This will rely heavily of Mercer I wrote just a couple weeks ago, with the added knowledge that the Bears are about even quality-wise with Detroit.
Mercer
Fear the Bear!
March 2, 2017, 7 p.m. EST
Macon, Ga.
Live stats. Live video (ESPN3).
Detroit preview. Mercer preview.
@UMichLacrosse. @MercerLacrosse. @UofMLaxManagers.
The Bears
Mercer is 1-2 on the year, with the lone victory, yes, coming over Detroit. They lost a nail-biter to Vermont and were blown out by UMBC – and neither of those teams was particularly impressive last year (or so far in 2017).
This probably isn’t a good team – in fact, it’s likely a rather bad one – and with the stage Michigan’s program is reaching, this shouldn’t be competitive. Will the Michigan we’ve seen too much in the past couple years – the one that plays down to inferior competition – show up to spoil it?
Offense
From the UDM edition of this preview:
Last year’s leading scorer, Chris Baxa, has moved on, along with his 22 goals and just two assists – he was your finishing attackman. He missed two games, which allowed now-sophomore middie Lucas Wittenberg to draw even with him thanks to 12 goals and 12 assists. Junior Matt Quinn is another key midfielder, and more like Baxa, with a scoreline heavily tilted toward shooting, not feeding. Senior attack Chris Rahill had a scoreline that was tilted toward scoring (the Bears as a team assisted on barely more than a third of their goals last year – not a sharing-type squad), as well.
Thus far it has been three not mentioned in that post – the starting attack line of sophomores attack Jake Nelson and Shawn Carter (Jay-Z?) and senior Kevin Yoggy – who have carried the load offensively. Wittenberg and Quinn are right behind them, but this is an attack-driven offense, even if that status meant relying on unproven players early in the year.
Defense
Again, from the UDM preview:
Senior Colin Massa is the leader of the defense. He led close D in takeaways (12) and was close in ground balls (16) last year. Junior Dustin White should start, as well. Mercer has to replace Clay Rivers on the close D, given that he got the lion’s share of minutes, despite only one start in 2016.
Goalie Mike Nugent played essentially every meaningful minute last spring, and had a decent save percentage of .526 despite playing behind a pretty porous defense. Tyler Boardo got 5:26 of backup minutes, which is totally not enough time to read into his .333 save percentage. Transfer Bradley Hodoval played the Vermont game, but the redshirt sophomore saved only .438 of shots faced: we’ll see how good he is against the Titans.
Massa has had shockingly little production so far in 2017: two caused turnovers and zero ground balls. He also committed a penalty in each of the first two games, so it’s not like he hasn’t been on the field, just ineffective. White has been out with injury, resulting in juniors Jake Saad and Willy Deines and freshman Michael O’Brien into bigger roles. This is a caused-turnover happy D, led by the SSDMs, particularly Ensor Walker.
Hodoval has gotten the vast majority of meaningful time between the pipes so far, and is saving a respectable .521 – albeit against one very good shooting squad (Vermont) and two terrible ones.
Special Teams
Only two players have taken a faceoff, and they’re both doing very well so far: Brennen Kiel is nominally the lead guy with a handful more attempts and a winning percentage of .615 to Will Beecham’s “only” .576. This should still be a decent matchup for Michigan.
Mercer has been giving up about three EMO opportunities per game and allowing opponents to convert half of them (that’s bad). Meanwhile, their EMO is right around middle-of-the-pack nationally.
Overall
Nothing surprising here: this is a must-win game if Michigan is to be the team it wants to be this year. The Wolverines should be able to take care of mid-major squads, and so far in 2017, they have with ease. It’s when the schedule gets tough that they’re likely to struggle (though hopefully not as bad as against Notre Dame). Building chemistry, confidence, and yes, a bit of a win percentage cushion before they get to the tough ones is what’s at stake here.
Predictions
Not going to spend too much time on this section because I’ve been derelict in my duties as a blogger and just want to get this up before the game starts.
Michigan takes a relatively easy (though tougher than it should be) game, 17-7.
Watched the game on HBO Go. Michigan dominated the first half, but came out flat in the second so that Mercer controlled the second half. The big lead UM built up in the first half proved to be the difference. I’m a little worried that UM only scored one goal in the second half against a mediocre team. Tommy Heidt played great in goal and has me believing that, as much as I liked Gerald Logan, it was a win-win for UM and Hopkins that he left. Another thought: UM commits too many penalties, which killed their possession time in the second half.
Really seemed like they were going through the motions because they realized they had the game won (or would easily be able to win it). Not necessarily a “championship culture”-type way to handle the second half, but it doesn’t really worry me all that much as it relates to the way the rest of the season will play out, either.
Logan is the man. I like Heidt, but this team would be even better with Logan between the pipes (of course, the coaches let him walk instead of trying to find an adequate grad program at U-M, so what the hell do I know).