In the Rose Bowl victory, Jim Harbaugh makes a statement about pass-rushing: “We handled business on the D-line.”
California: The defensive line of the Michigan football team had to answer questions all week.
In the Rose Bowl on Monday, the Wolverines faced Alabama’s formidable offensive line, which averages 338.6 pounds per starter. Approximately 338.6 reporters questioned the Wolverines about their opponent.
One of the biggest and most effective defensive fronts in the country by the end of the week had grown tired of being compared to Goliath. “Yes, we have heard a lot about their size,” Braiden McGregor grinned as he said to 247Sports on Saturday. “We’ll observe how it appears on the field.”
McGregor opened the game with an instant, untouched sack, and it took him exactly one snap to make it clear to the Crimson Tide what he meant. The Wolverines produced four sacks during Alabama’s first two drives and had one more before halftime.
In all, Michigan produced 12 pressures during the contest, including 6 sacks and 49 yards of loss. In addition, the Wolverines forced five scrambles (two on pressure snaps) for 42 yards, and Milroe completed one of three pass attempts for five yards. That indicates that in 15 instances, the pocket wasn’t tidy by the time after the ball was thrown, Alabama gained minus-2 yards.
Following the game, McGregor claimed that “some of the media were hyping them up.” “Yes, they were enormous.” blowing people away from the ball and everything. For the first two series, we had four sacks.
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As a result, the Crimson Tide modified their passing game plan in the second half, but it significantly curtailed Alabama’s ability to pass the ball. The Crimson Tide completed 15 of 20 passes in a clean pocket, but they only gained 111 yards overall, with an average completion depth of only 2.6 yards. Only three passes spanning 20 yards or more and three passes spanning 10 to 19 yards downfield were attempted by the Crimson Tide. Alabama had averaged 9.7 pass attempts of at least 10 yards downfield per game in its first 13 games. In the SEC Championship game, the Tide had 13 of these attempts against Georgia. Put differently, the Crimson Tide were unable to even try many passes downfield, much less complete them.
To be fair, Michigan has faced stiff opposition from the Wolverines’ defensive line the entire season. Michigan was fifth nationally in Pro Football Focus’s pass-rushing grade going into the bowl game, despite only ranking 34th in the country in terms of sacks per game. This suggests that Michigan had more influence over the play than their sack line would normally indicate.
Big and experienced on defense (four of their nine-man rotation’s players are seniors in their fourth, fifth, or sixth year; the other three are third-year players), the Wolverines have made block destruction one of their four defensive pillars this season. On Monday, against an Alabama line that has struggled pass-blocking all season, it paid off handsomely.Thanks to Coach Minter and Coach Elston, we have been preaching and training on this material since the start of the season, Jenkins remarked. Block destruction is what we’ve been teaching all the guys, not just the linemen. We would therefore review each practice after it ended to see what went well and what didn’t. We probably put in 700 hours on that alone this year, according to the coach. Thus, it only serves to highlight how seriously we take our dominating technique.
