Ann Arbor — One minute, Jordan Marshall was lying on the ground on the Michigan sideline, looking like another casualty on a night full of them for the home team.
The next, he simply disappeared. But not for long.
Because the game wasn’t over — much to the dismay of a chattering crowd of 110,517 inside Michigan Stadium on Saturday night — and the workhorse wasn’t done working.
So there Marshall went, plowing into the line one more time. And somehow, out of the pile, there he came again, leaving little doubt about how this night would end.
But questions? Sure, there would be a few.
Starting with the one Tony Alford greeted Marshall with on the sideline after that remarkable fourth-quarter touchdown run had finally given the Wolverines some breathing room.
“Coach Alford was, like, ‘What happened?’” Marshall recalled later, laughing, after he’d helped his team escape Purdue’s upset bid.
His answer: “I just kept running.”
He did, all right. All night, really.
Primary role
And the redshirt freshman might be the single biggest reason Michigan has kept winning these last few weeks, picking up the slack after starter Justice Haynes was sidelined by injury — or injuries, as it were — and practically carrying the Wolverines into their bye week with a 7-2 record.
Whatever you think of Michigan’s chances going forward — wins at Northwestern (Nov. 15) and Maryland (Nov. 22) could set up another epic clash with Ohio State at the end of November — don’t overlook Marshall’s role in getting the Wolverines where they are.
Saturday night, Marshall rushed for a career-best 185 yards on 25 carries, scored all three of his team’s touchdowns, and effectively ran out the clock on the Boilermakers, who haven’t won a Big Ten game in two years but easily could’ve won one here.
That’s because Michigan’s passing game feels like a disjointed mess most of the time. Freshman Bryce Underwood is still rushing too many throws, receivers are still dropping too many passes and the coaching staff is still lacking the kind of confidence you’d expect from a team that’s at least pretending to be a playoff contender at this point in the season.
Underwood followed up an underwhelming performance at Michigan State (7-of-18, 86 yards) with another one Saturday, finishing just 13-of-22 for 145 yards and a costly red-zone interception against a Purdue defense that just gave up 359 yards through the air to Rutgers a week ago in West Lafayette. And while neither the quarterback nor his head coach, Sherrone Moore, sounded any alarms after this latest outing, Moore did acknowledge, “We’ve got to be better in the passing game.”
They’ll have to be better all around, frankly. Michigan’s special-teams play remains an Achilles’ heel more than two months into the season. And a defense that was already missing a few starters lost another one Saturday when Jaishawn Barham exited with an apparent shoulder injury on the second play from scrimmage. But that’s no excuse for the way Purdue dominated time of possession through three quarters or the fact that the Boilermakers completed 77% of their passes and were only a third-down stop away from having a chance to win this game late in the fourth quarter.
Then again, Marshall made sure none of that mattered in the end. Nearly half of his 25 carries — a dozen, to be exact — came in the fourth quarter Saturday. And it would’ve been more if not for the cramping that sent him hobbling off the field in the middle of that final touchdown drive. Marshall missed a few plays getting treatment on the sideline — backup Bryson Kuzdzal filled in — yet he was determined to finish what he’d started.
“It can hurt tomorrow,” he said. “We’ve got a whole week to get our bodies right. But I gotta go out there for my team. They fought for four quarters, and I have to be out there to help seal the game and put the game away. And that’s my mindset.”
It showed, obviously. Just as it did a couple weeks earlier in the win over Washington here, as Marshall (25 carries, 133 yards against the Huskies) stepped into the starter’s role that likely would’ve been his all season had Michigan’s coaching staff not hit the transfer portal to bring in Haynes from Alabama last winter.
Waiting his turn
Instead, he was left to play a supporting role for the first six weeks, biding his time and waiting for a bigger opportunity. It finally came when Haynes missed that Washington game while nursing a rib injury suffered in the loss at USC. He returned last week against the Spartans and both backs went over 100 yards in that rivalry runaway. But now Haynes is out indefinitely with a different injury, one that had him using a knee scooter to get around on the Michigan sideline Saturday, his right foot stuffed in a protective boot.
Asked about Haynes’ status before Saturday’s game, Moore would only say “we hope to get him back.” But the back who’s shouldering the load in his absence certainly looks more than capable of doing just that.
Marshall has an impressive ability to absorb contact and gain extra yardage at the end of runs. And as Moore was quick to point out after Saturday’s win, of his 124 carries this season, only one has gone for negative yardage. But he packs more than a punch, too, and this career night against the Boilermakers amplified that, the way Marshall used his patience and vision to break off chunks of yardage time after time. A dozen of his carries went for 5 yards or more —Marshall gave most of the credit for that to Michigan’s young, improving offensive line — and the 54-yarder he took to the house for the game’s first touchdown was his second 50-plus yarder in as many weeks.
“But it’s not a surprise,” linebacker Ernest Hausmann said. “We all know what Jordan’s capable of doing. We go against that in practice every day. So it’s not surprise. We know who he is, and we know what he does.”
And for what it’s worth, Marshall says he knows he can do more.
“I don’t think I played my best today,” he said. “I think I ran well, but there’s some stuff in the pass protection I think I have to clean up, and our (running back) room has to clean up. And again, I’m very hard on myself, and there’s some runs that I wish I had back, things like that.”
And those aren’t just the kind of things coaches love to hear, either. It’s the mentality Michigan’s going to need when it gets back to work over the bye week, preparing for the stretch run.
“I promise you guys that we’re going to come out in two weeks ready to go,” Marshall said. “Next week is an opportunity. It’s not a week where we just get to sit around and relax. It’s a week to get healthy, fix things … back to the fundamentals.”
Saturday was a win, yes. But it was a “sloppy win,” Marshall added, “and we’re a way better team than that.”
john.niyo@detroitnews.com
@JohnNiyo
