Baas Shows His Versatility

The Wolverines’ most unselfish player stands 6 feet 5 and weighs 307 pounds. You’d think it would be difficult to move him.

Yet all Coach Lloyd Carr had to do was ask and David Baas went from left guard, where he had started 30 games, to center, where he had started none.

“It was a very unselfish move on his part because it forced him out of a position where he was very comfortable and had established himself as a two-time All-Big Ten player, so it says a lot about him that he did it anyway,” Carr said.

The move was made before the start of conference play, in hopes of improving a struggling run game, which during the nonconference schedule averaged only 106 yards a game.

In the last eight games, with Baas at center, the Wolverines have averaged 174.9 yards and that success has helped open a passing attack led by freshman quarterback Chad Henne.

The switch also is expected to improve Baas’ stock in the eyes of pro scouts. The team that drafts the fifth-year senior -- a finalist for the Outland Trophy, awarded to the nation’s top interior lineman -- will have a player proven capable at two key positions.

Asked Thursday how he had responded to Carr’s request, Baas said he had been happy to oblige.

“That’s what my team needed and I moved in there and kept working at it and getting better every single week,” he said. “I didn’t have any problem with it.”

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Freshman tailback Mike Hart, who has rushed for 1,372 yards, has fumbled only once in 261 carries. That was on Sept. 25 against Iowa and Hart has since carried 209 times without losing control of the ball.

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Offensive coordinator Terry Malone confessed this week that he spent “a lot of sleepless nights” worrying about whether Henne would be able to handle the role of starting quarterback.

“There are so many scenarios that go through your mind,” Malone recalled. “Including that he might not be able [to handle] taking a snap in front of 110,000 people. It can be a gut-wrenching thing to go through.”

Carr went a step further.

“If you told me the night before the [season-opening] Miami of Ohio game that we would win the Big Ten championship and go to the Rose Bowl, I would have found that very difficult to believe,” he said.

Henne has completed 60.8% of his passes -- 222 of 365 for 2,516 yards and 21 touchdowns.

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Junior wide receiver Steve Breaston, from North Braddock, Pa., said he couldn’t live in Los Angeles because the neighborhoods are too clean and the feeling is too much like living in some of the sitcoms he watches on TV.

“I need some stress in my life,” he reasoned, during a news conference in a posh Beverly Hills hotel. “After you leave here, you’re, like, back in the real world.”

Obviously, he hasn’t been looking in the right places.