adam shibley
Hoop Vision on Luka Garza. Iowa's just down the road for the basketball program:
Would they even have helped? In year one Juwan Howard had a couple of high profile recruiting reversals that stung: losing Josh Christopher to Arizona State and Isaiah Todd to the G-League. This was depressing at the time; for obvious reasons it no longer is. We've talked about Christopher some. Todd's been on the shelf as the NBA figures out what the hell to do with the G-League, but his Ignite team recently started taking the floor. Early returns via Sam Vecenie:
Teams remain unenthused by Isaiah Todd
Todd didn’t bring much to the table in the opener. He had a couple of nice defensive possessions but overall didn’t look like he was at the same level of play as most of the other guys out there. He played 17 minutes but had two points and three rebounds on 1-for-4 from the field. The 6-foot-9 forward was considered one of the top-five players in his class when he was an underclassman in high school but steadily dropped down the composite rankings through his prep career as he started to float out on the perimeter while not particularly improving as a shooter or decision-maker.
“There’s no way I’d draft him right now,” one scout said. “I wish him the best, but he didn’t look ready for pro basketball.”
The G League is a tough, highly competitive league. There’s no shame in a teenager not being ready to play in such an atmosphere. But it also goes to show just how far off Todd is from contributing to an NBA situation if he can’t even contribute positively to this one. I have Todd outside the top 80 on my board.
There's obviously a big gap between G-League teams and college. I wonder about the counterfactual where he's on this year's roster. Whose minutes is he taking? Terrance Williams, probably. Brandon Johns, maybe. Livers, Wagner, Brown: no.
If you're looking at one-and-done types the portal is likely to cough up just as many quality options as high school recruiting.
Also! This got slipped into an eval of Todd on Prospective Insight:
Much more effective when he plays inside-out, but doesn’t embrace contact; Subpar free-throw shooter; Was viewed as having one of the highest upsides entering high school, but has largely failed to improve substantially and became enamored with demonstrating his improving perimeter skill-set; Weak and often unwilling passer to date; Plus shot-blocker (more from the weak-side); Solid student; His mother is substantially more vocal than he is; Needs to add upper-body strength, tighten his handle, refine his perimeter shot, and embrace contact.
Grimace dot emoji.
[After THE JUMP: the spot you want to be in]
FORMATION NOTES: Rutgers is a standard 2020 spread gun team that runs a lot of 2TE sets. Michigan spent much of the night with Green in press on the backside WR:
Setups like these usually run that backside corner in man; sometimes if the WR crosses the formation they'll convert into a zone. The implication: this was a zone-first gameplan.
SUBSTITUTION NOTES: Kemp/Hinton/Jeter were in there almost all the time, with Vilain and Upshaw splitting the weakside end spot. DT rotation came from Speight and Mazi Smith, who does exist. Newburg got in a little, comming a personal foul. Welschof's time was limited.
At LB, Barrett/McGrone/Ross the whole way until McGrone went out and Shibley came in. Secondary the usual until Hawkins went out and Reynolds came in. 3-3-5 pretty limited, with under 10 BVS snaps.
[After THE JUMP: Rutgers looks like football team]
11/21/2020 – Michigan 48, Rutgers 42 (3OT) – 2-3 Big Ten
If there's one thing I've tried to incorporate into my brain over the course of writing about sports it's this: performances are not consistent.
Over a relatively long span of time a player can be expected to do X. Over shorter spans a player can wildly exceed or underperform his true level. And "shorter spans" can be astoundingly long, from the perspective of someone drawing meaning from a single game. The best example I can throw at you now is Strauss Mann, who has ~120 games of .930+ goaltending bookending a brief season-long disaster:
Mann also had 14 USHL playoff games at .932 for people double-checking the ~120
In basketball, Tim Hardaway Jr is a career 35% three-point shooter in the NBA. At Michigan his performance there went 37%, 28%, 37%. Duncan Robinson has a solid case for the best shooter on the planet in the Year of Our Lord 2020; through the first 10 games of his senior season he was shooting 30% from deep and everyone was writing him off.
You want curling examples? I've got curling examples. USA Curling more or less explicitly told John Shuster to die in a fire after finishing 10th and 11th out of 12 in consecutive Olympics. Shuster cobbled together a crew of ne'er do wells, won the national championship repeatedly, and then won an Olympic gold medal.
Football? Let me google some details about this obscure sport. [typing sounds] …interesting… [more typing] …it's like rugby except discrete… well. Let me show you some idiot talking about a Foot-Ball Quarter-Back replacing the starter mid-game during a year of worry and discontent:
Basic stuff... that felt like a revelation. O'Korn's quick, open throws stood in contrast to Speight's struggles to identify open guys the last few games. Twice Michigan picked up catch-and-run conversions on outs that had to be thrown with accuracy and timing to provide YAC. They were. Ditto Gentry's mesh touchdown, which O'Korn knew was open before he even turned around off of play action. This is basic quarterbacking being executed very well. That's huge progress for O'Korn, and apparently the offense.
And then he got dialed in. I gave him 6 DOs in this game, which is a lot on just 26 throws, and I shorted him one on his scramble escapades. The others were no-doubters. This throw is not only between two guys in a tight window but leads Gentry upfield and cannot be better placed for a catch and run:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd7-D0sd9bE&feature=emb_logo
One 15 yard penalty later, Michigan faces first and 25 with Purdue breathing down O'Korn's neck. O'Korn stands in, takes the hit, and gives Gentry a chance to make a play.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moYO8YubAYw&feature=emb_logo
1) Yes, throw it at the Ent. 2) He even puts this outside of the defender. Given the circumstances this about as good as it gets.
O'Korn leapt off the bench in relief of an injured Wilton Speight, completing 18/26 passes for 10.4 YPA, was the future of the position for one (1) week, and was thereafter a small child lost in a department store. Bet you wish I stuck with the curling examples.
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Now we must consider Cade McNamara. McNamara came off the bench, sparked the offense, and led Michigan to a win. He was calm; he sprinkled in some tough throws in the face of pressure. He looked pretty good. I think we should hold off on expectations that he will continue being pretty good until we see some more. Let's play Pick The Box Score Against Rutgers:
- 31/43, 319 yards, 7.4 YPA
- 27/36, 260 yards, 7.2 YPA
Door #2 is McNamara. Door #1? Rocky Lombardi. (Lombardi did have two interceptions. One was his WR running the wrong route; the second was Lombardi forcing the ball in desperation mode.) Rutgers may not be very good at football.
To be explicitly clear, this is also what I was advocating after the Minnesota game:
Now tell me about Milton. Be EFFUSIVE.
First I want to pump the brakes
I TOLD YOU TO BE EFFUSIVE
This was a beautiful way to break in a new quarterback against a team that didn't really know what was coming and the number of different things Michigan asked him to do was relatively limited. We don't know how good he is at throws that aren't screens and wide open slants/posts across the middle.
Post snap reads were minimal. These days it's extremely hard to tell if something is a genuine RPO or a called pass …there weren't even many opportunities to puzzle about it. They kept it simple.
Michigan never put in any reads, presumably because Milton wouldn't execute them consistently. Maybe McNamara can. Maybe he's the answer. But expecting QB3 to suddenly blow up when the rest of the program is in the shape it's in… well, it's optimistic. We literally just did this. Water status: holding.
[After THE JUMP: we soldier on]
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