Daily Brews: ESPN’s updated Football Power Index predicts how Michigan finishes 2019

Michigan football’s struggles have been filling national headlines and fueling national punchlines so far, but all that matters now is what comes next. The numbers have been crunched by ESPN’s Football Power Index, which has predicted how this season could finish up for the Wolverines.

Here’s a look at their chances of winning the rest of the games on the 2019 schedule after the most recent week of action.

vs. Rutgers: 95.8% chance of victory

vs. Iowa: 61.4% chance of victory

at Illinois: 85.6% chance of victory

at Penn State: 25.1% chance of victory

vs. Notre Dame: 29.0% chance of victory

at Maryland: 52.6% chance of victory

vs. Michigan State: 54.4% chance of victory

at Indiana: 69.7% chance of victory

vs. Ohio State: 19% chance of victory

This metric has the Wolverines winning six more games this season to finish 8-4 on the year. The Maryland and Michigan State games are basically coin flips, while Penn State, Notre Dame and Ohio State all project to losses as things currently stand. Iowa likely comes to town next week as a top-14 team, yet the numbers here are still decently in favor of Michigan.

For there to be any goodwill from the fanbase after how the year started, the magic number for this season seems to lie in that 9-10 win range. That means they’d have to go out and win a few that currently are heavily against them. As of now, no heart or set of computer data can easily assume they will do that.

But hey, at least there’s Rutgers.

Gattis speaks leading up to Rutgers game

Offensive coordinator Josh Gattis is not nearly as popular a man as he was after he was hired to give the Michigan Wolverines a facelift on that side of the ball. He spoke to the media on Wednesday and revealed that one of the biggest reasons the group has not performed as well as they would like is due to a lack of health and rhythm.

“Donovan’s first play Saturday was the first time he (on the field) all week long,” Gattis said. “Tarik was out last week, we had a number of different injuries that we were battling throughout the week. The biggest thing for us offensively is to get healthy and get the guys into practice so we can get into a rhythm and flow that can carry throughout the game.

”That’s been a little bit of a challenge for us because you look at every practice we haven’t had all 11 starters on offense ever. You can even go back to the spring. We just got to continue to get healthy, manage the players that we have and make sure that we keep them healthy and we give them the right amount of reps to be able to take those practice reps and turn them into game reps.”

Fans will not want to hear it, but it would be nice to see what the offense could do at full-strength if they could just find a way to play a clean game.

Sam Webb sounds off on state of Wolverines

Fans are shell-shocked about how the 2019 season has started for the Wolverines and one of the voices that we defer to in times like these is Sam Webb of The Michigan Insider, who appeared on a 247Sports podcast to reveal what the mindset in Ann Arbor right now is after a rough start.

“Absolute shock I think is the mindset,” Webb told 247Sports. “The emotional kind of consensus around here that Michigan could play so poorly, and play so poorly coming off a bye week. I think that’s what really kind of raises the concern -- the level of concern about where they’re headed. And I think they get that. I think you can sense that in hearing Jim Harbaugh’s comments. Because generally speaking, he’s kind of close to the best when it comes to the criticism of his team. The criticism he would put out there for public consumption. He doesn’t really bring to the public what he says behind closed doors to his players and coaches, but Monday, he did that.

“Monday he said ‘we have some issues with hustle, we have some issues with toughness, we have some issues with focus, and we have some issues with coaching. We were outprepared for this game, we were outschemed in some instances of this game. And if there were issues with being physical, if there were issues with going out there and being focused, or hustling, that’s a coaching issue. Because we’ve got to coach guys to do that. And if guys on the field aren’t doing that, we’ve got to get other guys in there’”

Saturday will be an opportunity to get some new names on the field and hit the reset button a bit after last weekend’s setback.

Other Brews

• Three Wolverines have been named to SB Nation’s top 100 NHL Prospects in the NCAA ahead of the 2019-20 season, including freshman defenseman Cam York, freshman forward Johnny Beecher and senior Will Lockwood.
• CBS Sports’ College Basketball Insider Jon Rothstein was in Ann Arbor on Wednesday to spend some time around Juwan Howard and the Wolverines and shared his thoughts on what the starting lineup could look like this season.

• Urban Meyer to Michigan, a strange pipe dream that has popped up in recent weeks, isn’t happening if you believe the words out of his own mouth, which you’d be right to always take with a grain of salt. But seriously, stop it.