BYU and Michigan down 10 · 
Texas down 7 to No. 13
Minnesota QB Drake Lindsey · B1G defense — 
Michigan State 41, 
Eastern Michigan 13 · 495 yards, no punts, no penalties, 2-0
‘The Same Twenty-Five’
Good morning. Michigan had Oklahoma at home and lost by thirty-two. Forty-nine to seventeen in that stadium, and this morning the Wolverines are twenty-second after being twelfth. Coach, you first, and I already know.
You know. Forty-nine points in that stadium. In front of their own people, at eight o'clock at night, with everybody there. I don't have a gentle way to say it and I'm not going to go looking for one.
They're one and one.
They're one and one and they've played one football team.
Their quarterback's a sophomore and he spent the whole second half running for his life. If everybody wants to take that tape and hang it on the kid, go ahead. I'm not going to do it.
I didn't say his name.
You didn't have to say his name.
Joel, what actually happened?
Oklahoma won the line of scrimmage on the first series and never gave it back, and that's the whole game. Michigan couldn't run it and couldn't protect, so by the second quarter they're throwing it on second and nine every time, and Oklahoma's front knows it.
And John Mateer is the best player in the country right now. He was the best player on that field by a distance and it wasn't a close vote. Nine touchdowns two weeks ago, and Saturday he beat them with his legs on third down about five separate times.
The thing I'd flag for people is that Michigan's problem in that game is the same problem they had beating Western Michigan seventeen to nine. It looked bad against a MAC team and it looked catastrophic against Oklahoma, and it's the same problem both times.
Say the problem.
They can't move anybody up front.
Then that's a program problem, and those don't get fixed in October.
The poll, and it's a strange one. Nobody entered the Top 25 and nobody dropped out of it. All twenty-five teams from last week are still in it, in a different order. Miami stays number one. Alabama drops twelve to twenty-third after losing at home to Kentucky in overtime, forty-six to forty-three. BYU falls ten to twentieth, Arizona beat them by twenty-seven. Michigan down ten. Texas down seven to thirteen. USC, Louisville, Texas Tech and Penn State each up four.
That's a September poll behaving like a September poll. Everybody who lost this week lost to somebody the voters already respect, so nobody wants to throw a name out yet. Give it two more weeks and they will.
So nothing happened. Fifty-some football games and the same twenty-five names.
Two of those teams lost by twelve and twenty-seven.
And they're both still in it.
They're both still in it. That's your point and it's a fair one. I'm agreeing with you.
Don't do that, it's early.
Can I say the part that bothers me? Kentucky went to overtime with Alabama and won a football game, and the only thing that happened in the poll is Alabama moved down twelve spots. Kentucky's still not in it. That's one of the biggest wins that program's had in my lifetime and the sport moved somebody else's name.
Heisman board. Mateer at one. Then three Miami players. Mark Fletcher Junior second, Darian Mensah third, Cooper Barkate fourth.
Three of the top four play on the same team and see each other at practice every day. And it's not indefensible. Fletcher is carrying that offense, he's the reason they can play the way they want to play in the fourth quarter. Mensah has been the most efficient quarterback in the country and hasn't put the ball in trouble. Barkate is the guy who catches it when it matters and he's the one who ends up on television.
It's what happens when the number one team plays in prime time every week and everybody watches the same game.
Give it to the running back and everybody go home.
Players of the week. National offense, South Carolina's LaNorris Sellers. National defense, NC State's Da'Kaari Nelson. In this league, Minnesota quarterback Drake Lindsey and Illinois linebacker James Kreutz.
Illinois lost by thirty-one.
He had a big day.
He was out there a long time.
Ohio State twenty-four, Texas twenty-one in Columbus.
Best football game of the weekend and I don't think it's especially close. Two defenses that can actually take a game off you, and it came down to about four snaps in the fourth quarter. Texas drops to thirteenth and I think that's a little rough on them.
It isn't rough. They lost.
They lost by three, on the road, in that stadium.
They lost.
Coach, people are going to accuse you of something.
People have been accusing me of that since two thousand and one and they've been right every time.
Iowa and Iowa State finishes on a blocked punt returned for a touchdown. Twenty-five twenty-four. I've been on the wrong end of one of those and you do not get over it in a week. Guys will tell you they got over it. They did not get over it.
Duke forty-five, Illinois fourteen. Illinois is oh and two, both at home.
That's the one people in this league should be looking at. Two of them at home, and the second one was worse than the first one.
Purdue's oh and two as well.
Nobody's worried about Purdue.
Northwestern is one and oh. Everybody else in the league is two and oh.
Michigan State beat Eastern Michigan forty-one to thirteen and is two and oh. Four hundred and ninety-five yards, eight point three a play, twenty-seven first downs, eight of ten on third down. They did not punt once and they were not penalized once. That is one penalty in two football games. Coach.
Eastern Michigan.
That's the answer?
That's what I've got. It's Eastern Michigan and everybody at this desk wants me to be moved by it and I'm not going to be moved by it in September.
There's a piece of this I want a minute on and it has nothing to do with who they played.
Their opening drive is eight plays and they don't hand the football off one time. Then they try to run it and it goes nowhere, because Eastern's three-technique, a kid named Warren-Stevens Tayou, is beating single blocks on the interior. He finishes with four sacks. Eastern Michigan finishes with four sacks. Michigan State ran gap scheme directly at him three separate times and got nothing for it.
