Threat Level Is Surprised That Michigan Football Even Bothered to Show Up This Season

Ohio State buried them six feet under the south endzone of Ohio Stadium last season, after scoring the most points in the history of the rivalry (if you weren't personally present for the 1902 game you don't get to tell me I'm wrong) and running their fans out of Columbus on a rail. It was fun and cool and extremely good because if after the game you asked literally any Wolverine fan whether or not they'd even try and field a team in 2019, you'd probably just get a resigned sigh and a shrug.

But through some unholy combination of voodoo science and black magic, the reanimated corpse of Jim Harbaugh and company shambles back out on the field once again for me to make fun of them for several months.

It's pretty much the same team! Will they live up to the extremely conditional hype afforded to them by the national media? Will they beat a top 10 opponent for like, actually the second time in the Harbaugh era? Will they make a pact with the literal devil and at least keep the Ohio State game close?

Find out all season on the Threat Level. Or just watch them on TV. Nah, don't do that.

THREAT LEVEL

Oh right, the game.

If you watched Ohio State sloppily out-talent an inferior opponent while maybe not exactly out-playing them, then you've already seen Michigan take down Middle Tennessee, just with different uniforms. The Wolverines won 40-21 in a game that looked and felt a lot more like 24-13.

Shea Patterson remains a good, but not great, quarterback. He passed for just over 200 yards and threw for three touchdowns, but that's pretty much the baseline for acceptable against a team called the "Blue Raiders," whatever the hell that is. He also fumbled on his first snap of the game and again later on (Michigan as a team fumbled four times, losing two).

The lone interesting part of the offense was freshman running back Zach Charbonnet, who got 90 yards on just 8 carries. He'll probably be intermittently great and then disappear as an effective offensive force sometime around the second week of October, but until then he should be a featured part of the new hurry-up attack that Michigan is trying out this season.

The defense was fine. 21 points to Middle Tennessee sounds like a lot, and it's not great, but the Blue Raiders were never in any danger of accidentally winning this one. Linebacker Jordan Glasgow had a couple of sacks while looking a little bit like a Flock of Seagulls escapee.

So what did we learn? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

The Threat Level begins at GUARDED.