tl;dr warning
With the intent of shooting more pictures, I sold our normal seats on StubHub and bought some Row 1 tickets on eBay for the Michigan-Indiana game, completely forgetting the fact that Rows A & B are ahead of Row 1. Thanks to the hail and chilling rain, that didn’t turn out to be a huge problem, as there was nobody in the 8 Row A seats in front of us the entire game, and the Row B seats in front of us were empty most of the second half as well. I picked corner of the south end zone to make sure we wouldn’t be behind the uprights or the field goal nets, and the location turned out to be great, except for the cold rain blowing in our faces during the first quarter.
I was a bit disappointed at the Minnesota game that I didn’t get a good picture of Brady Hoke jumping to grab the banner; I got one, but it was mostly obscured by someone’s head who stood up on the bench in front of us. Though we were much further away in the corner this week, I got that clear shot I was looking for:
Brady Hoke talks to Brandon Gibbons after a second blocked field goal in as many weeks. Brunettes?
Thomas Gordon tries to get the defense fired up, and maybe to keep Indiana from scoring a touchdown in, like, 24 seconds again?
Must’ve worked, as the defense celebrates a big play.
A short time later, we had Fitz Toussaint coming right at us for a touchdown!
Jeremy Gallon saw us taking pictures of Fitz and thought that seemed cool, so he brought a touchdown to our corner just a few minutes later.
Gallon said, man that was fun, let’s do that again, but this time to the other corner of that end zone.
If you saw the final score, you no doubt know that Indiana did their fair share of scoring to get to 47 points.
Indiana comes to the line lightning-fast and sometimes snaps the ball within 3 or 4 seconds of the ball being whistled ready for play. Michigan got burned for touchdowns twice on this, and for long gains a couple other times. The defensive coaches came up with a high tech solution that would help the players on the field quickly identify the right place to look to on the sideline for the defensive play call:
Yep, two guys holding up white towels behind Defensive Coordinator Greg Mattison. It seemed to help a bit, at least on this play:
Not so much on this one, though Thomas Gordon looks pretty awesome in whiffing:
Linebackers Jake Ryan and Desmond Morgan looking good pre-play and Jake Ryan comes *this* close to sacking Roberson.
Since Indiana scored all day long, we got to see many Dennis Norfleet kick returns. This one started right in front of us:
This late interception, tipped by Michigan’s Jourdyn Lewis to Thomas Gordon, helped seal the game for Michigan.
That led to this drive, closed out by this great Fitz Toussaint cutback touchdown run. The last picture, with Michael Scholfield’s finger in the air, tells the story.
