ANN ARBOR, Mich. (AP) -The Michigan Wolverines still aren’t exactly sure how they stormed back to win Saturday’s game against Wisconsin.
They just know that, not only did their second-half comeback make up for a first-half embarrassment, it might have saved their season.
Michigan (2-2, 1-0 Big Ten) trailed the ninth-ranked Badgers 19-0 at the intermission, and the score doesn’t properly express how bad the half had been. The Wolverines, still struggling to pick up Rich Rodriguez’s spread attack, had turned the ball over five times and managed just 21 yards of offense.
But Michigan scored 27 straight points in the second half, then stopped a two-point conversion after a late Badgers touchdown to post an improbable 27-25 victory.
ther part is that we were not executing on offense in the first half. That’s the frustrating thing about our offense, because you need to get into a rhythm. We were only able to do that in the second half.”
Rodriguez understands that those problems aren’t going to go away overnight, especially with an inexperienced quarterback like sophomore Steven Threet.
“I’d like to say we’re not going to have any more moments like that first half, but we still may have them,” Rodriguez said. “We’re still in the middle of the process, and we’re grinding away. It’s not a lot of fun, and you’d rather just have everything go smoothly, but that’s not where we are at right now.”
Threet said that he’s encouraged by the progress the offense made in the second half.
“There were obviously some plays in the first half that didn’t go the way they were supposed to go, and some decisions that weren’t made the right way,” he said. “But we kept on working and kept on trying to get the yards, and things started to get moving in the second half.”
Threet said that he was able to ignore the boos raining down from over 100,000 disappointed fans at the half, a noise loud enough that Rodriguez joked it could be heard all over the city of Ann Arbor.
drive of the second half and you have to treat it like it is the first half of the game.”
Senior nose tackle Terrance Taylor gave the team a pep talk at the half, and his teammates said it certainly worked.
“He came over and talked about how the offensive and defensive lines needed to control the game,” said offensive tackle Stephen Schilling. “He told us that we needed to win this one for the seniors, and he was pretty upset, so it was definitely some motivation for us.”
The offensive players also credited a defense that held Wisconsin to just 19 points while they were floundering in the first half – an effort that middle linebacker Obi Ezeh was proud to have helped.
“I thought we did a great job,” he said. “We came out for the first half with the mind-set that we would play as hard as the team needed us to play, and it turned out that we had to be out there for a very long time, but we stood tall for the whole game.”
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