Rece Davis calls Michigan not throwing vs. Penn State a 'proverbial middle finger'

Embroiled in scandal and without a head coach, Michigan made a big statement last weekend by walking onto Penn State’s campus and beating the Nittany Lion football team without even throwing a pass in the second half.

The Wolverines are the talk of the college football world over the last month due to off-field hijinks, but this past Saturday, they reminded folks that their football team is still dominant with what seemed like a pretty easy victory over PSU. In the aftermath, College GameDay host Rece Davis said that Michigan really sent a message by not even passing the ball en route to the win.

“Went into Penn State and beat them without throwing a forward pass in the second half. Now, there are a couple of ways to look at that,” said Davis when on this week’s College GameDay Podcast. “Joey Galloway and I were having this conversation off air last night and he asked me a simple question: ‘What do you make of that?'”

Davis says he responded that perhaps Michigan wanted to avoid Penn State’s stellar defense against the pass — both in coverage and vs. the pass rush.

“I think there’s one school of thought that says, ‘you know, okay, well they wanted to they to avoid Penn State’s pass rush.’ And, you know, probably the strongest parts of State’s defense, which is pretty good overall, would be the guys that they have to cover. I don’t know that Michigan has really good receivers, don’t know if they have elite ones. Penn State’s got good cover guys. Chop Robinson’s back, you’ve got a good pass rush, so you just don’t deal with it. That’s one way — and that might have been part of the thinking.”

But per Rece Davis, the exclusive rushing attack was quite the signal to the rest of college football.

“There’s also a big part of me that thinks that somehow that was somehow a proverbial middle finger, you know, to everybody as the way of saying ‘how about we just line up and run over you on the road.’ Also might have been a little dig to say ‘we also don’t believe that if we played for six weeks that your offense could score enough points to beat us.'”

The second half just goes to show the kind of attitude Michigan is playing with on the football field as they deal with this circus off of it.

“So, you know, there was a lot of lot of bravado in that decision, I think, that was as much about the mindset and mentality of how Michigan is approaching the rest of this season as it was some strategic advantage.”