Former Michigan football player reacts to Oklahoma loss: 'It's a fail'

The Michigan Wolverines fell 24-13 to the Oklahoma Sooners on Saturday night in Norman, headlined by an offense that struggled to protect the quarterback or get anything of note off the playsheet for most of the night.

Former Michigan defensive lineman Ryan Van Bergen and TheWolverine.com’s Anthony Broome discussed the performance on a Sunday morning podcast, where the U-M alum took issue with the offensive game plan and how coordinator Chip Lindsey and head coach Sherrone Moore failed to set the team up for success.

“ It’s a fail,” Van Bergen said on the morning-after show. “If you were to grade our offensive performance last night, and I’m not saying each player, but just as a unit and our scheme, our game plan, that’s an F performance on the biggest stage in college football, and it’s disappointing considering the investments we’ve made in the offseason to try to rectify and create an offense. Not having an offense is nothing new for Michigan football. We’ve found ways to win without offense.

“With that being said, there are plenty of things that you could point to as partial reasons that the game plan didn’t go off as executed, but even if you couldn’t get plays off the play sheet, I question what that play sheet says. [The fact that Marlin Klein] wasn’t going to play was a huge loss. He’s probably Bryce Underwood‘s favorite target under duress. You come out of your first series and you’re running bubble screens and you’re running up the middle, which is normal. That’s Michigan football, smash, smash, I’m with it. And so they stop it. But then you get into a rhythmic drive, I think the second drive, and you run some kind of crazy reverse to Donovan McCulley out of nowhere that doesn’t exist and doesn’t need to be there. There’s a lot of that.

“Yeah, the offensive line didn’t protect and there wasn’t good run blocking. We didn’t have receivers with separation. We can go on and on through this list, but I think it starts with what you’re setting your guys up for. And Chip Lindsay, I don’t think is setting our guys up for success and a lot of the different things that you’re running and calling to highlight a few things. I think the lack of downfield passing hurts. I We’re just missing concepts. We’re missing mesh, which is a concept, not a route. We’re missing levels, which is a concept; it’s not a route. We’re missing an angle route with our running back. I don’t understand how we could be missing these basic elements of fundamental offense.”

For more off-the-cuff reactions from Saturday night’s game, we did a quick show from the press box in Norman to discuss what had taken place minutes before. You can watch using the video player below and find both shows in your feeds on Apple and Spotify.