Who Are You?

"My name's Tommy, and I became aware this year." (Michigan Athletics)

Well, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

Tell me, who are you? (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

'Cause I really wanna know (Who are you? Who, who, who, who?)

--"Who Are You?" by The Who, from their 1978 album of the same name.

Michigan fans spent the week holding two contrarian notions in their mind: That Michigan should beat Rutgers, and that Michigan would find a way to screw up against Rutgers and lose this game.  It's not an ideal place to be, even in a season where it feels like no team in college football is actually good. Michigan's split personality, lights-out defense, cower-behind-the-sheets offense, was a particularly galling affront to Michigan fans who had grown too accustomed to competence across the board.

But, ultimately, that feeling is basically embodied in the chart.

Michigan got some good passing going with the "chuck it to JJ" strategy actually being solid.  The most maddening part of this game is that Michigan's defense basically gave up two major busts on plays and because of that, what should have been a sleepy opening to Halloween became an unnecessarily tight nailbiter that was saved, once again, by Tommy Carr's general elusive vibes.  Michigan wins a game closer than it should have been, gives up more points than it had all season, scores fewer points than most teams had on Rutgers, but they won.  They don't ask how, they just ask how many.  But they should probably ask how in this case.

I woke up in a Soho doorway

A policeman knew my name

He said, "You can go sleep at home tonight

If you can get up and walk away"

I staggered back to the underground

And the breeze blew back my hair

I remember throwing punches around

And preaching from my chair

Trying to figure out who you are as a team after eight games is probably not ideal, but I don't think Michigan is trying to figure out who it is as much as it has to accept who it is.  "Who Are You" is nominally a story from Pete Townshend's life where he was so drunk after a bad day of royalties negoiations, he had fallen asleep in the street and was shooed home by a policeman who recognized him. Michigan wants to believe they are something different, but they aren't. Michigan should be able to play middling offense to compliment its top ten defense and be better, but they're not.  One of the most maddening things is that when coaches say "We're a few plays away from being 7-0" is that yeah, they're not wrong, but they're hiding the part where they're a few plays away from being 2-5, so...  Michigan won a game they were supposed to win, and did so with over 400 yards of offense on the day, and they still looked middling, and occasionally hopeless, on drives.  As said earlier, Michigan largely won because JJ Buchanan had a hell of a day and Tommy Carr did the Tommy Carr thing twice.

We head into one of the least anticipated Michigan/Michigan State games in memory, a 5-3 Michigan facing a 2-6 Michigan State in a night game shunted to Peacock only because there are a litany of ranked v. ranked matchups next week. For the third time since the Paul Bunyan Trophy was introduced, it will be a matchup of first year coaches at the school, joining 1995 and 2024, which the teams split, with Nick Saban beating Lloyd Carr and then Sherrone Moore beating Jonathan Smith.  Michigan should be able to handle their business against a Michigan State team that has a litany of injuries longer than Sparty is tall.  But it's the Battle for Bunyan under the lights, again, strange things happen.  Let's just hope Michigan can bring the lessons from the offense from this week forward.  

Tales from the Spreadsheet

• Win 1,026
• 28-21 is NOT a Scorigami (which most of you guessed)!  But what's remarkable is that for such a football-looking score, it's only ever happened once before, almost exactly 51 years ago, 1975 Minnesota on November 1.
• 39,540 attended the game, which, according to at least one note I saw, was the smallest Rutgers home crowd in the second Schiano era.  It's worth noting this is still more than watched Michigan play Northwestern at Wrigley Field last season. 
• Michigan moves to 10-1-0 all-time against Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey.  (As noted by the in-game trivia question: Michigan and Rutgers are #1 and #3 all time in games played by current FBS schools, with Navy coming in #2.)
• Michigan moves to 15-5-1 all-time on October 31, the tie being the game where Michigan "abandoned" the Little Brown Jug at Minnesota, and the two most recent Halloween losses being the 2009 Illinois debacle and the 2020 Michigan State all-jump balls game.
• Michigan moves to 44-6-0 when scoring exactly 28 points (the most recent 28-point effort was 2024 Arkansas State).
• Michigan falls to 23-19-2 all-time when allowing 21 points to the opposition.
• Michigan has won 5 games all-time by exactly 7 points, most recently the 2026 Oklahoma game that's looking less impressive with each passing week.