You Learn Something New Every Day ... THE 2015 Game
Riding a four-game winning streak, having won nine of its last 10, Michigan felt pretty good going into its 2015 regular-season finale against Ohio State. But bubbling below the surface was a schematic change that may have been responsible for the Wolverines' 42-13 loss.
“What a lot of people don’t realize is we should have beat Ohio State in 2015. What happened was we changed up the whole defensive scheme the week going into Ohio State,” former starting safety Dymonte Thomas said during a radio appearance last week with Michael Spath.
“Coach [DJ] Durkin changed up our defense, so they just ran all over us cause we were running a 3-3-5, which we had not really run all season.”
Spath blatantly asked the safety, “Why did Durkin switch up the defense right before the Ohio State game?”
Thomas responded, “I’m not 100% sure. I just remember walking in, and he was like, 'This is what we are going to go with. We're gonna run this, we gonna run that.'”
To make matters even worse, Thomas acknowledged that many Wolverine defenders didn’t even understand what they were supposed to do on certain plays.
“I remember going into the game some of us were still confused on what plays we were running, what we were calling, what’s our check,” Thomas said. “Like we had been so used to running one defense for Coach Durkin that he changed up things, and I think it kind of threw us off because a lot of us were playing (other) positions and out of positions. We were kind of confused on the check and the call.”
Still to this day, Thomas does not understand why they changed their defensive scheme, which he believed ultimately may have cost them the game. The former Michigan safety would have much rather lost playing the way they had all season compared to playing the contest in a scheme they just learned.
“We didn’t play the game with confidence,” he said. “Compared to like if we had went in there and ran our regular defense, and we would have made mistakes and lost then so be it. But at least we would have known what we were doing.
"But we were out there not knowing what we were doing. A lot of times we were beat just off our mistakes.”
After they lost, there were a lot of players in the locker room looking for answers, but none came.
“I remember we didn’t even watch the game after they beat us. Like we didn’t even talk about the game, we didn’t watch the game. I think Coach Harbaugh gave us a few days off and was like, ‘Get ready for the bowl game, we will find out who we will have in a few days.’ And, we didn’t even watch it," Thomas said. "And, I’m not sure why. Maybe Coach Durkin saw something that a lot of people didn’t see [in deciding to change], but it didn’t work. And, we got beat pretty badly.”
