Michigan

Niyo: Marshall plan keeps Michigan running on schedule

Published

5 months ago

November 2, 2025

Niyo: Marshall plan keeps Michigan running on schedule

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

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Michigan

Over 40,000 without power after storms push through West Michigan

Published

21 minutes ago

April 15, 2026

Press Room

Over 40,000 without power after storms push through West Michigan

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Over 40,000 Consumers Energy customers are currently without power after strong storms pushed through West Michigan on Tuesday.

The outages, according to a map provided by Consumers Energy, are peppered from as far east as the Lake Michigan shoreline and over to Gratiot County.

This comes as storms producing strong winds, along with severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings, push through the area.

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News Channel 3 is tracking these storms and will provide updates.

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Michigan

Max Bullough brings lineage and lessons for Michigan State defense

Published

12 hours ago

April 14, 2026

Press Room

Max Bullough brings lineage and lessons for Michigan State defense

East Lansing — It’s 6:30 a.m. but the energy is high inside Michigan State football’s practice facility as Max Bullough barks out orders to his group of linebackers who watch him with rapt attention. At 34 years old, the Traverse City native looks as though he could go through these drills himself. He probably wants to.

Now, the former two-time MSU captain Bullough returns to East Lansing. To the same stomping grounds where his grandfather Hank once plodded the sidelines for Duffy Daugherty. Where his father Shane once captained a team for George Perles. Where he and his brothers Riley and Byron each played for Mark Dantonio, including Max’s captaincy of the 2013 team that won a Big Ten championship and earned a ticket to the Rose Bowl.

A Rose Bowl he never got to play in.

With Bullough, it felt like a matter of when, and not if, a homecoming would occur on the sidelines. And with that reunion would come the inevitable question: Why did his career end a game early, suspended from the Rose Bowl his senior season?

“Yeah, you’ve been dying to ask that one,” Bullough said. “Here’s my answer to that one:

“That was 13 years ago, right. So my focus and my energy and my attention is on the 2026 Spartans, and my beautiful wife, Bailey, and my four boys Rocky, Teddy, Banks and Murphy. We’ll leave the past where the past is. It has nothing to do with what we’re doing moving forward, and so let’s talk about the 2026 Spartans.”

Now that that’s out of the way.

As much as Bullough doesn’t want to talk about the past, it’s what his very hire harkens back to. He’s here to help revive a storied program that means so much to him that he has “Spartans” tattooed across both arms. He gets to raise a family where his family has played and coached, and where his grandmother, Lou Ann Bullough, still gets to every Michigan State basketball game she can. What would it mean for his grandfather to know he came back to join the coaching ranks?

“I don’t know how much he would tell me or not. You never got that much out of him that way,” Bullough said. “But I think at the end of the day, I think it would mean a lot.”

The first thing you notice about Bullough is his intensity, especially for Michigan State football. At least that was the case for new head coach Pat Fitzgerald, who had Bullough wrap up the first team meeting of the year for a new group trying to rise above 4-8 mediocrity a year ago.

“I gave him 90 seconds, I think he went 15 minutes,” Fitzgerald said Feb. 4. “Getting to know Max through the evaluation process when I was putting the staff together, you could sense very quickly his pride — beyond the double bicep — for the Spartan football program, the state of Michigan, his time here, and what he wanted to bring back, and that was toughness.”

Bullough’s part in an illustrious past for this program — in four years he went 40-12 and captained the Spartans his junior and senior years, an honor that means a great deal to him — is a major cultural building block for a staff trying to reestablish principles of the era of Dantonio, who is around more often since Fitzgerald got the job. Thankfully it all worked out, Fitzgerald says.

“He’s got a bright future ahead of himself in his career, and we wanted to make sure,” Fitzgerald said, “coming here is obviously easy to say of course, he’d want to come home. But it also had to fit looking at his three-, five-, 10-year plan for his career.”

Bullough was brought in for the next two seasons on a contract paying him $750,000 per year. When he stepped on campus as an assistant coach was only the second time he’d stepped food on campus since he graduated. The other time was when he was an honorary captain in 2015.

“There’s a lot of new buildings, this whole place,” Bullough said. “That’s the question y’all should ask. This place looks completely different.”