And then they stopped. Two and three tight ends, they start moving their H-back across the formation before the snap, and they run outside instead of between the guards. Their back has twenty-one yards on his first eight carries and a hundred and thirty-seven on his last fourteen. Same back, same line, same afternoon.
What I'd point at is the order that happened in. That's a head coach diagnosing his own plan while the game is going on and throwing it in the garbage. Be as skeptical as you want about a twenty-eight-year-old. That is a hard thing to do at any age.
Against Eastern Michigan.
Against anybody.
I've watched people be brilliant in September for twenty-five years. I've been one of them.
Let me do the quarterback, because I like this one. Leo Hannan, redshirt freshman, second career start. Sixteen of twenty-one, two hundred eighty-six, two touchdowns, no interceptions, rating over two twenty. Two hundred of those yards and both touchdown throws came before halftime and then they took it out of his hands and ran it.
He has not thrown an interception in two games. And the thing I'd tell you from having been the kid in that spot is that nobody had to hide him. Nobody was handing it off eleven times a half to keep him out of trouble. He was the reason they were ahead at the break.
Their defense gave up two hundred and thirty-eight yards in the first half and seventy-eight in the second.
Two different football teams and both of them are on the tape, and I'm not going to skip the first one. Braydon Bennett had a hundred and eleven rushing and eight catches, and Michigan State could not get him on the ground for a half. They were fine on first down, they were fine on second down, and Eastern converted four of its first six third downs. That's a coverage problem and a tackling problem at the same time.
Then after halftime they stopped disguising, played straight, tackled, and Eastern converted nothing the rest of the day.
Their cornerback, Charles Brantley, has had a hard game two weeks running now. A forty-four-yard touchdown, a missed tackle, a third-down completion in the fourth quarter.
I watched the forty-four. He's by himself. It's single high, and then the safety isn't in the middle of the field anymore, because their head coach wanted him down helping against Bennett. So now there is nothing at all behind that corner and the receiver can go whichever way he wants. That is a hard job for a nine-year pro. He's twenty years old.
Then he's got to play better.
That's not an answer, Urban.
It's the only one there is. You can explain the coverage for as long as you want and a man still ran forty-four yards down the sideline without anybody touching him. Two weeks in a row. If you can't cover, you don't play, and somebody at that school is going to have to say that out loud, and it's clearly not going to be the head coach.
On that. He was asked about the player twice and both times answered about his own coverage call. He said it's a policy and that he doesn't grade players publicly.
Sure.
You don't buy it.
It's a lovely thing to say when you're two and oh over Grambling State and Eastern Michigan. Ask him in November when it's costing him something.
I'd take that over the other thing every time. I played for men who did the other thing and I can tell you exactly what it does to a room.
It's also the third time he's done it in two weeks and he's been consistent about it since he was hired. I don't know what it's worth yet. I know it isn't an accident.
Joel, anything else on them before we move?
One thing. Their receiver, KK Smith, had seven catches for a hundred and thirty-six and two touchdowns, and he's at fourteen catches and two hundred forty-one yards through two games. He was outside, he was in the slot, he was stacked behind another receiver, and Eastern's corner never found him. The touchdown in the first quarter is a back-shoulder throw in the end zone that's covered about as well as it can be and goes in anyway.
Eastern's corner.
Eastern's corner.
Saturday, Michigan State goes to Notre Dame. The Irish are one and two. Forty-two to six at Miami, thirty-eight to ten at home to Wisconsin, and then fifty-two to ten over Rice. They're receiving votes after being third in the country in August. Brady, you go first and I know why that's unfair.
It's fine. Here's where I am and it isn't comfortable. I have watched all three of those games and I could not tell you which team walks out of that tunnel on Saturday.
The Rice game I take almost nothing from. They were supposed to do that and they did it. The Wisconsin game is the one I keep going back to, because somebody made them uncomfortable in their own stadium and they came apart, and that is a specific thing to watch happen to a team.
What I'd say against the panic is that it's the same roster everybody had at number three five weeks ago. Every one of those players is still in that locker room. So if somebody wants to tell me a team is finished in the third week of September, they're going to need more than one bad Saturday and one easy one.
The matchup is the exact thing Michigan State just lost. Their interior gave up four sacks to one man from the MAC, and Notre Dame's front is the best thing they've got. It was the best thing they had while they were losing those two games.
So if that's a problem again on Saturday, nothing else on this list matters, because everything Michigan State wants to do starts with running it and keeping the quarterback clean.
And I'll say the other half of it, because it's also true. If they can protect, they've got a quarterback who hasn't turned it over, a receiver nobody's covered yet, and a playcaller who has already shown he'll throw his own plan away by the second quarter. That's a live football game.
Notre Dame by four touchdowns.
You're sure.
I'm sure. Ninety thousand people in there who are furious about six weeks of their life, on a Saturday afternoon, against a two-and-oh team whose wins are Grambling State and Eastern Michigan. Their head coach has never been inside that stadium. Never. He said so himself, on the record, in his own press conference, and nobody had even asked him.
He said it Tuesday. Nobody asked.
Well. He'll see it.
You're going to get quoted on four touchdowns.
I'd like to be.
Joel.
I'm not predicting it. I'll tell you what I'm watching, and it's the first two series Michigan State has on offense. If they're standing up in there, this is a four-quarter football game and everybody at this desk is going to have to talk about it Monday. If they're not, it's finished by the middle of the second quarter.
Brady?
I'm not doing it. It's my school and I've already been wrong about them twice this year.
That's Big Ten Now. Saturday, all day, all over this network. Thanks for being with us.
