Maryland’s Mike Locksley breaks down Michigan’s win and key advantages

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Michigan football played its most complete game of Big Ten Conference play on Saturday, taking down Maryland, 45-20. With Ohio State on deck, the maize and blue needed not only a more crisp game, but also to build some confidence before the Wolverines host the Buckeyes.

The offense was electric, bolstered not only by a strong run game with third-string back Bryson Kuzdzal getting the start, and quarterback Bryce Underwood connecting with wide receivers Andrew Marsh and Donaven McCulley, as well as the tight ends.

After the game, Maryland head coach Mike Locksley had a lot to say about the Wolverines and their efforts. Here are the parts of his postgame press conference that mentioned Michigan football.

Opening statement

First of all, credit to Michigan, really good team. 

I want to secondly thank our seniors. These guys really have done a tremendous job the last couple of years of modeling what true leadership looks like, especially through a tough stretch here for us. As I told them in the locker room, the leadership that they've shown us through these tough stretches the last couple of years for this group of seniors, especially some of the older guys that have been around here, they've really modeled for an inexperienced team what it looks like that you just keep showing up and you keep swinging, which they did. We'll grow because of the work that this group has put in. I know this team will keep fighting as long as there's time left.

We'll keep fighting, keep showing up and working. We have one more opportunity next week in Detroit to send our seniors out with a win. And I know this team because the character they've shown the last seven weeks here will continue to do that and send off and finish this thing the right way as we travel up next week after Thanksgiving to go play Michigan State. We just weren't good enough today. It starts with me as the leader. We all will take a look at this film and get things corrected and finish it up the right way.

With that, I'll open up to questions.

Trying to contain Michigan

Obviously, 12-14 on third down, the execution of getting off the field showed up again. I give our defense, they played a short field all game long. Obviously, the kicking game and the drive starts for them was not advantageous. But we do have to be able to get off the field on what we call money downs, and didn't do that today, didn't do it very well.

Michigan's run game

The way it looked on the field for me until I watched it, the ball came off the edge. We didn't set the edge of the defense very well. The last few weeks has been a lot of what we call interior runs. Today, the ball came off the edge of the table, which typically means that we've got to get the forced players down tighter. They've got to do a better job of forcing the ball back to where the help was. Today, I didn't see a lot of the ball being forced back inside. The ball came off the edge of the table too many times.

On Bryce Underwood

I haven't studied Michigan enough to know what they've done for Bryce other than getting prepared for this week. I think our freshman quarterback has played pretty well. Are there ways and areas that he can play better? No doubt. But I haven't studied them enough to be able to make that assumption.

On Michigan's offensive success on third down

I mean, I've got to go watch it. I mean, it starts with making the plays that are there. We've had some opportunities on some of the third downs.It looked like our undercoverage on some of the longer situations. I know they hit the tight end of the seam a couple times. You know, it's tough for me to get up here and answer why and exactly how everything that happened. I'll get it watched, get it evaluated. I know it just happened too often, and we've got to get it stopped and get off the field.

On punting after early successful trick plays

Yeah, so again, we wanted to play aggressive to generate explosive plays. I mean, we dissect them. It's amazing how we can dissect every single play.But the end result is this, the way you create explosives or momentums, either a player makes a play or a coach designs or schemes or calls things to generate an explosive. We tried to steal a series. I don't know if you know our kicker, 46, who typically kicks off, wasn't available.

And so we had 98 kicking off, and we put the surprise onside and some things we saw to try to steal a possession, generate some momentum, generate explosives. We wanted to be aggressive. We had the reverse pass that wind up Malik scrambled. Again, we hit that top of that red zone area. Here's a coach trying to design a play to create an explosive. But then we get a fourth-and-5, and I don't know how it got compared to that, but now we got a really good punter who pins people down inside the five-yard line with punts quite a bit. And so we decided to try to pin and play good defense and then flip the field position. So that's how those decisions were made.

This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: What Mike Locksley said about Michigan after Wolverines beat Maryland

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