In Bullough, though, there’s a connection to history that feels further and further following four straight losing seasons.

“He’s brought energy, brought enthusiasm. He brings a lineage,” defensive coordinator Joe Rossi said April 7. “He understands what it means to be a Spartan, not only him but his family. So it’s been awesome.”

As an understudy to Rossi, Bullough is listed as a co-defensive coordinator in addition to his role as linebackers coach. Not only does that free up Rossi to “roam” around practices and observe his entire defense (last season, Rossi filled that linebackers coach role), Bullough also gains experience for later in his coaching career that has been impressive through stops at Notre Dame and Alabama. He’s a riser, of whom coaches and players speak highly.

Playing for Mike Vrabel while with the Houston Texans watered the genetic coaching seed in Bullough. It was at Notre Dame that Bullough really fell in love with being a college coach.

“Once I was able to get to Notre Dame and have my own room,” Bullough said, “which is where the magic comes for me, like when you’re able to coach your own room and have your own guys. Like the connection that you’re able to build with guys that are this 18 to 22 years old, especially when we’re able to bring (our) own guys in. Watch them come in, watch them develop, and see what they turn into in terms of football players and in terms of men.”’

Men who make mistakes, like he did with whatever incident caused him to be suspended for the biggest game of his career, as perhaps the most important player to that team. That’s not an incident he uses as an example for his players who face trying times, he says, but he does use his life experience as a model for the young men following him, including linebacker Jordan Hall, who likely will be a two-year captain just like his coach this upcoming fall.

“The message to Jordan is, people are drawn to you, brother, what energy are you giving back?” Bullough said. “Because you gotta be on it all the time. There isn’t any time where you can where it’s like you can be down. You have to be on it all the time.”

Bullough said there was one incident early in spring ball that Hall was frustrated he got pulled for a teammate to play. He got frustrated, didn’t handle it well. The next time it happened, Bullough says Hall became an asset on the sidelines.

“I think that’s a testament to the kind of guy he is and the teammate he’s striving to be,” Bullough said. “… He made a mistake the one day, and he got better from it. He’s helped me a lot. And, I mean, I can admit that. I know he and Coach Rossi are very close and that he knows Coach Rossi’s defense like the back of his hand. I have no problem asking ‘Jordan, how do y’all see this? How did we do this last year?’”

“If you guys notice, any of the drills he’s like right behind us, almost mirroring everything that we do,” Hall said March 17. “Very passionate. I mean, just a great ball-knower.”

cearegood@detroitnews.com

@ConnorEaregood

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Michigan

Former Eastern Michigan football player stands outside Lions facility, asks for chance on the field

Published

1 day ago

April 14, 2026

Press Room

Former Eastern Michigan football player stands outside Lions facility, asks for chance on the field

Former Eastern Michigan football player Freddie McGee III went viral on Monday, doing anything he possibly could to get the Lions’ attention for a tryout to make the team.

“I felt I just needed to take matters into my own hands,” said McGee.

The Canton, Michigan, native, and reigning Defensive Player of the Year in the Arena Football League, says he arrived at the Lions practice facility in Allen Park at 8:45 a.m. Monday to beg for a chance to walk onto the Lions, just like how he walked onto Eastern Michigan’s football team a few years ago.

“This morning was a little nerve-racking, you know, this is definitely stepping outside of my comfort zone,” said McGee. “Just wanted to come out here, maybe catch the right scout, the right personnel person pulling in here, maybe take a look at the sign I have and get to know my story a little bit, maybe give me a shot today.”

Former Eastern Michigan University football player Freddie McGee stood outside the Lions facility in Allen in hopes of an opportunity on the field.

CBS News Detroit

McGee’s brave pitch to the Lions is that he’s not just a dreamer; he dominated the AFL last year with 14 interceptions and 25 pass breakups. And his story is one that he says exemplifies everything Dan Campbell and the Lions should be looking for: grit.

“Other than just being a local kid and growing up loving the Lions, I feel like I’m the epitome of grit, like my career hasn’t been easy, I’ve overcome a lot of adversity,” said McGee.

CBS News Detroit reached out to the Lions organization for comment and is awaiting a response.

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