a threat to score every time he touches the ball. He might be the best offensive player on the roster. We’ll see more of him doing every damn thing as the schedule gets thicker. It seems clear at this point that he’s going to function the way a sharpshooting sixth man does in basketball: he’s going to come off the bench when the team needs a shot in the arm and he’ll be involved whenever he’s on the field.

After the offense looked a little sluggish early on, he came in at QB and promptly reeled off a sixty yard run down to the Rutgers five yard line. It’s getting increasingly difficult to overstate how special Peppers is. Seriously, try not to love this kid:

https://twitter.com/JabrillPeppers/status/784966071774277632

Taco Charlton

Another game, another game ball for the defensive line. Last week it was Ryan Glasgow, this week Taco Charlton. I think it’s safe to say that he’s fully shaken off the rust after his early season injury. This defensive line just isn’t fair. Charlton and Chris Wormley had little to no trouble getting into the backfield from the edges, to the point where it seemed like they were beating the snap to the quarterback.

Charlton was a split second quicker on his two sacks, though. Charlton is a big dude, but he’s gonna make his money with his quickness and speed around the edge. The pocket collapses pretty quickly when he gets a step on a tackle. If the defensive line can stay healthy, they could end up being the best line Michigan has ever had, and Charlton is going to be a big part of that.

When he’s healthy, the front four go from scary to Linda Blair turning her head 180 degrees scary, They have a couple ogres in the middle with Glasgow and Godin, they have crazy speed on the edge with Charlton and Wormley, they have great depth with Gary and Mone. Oh, and they can all play multiple positions and their coordinator is a mad scientist that looks like George Custer and Wilford Brimley.

Khalid Hill

The fullback/H-back is alive and well, ladies and gentlemen. Hill ran for two touchdowns and caught another, bringing his total touchdown count to a kind of mind boggling eight on the year. Hill is unstoppable around the goal line because he’s huge (6’2, 263) and he’s surprisingly nimble.

https://twitter.com/UMichFootball/status/784914501766352896

That’s hilarious. It’s always fun to see the big dudes get in the end zone, but Hill has actually become a really important part of the offense. He’s by far the best blocking tight end on the roster; he can get out to the sidelines or just line up and easily take on a linebacker and the odd defensive end. He has probably sprung as many touchdowns as he’s accounted for this season.

Hill has surprisingly good hands and is faster than you’d think, too. The next time you see him drag a few unfortunate defenders into the end zone, just remember that he probably did a ton of work to help get the team down to the goal line in the first place.

Hill has surprisingly good hands and is faster than you’d think, too. The next time you see him drag a few unfortunate defenders into the end zone, just remember that he probably did a ton of work to help get the team down to the goal line in the first place.

At the end of the day, for Michigan football and its fans, the questions has to be — who has it better than us?

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The answer. Nobody.