Podcast: Michigan football ends non-conference with a bang, buy or sell narratives, more

The Michigan Wolverines closed out the non-conference season with a 63-3 win over Central Michigan, which helped the team reset ahead of the Big Ten opener this weekend at Nebraska.

TheWolverine.com’s Anthony Broome, Chris Balas and Clayton Sayfie discuss Michigan’s blowout win over Central Michigan, buy or sell some of the key narratives to emerge out of the first three weeks, discuss Biff Poggi’s press conference and more.

 ”Pretty much everything went right that you wanted to get done in this game,” Sayfie said on the show, “You don’t often win by 60, right? It was just CMU, but you were favored by 27.5 [points]. Even I had a huge margin predicted at 52-7, and even that didn’t do justice. What happened on Saturday was just complete domination from start to finish. And you were down some pieces. You didn’t have your offensive guards. TJ Guy didn’t play for whatever reason… Rod Moore did not come back.

“Those things weren’t gonna make a difference in what the result of this game was. But Michigan didn’t skip a beat in terms of what they wanted to get done, no matter who was out there. And I think the interesting thing to me is just the broader context of this entire week. You weren’t gonna have your head coach starting at 12:01 a.m. [on Saturday]. You have Biff Poggi stepping in for the interim role. They talked about the emotional dinner on Friday night where Sherrone Moore said, ‘Don’t play for me, play for yourselves’. And then when he left, they said, ‘Screw that. We’re playing for him.’ And they got it done with a 60-point win.

“ You were coming off a tough loss to Oklahoma. There was a players’ only meeting earlier in the week where they talked about having all their goals in front of them and not letting this spiral, and we have to stay together because that didn’t happen last year after the Texas loss. According to Jordan Marshall, he felt like the team got a little bit divided at that point. Of course, it was galvanized at the end, but they were astray there for a while.

“The adjustments that you wanted to make… you wanted to allow Bryce Underwood to run more; you wanted to allow him to throw it down the field more. You wanted the defense to have a bully mentality as Wink Martindale told the Big Ten network crew… They did all those things.”

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