ANN ARBOR, MICH. >> Lightning strikes forced a one-hour delay to the start of Saturday’s football game at Michigan Stadium.
Fourth-ranked Michigan was a greater force of nature in the Big House, rolling to a 56-10 rout of Hawaii before a crowd of 110,012.
“It was a tall task for us,” said Timmy Chang, who is seeking his first victory as Rainbow Warriors head coach. “That was a really good team. They were really well coached. They have really good players.”
NCAA rules call for a minimum 30-minute delay after a lightning strike within 10 miles of the venue. Seventy-five minutes before the scheduled 8 p.m. Eastern time kickoff, players were ordered from the field to the locker room and fans were instructed to head underneath the concourse.
It was 8:30 p.m. when officials ruled it would be safe to play the game. That gave the teams 25 minutes to warm up, followed by five minutes for the playing of the national anthem and the coin toss. It also left no time for the Wolverines to touch their banner ahead of the game, a tradition interrupted for the first time since 1961.
The Rainbow Warriors, who entered as much as 53-point underdogs, won the coin toss, electing to receive the opening kickoff.
“I wanted my players to understand we don’t back down,” Chang said of wanting the first possession. “Against the No. 4-ranked team — great players, great coaches — we don’t back down. We wanted to take the ball and do our thing. That’s the mentality I want them to have.”
But the Warriors’ best intentions could not overcome the Wolverines’ snarling defense. The four-man front relied on two hand-on-the-turf tackles and slicing edge defenders to create pressure, proving the difficulty in blocking moving parts. The Wolverines’ speedy and static-clingy corners freed the safeties and nickelbacks to slide into the running lanes and flats.
“You have to earn everything you’re going to get from them,” said UH quarterback Joey Yellen, who was 13-for-36 for 113 yards. “A team like Michigan, they’re not going to give you a ton of disguises. They’re not going to give you smoke and mirrors. They’re going to line up in front of you and basically say, ‘We’re better than you.’ They’re a really good team. Ninety percent of the time (they’re) right.”
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The Wolverines blasted their way to a 42-0 lead at the intermission. It was their first halftime advantage of more than 40 points since 2016.
This time, the team less than an hour from the Motor City hummed with J.J. McCarthy at the controls. Michigan coach Jim Harbaugh had set a two-game audition at quarterback. Cade McNamara started last week in the Wolverines’ season-opening rout of Colorado State. On Saturday, it was McCarthy’s turn.
McCarthy, a sophomore who was a 5-star prospect at IMG Academy, was 11-for-12 for 229 yards and three touchdowns — all in the first half. McCarthy’s lone first-half incompletion was Ronnie Bell’s drop in the open field. But Bell made up for it when he caught a 13-yard scoring pass on a crossing pattern.
McCarthy, who is widely viewed as a run-first quarterback, proved his pocket skills. With UH blitzers bracketing the perimeter, McCarthy stepped forward and fired a pass to Cornelius Johnson on a corner route for a 42-0 lead.
“Hat’s off to him,” Chang said of McCarthy. “He did everything well. He made some deep throws. … We couldn’t stop the pass. He’s a good quarterback. He made a lot of plays with his legs.”
The Wolverines thinned the Warriors defense with pin blocks on the perimeter to free running backs Blake Corum (9.8 yards per carry) and Donovan Edwards (8.7). When the Warriors added defenders to the tackle box, McCarthy would throw over the secondary. That tactic was displayed when Edwards starred in a three-play scoring drive. Edwards raced around right end for a 25-yard gain, caught a 33-yard pass from McCarthy, and then scored on a 1-yard blast up the middle.
Perhaps the most efficient Wolverine was Roman Wilson, a Saint Louis School graduate. Wilson’s only two touches resulted in touchdowns.
On Michigan’s opening drive, the Warriors showed a two-deep look, then moved their safeties up. Wilson, aligned as an inside receiver on the left side, zipped his way on a post pattern and secured McCarthy’s pass for a 42-yard touchdown.
Later in the first quarter, Wilson was set up on the right side. He motioned across the formation, took a handoff from McCarthy. and scooted around left end and up the field for a 21-yard touchdown.
In the first two games, the Warriors struggled after the intermission. Yellen misfired on 12 of 17 passes in the first half. But Chang decided to stick with the Pittsburgh transfer the rest of the way.
“The merry-go-round of giving a player confidence and letting him play through things,” Chang said of Yellen, who was making his second consecutive start. “And he did that.”
In the second half, Yellen was 8-for-19 and led two scoring drives, resulting in Matthew Shipley’s 26-yard field goal and freshman running back Tylan Hines’ 54-yard touchdown run with 11:27 to play.
The drama had long ended before those scores. But Chang found moderate hopefulness in the Warriors winning the turnover battle (1-0), committing only one penalty (for 10 yards), and getting their first two sacks of the season (by defensive linemen Blessman Ta’ala and John Tuitupou).
“One thing about a game like this, they’re valuable reps,” Yellen said. “Nobody in the world is expecting us to win. We’re coming out with that intent (to win). But after a little bit, you kind of find out, all right, maybe it’s not going to happen. But we can still get some positives out of this, get some drives going, really get some good (work) against a really good team, really good players, a really big environment — nothing we’re going to get in the Mountain West. So I think that game made us a better team, for sure.”
