Kyle Whittingham reacts to Michigan's wild Hail Mary win over WMU

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Week 1 saw Michigan football underperform to about the greatest lengths that perhaps the team ever has, and that’s saying something. But the Wolverines also got a bit of a reprieve against Western Michigan: one more chance.

The maize and blue appeared to have suffered its second loss in program history to a MAC team, with the first being Toledo back in 2008 — Rich Rodriguez’s first season. However, controversially, one second was put on the clock, and Bryce Underwood hit wide receiver JJ Buchanan for the go-ahead score as time expired.

After the game, head coach Kyle Whittingham, in his first postgame press conference as the Michigan coach, said he thought they had another second left on the clock, though replays indicate that might not have been the case. But he’s pleased to emerge with the victory, though he’s not exactly happy about it, either.

“Well, yeah, obviously the extra second was huge,” Whittingham said. “As I watched the first Hail Mary end and the ball sailed out of the back of the end zone, as I glanced at the clock, I was pretty sure there was one second left, but that obviously is not up to me. But as the refs went to replay, they confirmed it, and so it gave us one more opportunity. And that second time around, Bryce threw a perfect ball, because the first one he sailed it out the back, which gives us no chance to catch it.

“JJ made a phenomenal catch, doesn’t surprise me, that’s who he is. I see him make contested catches every day in practice. The offensive line gave Bryce enough time to launch it, and so this game will go down in Michigan history; I don’t know if it’s in a positive way, but it will go down in history for certain.

“Bottom line is we’re 1-0, but the reality is we have got a lot to fix, a lot of things to address.”

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Whittingham explained the breadth of why Michigan struggled in the season opener. The offense, after the first drive, was stuck in the mud. The team had three turnovers — two on offense and one on special teams. The only score, until the last play of the game, came on the opening drive — when the offense looked particularly sharp.

The defense allowed the Broncos to hold onto the football for nearly 41 minutes, though it allowed just nine total points.

Ultimately, the Wolverines emerged unscathed, but there is a lot to fix before Oklahoma comes to town next week.

“Things we didn’t do well: we didn’t play the run well on defense, we didn’t run the ball well on offense, we lost the turnover margin three-zip, we didn’t make enough first downs,” Whittingham said. “And all this is squarely on my shoulders; there’s no doubt about that. And I’ve got to do a better job preparing this football team. But I’m going to tell you right now, there was not a lot of hooting and hollering in that locker room; in fact, there was none, because we understand that we’ve got a lot of work to do and we’ve got to be much, much better than we were tonight.

“Now, give Western Michigan credit, they came in with the exact game plan that I would have come in with, if I was in their situation: shorten the game, run the ball, heavy QB run, a dose of that, protect the ball. And they had, to their credit, zero turnovers, and as a defense we’ve got to create and generate takeaways. Now, to our defense’s credit, all three takeaways that Western Michigan got, we held them to field goals in each of those instances, and so that was a positive defense, kept them out of the end zone — that was positive. They only allowed 12 first downs.

“So there’s some positive things to take away from it; the most positive thing of all obviously, is 1-0, but we know we’re not going to win a lot of ball games this year if we don’t fix some things and fix them right away, and we will be in early tomorrow morning working towards that end.”

Underwood looked vastly improved on the first drive before everything fell apart. Whittingham doesn’t believe there was anything that Western Michigan did to stymie him, but it was more that the team stopped doing what it was supposed to do, which stalled out the offense.

“Not that I could tell. Not that it was nothing dramatic,” Whittingham said. “We just stopped executing. We stopped controlling the line of scrimmage. They ran a lot of movement with their defense, and if you want to be successful against movement, you’ve got to hit it. You just can’t. They had too much penetration at times, and we did not do a good job picking up movement in the run game, and that was one of our biggest deficiencies of the night is exactly that.”

Michigan had better fix things in a hurry, as the next contest features an Oklahoma team that just blew out UTEP, the Wolverines’ Week 3 opponent.