Everything Kyle Whittingham said after Michigan’s loss to Iowa

Michigan football head coach Kyle Whittingham met with the media Saturday following the Wolverines’ loss to Iowa at Michigan Stadium.

Whittingham discussed Michigan’s red-zone struggles, costly penalties, the final defensive call, Bryce Underwood and the offense’s continued progress, the inability to close out the game, Jordan Marshall and Blake Frazier, the secondary rotation, Michigan’s lack of takeaways and how the Wolverines move forward from their first loss of the season.

Here is everything Whittingham said after the game.

Red-zone struggles

No, they didn’t do anything different than what they’ve shown on film. They’ve been doing it for 15 years, and we just didn’t do our part in the red zone. I think we were two for four, and that proved to be one of the differences in the game for certain. We just got to be able to, as you mentioned, execute better.

Costly penalties

Well, I’ve got to watch the film, first of all. I’ve had people tell me that it shouldn’t have been, or should — who knows? Bottom line is, we’re penalized too much again today. I think before today we were somewhere in the middle of the country in penalties, 50th or 60th, something like that. Now we’re probably back in the top 30 or 20. So it’s excessive, and we’ve got to do something about it. It was a couple of really costly ones, particularly on that last drive. But we’ve just got to keep coaching it and keep pressing on our players’ minds that penalties have consequences in games. They extend drives, they bog drives down, and it’s got to continue to be a point of emphasis and continue to clean it up.

Final defensive call

There’s two schools of thought. You either play coverage or you speed things up and bring people and try to speed the quarterback up. In hindsight, you probably would’ve brought six and max pressure and tried to speed him up a little bit.

Postgame locker room

Yeah, it was a tough locker room, but I told them, hey, first of all, it’s a shame that we let that one get away from us because we had it. I told them sometimes in life you get knocked down and things seem tough and like, how can you overcome that? But that’s life. You’ve got to get back up, pick yourself back up, and we’ve got to go right back to work on the next opponent. That’s how this profession is. You’ve just got to keep going forward and learn from your mistakes. We’ll watch the film, obviously, and critique things, but I thought our offense was the best they’ve been all year. I thought Bryce had his best game. Both receivers over 100 yards. Jordan Marshall finally got a little bit untracked. We completely dominated them statistically, but that doesn’t really matter, obviously. It doesn’t matter at all. The final score is all that matters. But if you’re looking for things we did well, then we did some really good things. We did have the one turnover and zero takeaways. That was a factor in the game, being minus-one. And then that kickoff return that they had early in the game kept the score close, and that’s something you just can’t let happen. That’s unacceptable. We’ve got to coach it better. We weren’t trying to kick it to them. We were trying to kick it out of the back of the end zone, but just a little bit of a mishit and the guy took it back on us.

Finishing games

Oh, it’s a big emphasis, and that’s something that you’re preaching constantly, is to finish. That includes fourth-quarter performance. One of our points of emphasis on the plan to win is win the fourth quarter. It’s critical. I think the first — I can’t remember exactly — but I think the first three games, I believe we won the fourth quarter each time, or maybe one game was so out of reach it didn’t matter, the UTEP game. But winning the fourth quarter is a part of our plan, and it’s emphasized for certain.

Four-minute offense

Well, we certainly would’ve liked to have run the clock out in our four-minute offense, and we haven’t been able to do that. It’s been a couple times now, and so that was disappointing. But again, we’ve got a lot of things to work on and fix, but there’s a lot of positives with this team. Going forward, I believe we’re going to win a lot of ballgames, but we do have some things that are not up to par, and we’ll continue to work. As long as the players keep the right attitude, stay unified, which we will, and keep their heads up, which we will, then we’ve got a chance to be pretty good when it’s all said and done.

Final timeout decision

Well, I didn’t want to give them any more time to plan it. First of all, I was going to call timeout if they hadn’t stopped it because John Henry was on the ground 20 yards behind where the ball was being snapped, and so I was concerned that if they snapped it, it’d be a free play because it’d be offsides. So finally they shut it down. They realized he was back there and shut the thing down, and so that was, in essence, a timeout because there was a stoppage in play and we had a chance to gather ourselves over there. Would we have benefited from another timeout? Well, I guess it would’ve been another one because you can’t call consecutive timeouts, but since they didn’t recognize that as a timeout, we could have. But I don’t know if we would’ve played it any differently than we did even if we had taken that timeout.

Bouncing back

Well, you’ve got to bounce back. Again, that’s life. You get knocked on your butt, you pick yourself up and you continue to fight and scrap and compete. Unless I miss my guess, this team is going to come back next week and play very well and continue to practice well and work hard. If you’re a competitor, that’s what you do.

Frazier, Marshall updates

Yeah, Blake’s a tough individual and came back after — it was very painful. Fortunately, we hope it’s not serious, and we don’t think it’s serious. They wouldn’t have let him back in the game if it was. But he was certainly playing in pain. And Jordan Marshall, I thought he had his best game, and Savion was running well. So I don’t think, unless there’s something I don’t know, I don’t believe Jordan wasn’t in there because of injury in that fourth quarter. But the game just ended, so there’s a lot of things I’ve got to research.

Cornerback rotation

We only played 59 snaps this afternoon, and we haven’t played excessive snaps. Last week, I think the starters played like 20 snaps, and so I don’t think we’ve put anyone out there for excessive periods of time. I think they’re very fresh after four games relative to what’s average typically during a normal four-game stretch, and so they’ve been playing a lot fewer snaps. Would we like to get some more guys involved? Yeah, but they’ve got to earn that in practice. We’ve got to feel confident with them. But right now, we have four corners that you see rolling through there, although Shamari did not play a lot of reps this afternoon. But corners have got to be able to run forever and play. Now, if you’re asking them to play 80 snaps, that’s a little bit different. But I don’t believe any of them approached 60. They were all under 60 snaps.

Offensive progress

Yeah, well, that’s football. You can play not so well and win and play very well and lose. It’s a game of all kinds of things that go on and transpire. But I am proud, like I said, of how the offense performed. We didn’t finish a couple drives. We probably should have had 30-plus points, but we didn’t. But they’re taking steps forward each week, and I think that’s very encouraging. Bryce’s play is encouraging, and the offensive line play is encouraging. The defense, even though we gave up that last drive, they still rushed for, like, what, 55 yards or something like that? A very poor number from an offensive perspective. But the one thing, and I’ve been saying it for a few weeks now, that we haven’t been doing a good enough job is just getting takeaways on defense. We got zero today and ended up minus-one in the turnover margin. The offense sure could have used a little bit of help in short-field situations, but we weren’t able to generate that today.

First road game

Well, I don’t know about that. I’d rather play home every single week. We love playing in the Big House. The crowd was great. But it is a road game this week, and we only have four of them. In a way, I hear what you’re saying, just to get on an airplane and have an us-against-the-world mentality in an opponent’s stadium. There’s something to that, too. So maybe our guys will be looking forward to that opportunity.