Ann Arbor — Michigan safety Quinten Johnson has been part of the football program since 2019. He has seen the team struggle, and he has enjoyed the success of the last three seasons.
After the defending national champion Wolverines lost 31-12 to No. 3 Texas and saw their 23-game home winning streak snapped, as well as their 29-game regular-season win streak, Johnson spoke in the postgame news conference with the voice of experience. The Wolverines play Arkansas State on Saturday at Michigan Stadium before hosting USC in the Big Ten opener for both teams on Sept. 21 and corrections clearly need to be made in multiple areas.
They don’t have a choice but to respond, but how will they reset after the sting of this loss?
“We don’t know the resolve yet, but we’re gonna see,” Johnson said. “At the end of the day, we lost. That’s the reality of the situation. We’re going to come back Monday, we’ve got a team next week, we’ve got a team after that and a team after that. It’s how you respond. A lot of guys in that locker room are high-end players that have a lot of personality, and they’ve got a lot of eagerness to go out and fix the wrongs. The biggest thing is going out there doing what you’ve gotta do and that’s handle business.”
This is when the leaders of the team, the veterans and captains, will be leaned on. Johnson watched Michigan finish 9-4 in 2019 and then 2-4 during the COVID-19-shortened season, so he understands the depths of disappointment. The Wolverines last lost a regular-season game at Michigan State in 2021, but responded with five straight wins, including a long-awaited victory over Ohio State and then a Big Ten championship before losing to eventual national champion Georgia in a College Football Playoff national semifinal.
“At the end of the day, and I know a lot of the guys on the team aren’t used to being in this position, but it’s adversity,” Johnson said. “As a man, it’s manhood. How are you going to respond to it? You flush it and you keep moving. It’s Week 2, and that’s the great thing about our schedule and opportunity that comes ahead. It’s so early in the schedule that we can fix all the execution problems we had (against Texas), and that’s the real reason why we lost was execution. We’ve got all year to go back and fix that.”
Junior tight end Colston Loveland said the Wolverines are a group of “tough-minded individuals” who don’t like to lose. He predicted the players would show up at the football building on Sunday “ready to be perfect” and said they will turn this defeat into a positive.
“You always learn from these losses,” Loveland said. “We’re gonna watch a lot of tape and see what we’ve gotta figure out. I think we’re gonna respond in a good manner.”
For the second straight week, Davis Warren started at quarterback for the Wolverines. After the game he said moving forward would take plenty of reflection and working on all the things that needed to be fixed.
“I’m confident we’re going to face adversity right in the face,” Warren said. “We haven’t lost a regular-season game here in a while. The only people that are gonna come back into Schem on Monday are the guys who are gonna want to put the work in to be better and are gonna know that we have what it takes and have full confidence in this team to make it happen. … I know the guys in the room and all of us, we’re gonna be prepared to go out there and flip the script.”
Warren said there is no difficulty in maintaining the standard Michigan set the last three seasons. Nothing has changed he said, not how they practice, how they handle meetings and walkthroughs.
“That standard hasn’t changed,” Warren said. “It falls on all of us to uphold that standard in every single way. That’s something we didn’t do well enough (against Texas). It falls on me to be better, to play better. It sucks, because you come into this game, and you know there’s a lot on the line.
“You want to get a win and so, gotta take a long hard look in the mirror at what type of team we want to be, who we want to be. I know from my end, adversity, I’m used to that. I’m prepared to deal with it and take it in stride and wake up tomorrow morning with a burning passion to get better.”
One loss, edge rusher Josaiah Stewart said, doesn’t define the Wolverines. Johnson, sitting beside Stewart in the postgame interview, agreed with that assessment and said the players will learn a lot about themselves in the aftermath of the loss.
“It’s obviously not a position we’re used to being in,” Johnson said. “A lot of people say you don’t know what manhood is until you face adversity. I’ve faced adversity before. We lost before, and we lost bad before. Just facing that adversity and being able to overcome this improves who you are as a person. It’s a humbling experience but at the end of the day, it should drive you to have the next experience be better than this one.”
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Publish date : 2024-09-08 08:32:00
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