Grading Michigan Football’s offense after loss to Spartans

ANN ARBOR, MI - OCTOBER 31: Adam Shibley #45 of the Michigan Wolverines takes a knee after the Michigan Wolverines lost to the Michigan State Spartans at Michigan Stadium on October 31, 2020 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images)
ANN ARBOR, MI - OCTOBER 31: Adam Shibley #45 of the Michigan Wolverines takes a knee after the Michigan Wolverines lost to the Michigan State Spartans at Michigan Stadium on October 31, 2020 in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (Photo by Nic Antaya/Getty Images) /
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The Michigan football team followed up a great performance against Minnesota with a less than inspiring loss to the Spartans.

The game against the Spartans should have been a win. The Michigan football offense was supposed to be better and the defense had looked good enough to shut down a less than stellar Spartans offense. But we said it before funny things can happen in rivalry games and that is exactly what happened.

The line may have been over 20 points in favor of Michigan football but if you took a deeper look into the box scores that was too high.

It was said many times, but if you take the seven turnovers away from Michigan State against Rutgers, they dominated that game statistically. It looked, though, like the Wolverines were lulled to sleep by the score and not what the Spartans could actually bring to the table.

Rocky Lombardi might not have been the most accurate but he did enough with the deep balls continually make Michigan’s corners look bad, but the offense didn’t do much to help out either.

The offense that looked they had figured out their personnel and finally found speed in space, looked out of sync yet again. They failed to really put together many drives and on one of their touchdowns they were helped out by a stupid 15 yard penalty for taunting by a Spartan defender.

This was not what we were expecting from the Wolverines after the first week. But it is 2020 so we should have seen this coming.

Is it time for a change at the top? It is starting to look that way, but while losing to your rival is never fun (and yes the Wolverines are doing way too much), believe it or not this isn’t the worst loss in the Harbaugh era.

It will go down as one because of where the line ended up, but again that line was too high. But whether it was too high or not, the Wolverines should have won this game and need to fix things in a hurry if they don’t want to have their winning streak against Indiana snapped next Saturday.

Before we get to that game, lets take a look back at the offense and hand out grades.