It’s only up from here for Michigan Football
Michigan had too many turnovers
All year, we’ve talked about how Cade McNamara has been so good at taking care of the football, not making the mistake, and taking what the defense gives him.
Well, the Orange Bowl game is definitely one he’d like to have back. When Cade is on fire, he is on fire. He can lift up a room, the players all seem to look to him for veteran leadership, and he’s cool, calm, and collected.
When he’s off though? That’s a struggling Cade — throwing inaccurate, short dump-off passes and quick slants. When Cade is off, it’s the little things that he messes up. That’s what was frustrating about Friday night.
It was the inaccuracies on simple out routes and dump-off passes that Cade wasn’t hitting on. And that’s something that we’ve been critical of with Cade’s faults all season long.
This resulted in two turnovers. One was a misfire on a sideline route to Roman Wilson that Roman wasn’t quite ready for (it should’ve been PI on the play, a horrendous no-call but still) it tipped off his hands and into a Georgia defender.
The other was a fade route to the end zone that was picked off (now part of that was on Daylen Baldwin because he just stopped running his route but still). The ball placement on that throw wasn’t the best either.
And if we dive even further into it, just Cade’s general immobility really affected Michigan.
If you look back at the SEC Championship game, whenever Georgia did bring pressure on Bryce Young, he was able to escape the pocket and find an open receiver.
Too many times, Cade was standing back in the pocket, and his immobility led to a sack or what should have been a potential first-down scramble or 5-6 yard carry only gained a yard or went back to the line of scrimmage.
Cade did run for a first down early in the game on a broken pocket, but after that, whenever he tried to run, he was swallowed up almost immediately.
The best way to counter a speedy defense is to have a mobile quarterback. It stretches the defense horizontally and uses speed against the players. That’s why Michigan’s defense has struggled to contain mobile quarterbacks.
It’s not because Michigan’s defense is slow. No, they are fast too. But quarterbacks are fast enough to exploit and use the speed against Michigan’s linebackers and defense.