Despite the lopsided scoreline, Harry Plumer found respite in one UMass drive Saturday.
UMass safety Christian Birt, crosses the goal line after running back a interception in the second quarter as UMass Athletic Director John McCutcheon signals touchdown.
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It was a game that didn’t have a ton of positives.
It’s hard to lose 63-13 and have much good to say.
It’s hard to let Denard Robinson make your defense look silly and come out thinking everything is sunshine and rainbows.
It is most certainly not sunshine and rainbows.
There were concerns all over the field, not the least of which was the lack of discipline and gap integrity on defense — two things UMass knew it needed to have to keep Robinson’s numbers from being gaudy.
It’s hard to have anything good to say at all.
But let me try.
In the midst of a four-hour beatdown, I saw a glimmer.
It didn’t shine particularly long. In fact, it lasted about three minutes of game time. That’s one-twentieth of the game, or five percent for those of you who don’t list math as a strong point on your resume.
The score was so lopsided, perhaps you’ve forgotten about it completely by the time you’re reading this.
In the small picture of this single game, this five percent obviously didn’t matter. The final score ultimately reflected what we saw with our eyeballs: The University of Michigan’s football team is far superior to the University of Massachusetts’.
But I didn’t need to get on a plane and fly to Ann Arbor to know that, and ultimately the W or the L seems like a foolish way to judge what happened Saturday.
In the big picture of the program’s transition to the FBS, the one drive, which didn’t even end in a touchdown, for one temporal moment showed UMass fans what the Charley Molnar vision might look like once it’s given time to develop.
If you watched the game, you know which one. It came at the end of the first quarter.
It started with a simple, four-yard pass for a third-down conversion. Redshirt freshman quarterback Mike Wegzyn found Alan Williams, and UMass moved the chains for the first time all day.
Then, on third-and-11, Wegzyn showed a flash of surprising speed on a quarterback draw to convert. On the very next play, Cox picked up 14 yards and all of the sudden the Minutemen had a drive going.
I turned to the Daily Hampshire Gazette’s Matt Vautour, who has been watching UMass since the mid 90’s.
“Are you seeing this?” I asked him. “This looks like, um, a real offense.”
He agreed, and that was before true freshman Tajae Sharpe made the offensive play of the day for UMass.
Charley Molnar doesn't look very happy as he looks up at the score board in the Big House.
On first down, Wegzyn lofted pass down the right sideline, and Sharpe laid out to catch it, managing to get not just one foot in bounds, but both — perhaps just for good measure.
Four first downs on one drive for the first time all season, and in Michigan Stadium no less?
There was Wegzyn, rushing to the line of scrimmage, getting signals from the sideline, checking the defense at the line of scrimmage.
For the most fleeting of moments, there was rhythm. When Wegzyn said after last week’s loss to Indiana that the offense was close to “clicking” it seemed laughable. For three minutes on Saturday, you could see what he was talking about.
It was an odd feeling watching it, truly. For so long, this fast-paced, no-huddle attack that Charley Molnar was supposed to be bringing to UMass was merely an abstract idea. It was a diagram in a binder, not something any fan had actually seen during a game. It was a sales pitch to recruits, a faraway fantasy, and certainly not something any of us expected to see against Big Blue.
But there it was. In the most brief of moments, I was able to stop and say “Oh. This is what it’s supposed to look like.”
No boneheaded penalties. No running backwards or sideways. No negative yards on screen passes.
All of the things that fans and coaches had seen repeatedly torpedo UMass drives went away for a few minutes.
The first quarter came to a close just as the UMass was gaining momentum. Williams caught another pass on the first play of the second quarter, threw Michigan cornerback Courtney Avery off of him like a ragdoll, and fought forward to the Michigan two-yard line.
And then, just like that UMass went back to being UMass — a negative run, a holding penalty and two incomplete passes kept what should have been the best drive of the season for the Minutemen from being just that.
It wasn’t lost on Molnar, who said on third-and-goal an unidentified receiver’s mental error cost the Minutemen and chance at pay dirt. 
“If he runs the right route I’d like to think he’d have been wide open and we would have threw it to him for a touchdown, but he didn’t run the right route,” Molnar said. “And it’s not like it was something brand new, it was something we do quite often in practice, and just didn’t do it in the game.”
And so UMass was back to earth. Back to realizing where it was — in a stadium with 110,000-plus fans (Molnar said his team looked “a little bit like tourists” before the game). Back to realizing what it was up against — the No. 17 team in the country. Back to getting pummeled — and being happy enough to collect its $650,000 check and move on to MAC play.
A 50-point loss is never a good thing. But hey, even UMass had the best team in the country, it isn’t bowl eligible this season anyway — so maybe we should throw the record out altogether.
If you’re focusing on the development of a team and of a program that is building toward something, then forget the score — you should have known it was going to be this bad.
It was bad, and I’m not trying to pretend it wasn’t. The one drive was a mere blip on the radar.
But it’s a blip that will give me something to think about as I hum “Hail To The Victors” (we lost count at 16 plays of the Michigan fight song Saturday) in my sleep tonight.
With conference play beginning next week, and the talent level “tilting more evenly” toward the Minutemen according to Molnar, maybe it’ll give UMass something to think about too.