ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Michigan football has lost three games by one score. And all but one of seven games this season have come down to the final possession on one side of the ball or the other. For the most part, the defense has held up its end of the bargain, but the offense hasn't.
It's not complementary football, as hoped or expected.
As far as the offensive struggles, following the 13-6 loss to Indiana, head coach Kyle Whittingham was somewhere between tearing everything out from under the hood and staying the course, noting that it's on the coaches, but also crediting the Wolverines for holding the game close to the No. 6 team in the country.
"Well, we got our work cut out for us," Whittingham said. "And that's our job as coaches, to do just
that, spark the offense. And we'll continue to search for answers and look at every possible scenario. And we need to modify schematically. We need to play some different players. I mean, we have to just look at all the players. But I'm not putting this on the players at all. We have to be better as coaches. That's where it starts.
"We have to be better as coaches and do a better job of putting these guys in a position to succeed. And that's all there is to it. Again, we need to take nothing away from Indiana; we give them credit. Statistically, they had an outstanding offense. If that's the No. 6 team in the country, then we're pretty good. We're a pretty good football team. We're sitting here at, what? 4-3."
It's a somewhat perplexing reaction. Yes, the Wolverines have been a few plays away in every game, but that's for better and worse, depending on the game. Each game could have featured one play that would have won games they didn't, but the same could be said if one play wasn't made in the games they did win (like the Western Michigan game).
Ultimately, the offense has been disjointed. Only once all season has it topped more than 21 points, in the Week 3 romp over UTEP, but even that game saw the offense stuck in the mud in the first half.
Whittingham believes that if the players stay the course, then good things will happen. And he urged his players to do that and not quit, noting there are five games left this year.
"Well, I believe these guys love football, and they want to compete, and that's what it's all about," Whittingham said. "There's a few, probably 130 teams in the country, probably half of them, with the same problem we got. Not where you want to be, not where you hope to be, but you love football and you love to compete, and you're a competitor. You keep working, and you keep coming back to fight every single week regardless of circumstance.
"And that was one of the messages in the locker room was, hey, we just keep going. We've got a lot of football left. We have five full games left and maybe more beyond that, depending on how it plays out. But if you've got guys that don't want to play all of a sudden because they've had a couple setbacks, then you've got the wrong guys."
Up next, Michigan faces 2-5 Rutgers, a team that's all but eliminated from postseason contention. Given that the Scarlet Knight defense is ranked 115th nationally, perhaps it could be the game where the offense comes alive for the second time this year.
This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Kyle Whittingham admits Michigan coaches must fix struggling offense
