ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Another week, more disappointment from the Michigan offense. The Wolverines had several chances to beat No. 6 Indiana on Saturday, and they even took the Hoosiers to overtime. But it was little thanks to Michigan's offense.
The Wolverines scored six points in their 13-6 defeat on Saturday, and kicker Trey Butkowski missed a pair of kicks, which, looking back, could've been the difference.
But there is a common denominator in each of Michigan's games: play calling. Jason Beck had plenty of questionable calls on Saturday against Indiana. Starting a freshman quarterback, making his first start of his career, Tommy Carr had little help from Beck.
Damaging call
And there was one call that really stood out. On third and one on the Hoosiers' one-yard line, Beck called a naked bootleg to, to which Carr took a 13-yard sack.
In theory, Michigan had two chances to score a touchdown from the one. Instead, Butkowski missed a kick. Kyle Whittingham wouldn't fully put the blame on Beck's shoulders after the game. While he took the brunt of the blame, he did say that the call was damaging and Beck wanted it back.
"Everything falls on my shoulders, so whatever happens in the course of a game is on me," Whittingham said. "That was not a good football call, no, that was not a good call at that point in time.
"I have the ability to overrule anything in the whole program. And so, like I said, it circles back to me, but it was a very disappointing outcome and a call that I know Jason wishes he had back, because it really was damaging."
Assessing Beck's play calling
Thanks to its stifling defense, Michigan outgained the Hoosiers on the day. But the raw stats don't show any improvements from the Wolverines, despite turning to Carr at quarterback. Michigan gained 224 total yards, while running for just 57 in the game. Carr turned the ball over twice and the offense, once again, seems unimagineably bad.
However, after coaching with Beck last season at Utah, Whittingham, once again, spoke about how effective his offense was in Utah. And with five games left on the season, Michigan has to get better.
"Well, we've got to get better," Whittingham said. "I mean, there's no doubt about it. It's a long season. I have always judged the season as a whole. I don't judge the season in segments or game by game. You just look at the whole body of work, and the whole body of work so far, he'll be the first to tell you it's not good enough.
"We've got to get better. There's a lot of areas there's really nowhere you can say, hey, we're doing this pretty good. We're not really running the ball as effectively as we want to. We did last week, but not in the other weeks. We're not completing the ball at a high enough percentage. We're not protecting the ball well enough. We're not good enough in the red zone offensively. So there's you name it, and we've got to work on it. And so that's our challenge. That's my challenge. That's Jason's challenge, and it's squarely on our shoulders."
Michigan will travel to Rutgers next weekend for a 12:30 p.m. ET start.
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