the harbaugh effect
[Reminder: submit your #MGoPumpkin to win $200 towards a stay in the new hotel downtown. So far I think Noah Neidlinger is gonna win, unless Michigan scores on the play John Zainea drew up.]
Falk getting his. From the Jug thread.
Dear Diary took a bye last week and it couldn't have come at a better time. My football place was pretty sore for the 168 hours after the one with poor Paul Bunyan being mandled by the least deserving yups to ever play for a program I am preconditioned to think the worst about.
Misery for our company. CR found some more football fans for our healing circle by consulting novelist Jon Rowe, who offered a list of commensurate moments. A sampling:
- The Band is On the Field from Stanford's perspective
- Leon Lett's muff
- Auburn returns Bama's field goal attempt
- Baylor gets a 99-yard fumble return on its face when it could have kneeled
- Furman goes for 2 up 15-14 with 7 seconds left, but its 2-point conversion is intercepted and returned and they lose 15-16.
- The immaculate reception
- Wait, what? Why is the MSU game on this list I thought I'm supposed to feel better?
- In range for a field goal to avoid a historic upset…AGAIN? Stop bringing up Michigan!
- An uncharacteristic offensive explosion should have ended when Anthony T—
- Colorado, down…STTTTTTTOOOOPPPPP@!@@@@@@@
In conclusion every bit of luck that goes our way ever again is wholly deserved, not that we'll be able to enjoy it because self-awareness is cruel.
Self-awareness isn't always cruel. Math—I mean good math—doesn't do things like overrate the last thing to happen. And out of the randomness comes good news from our resident advanced stats collator Ecky Pting:
Ecky also did this last week for win probabilities. Right now we are looking at 9 or 10 wins most likely, which is to say Ohio State's a coinflip and 85% we get there without collecting any dust. And if you like statistics dust, here's a quaint little piece from the 1980s. It's called "Good at Football Again"
Etc. Alum96 has the stock report and a By the Numbers on Minnesota in the forums. MaizeJacket should update the Coaching Changes diary before we discuss. Best and Worst and Inside the Boxscore from last week.
[Hit THE JUMP for Harbaugh costumes layman's guess at 2016's QB]
Yea, and we shall block things
The Question:
Ace: Which returning player do you expect to have the biggest breakout season under Jim Harbaugh? Who benefits the most from the coaching change? To keep us from all answering the same thing, first responder gets to take Butt/Bunting.
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The Answers:
Adam Schnepp: Butt/Bunting or whoever lines up at Y/TE are obvious (and very merited) choices, but I think that the returning player most likely to have a breakout season under Harbaugh is the guy who ends up being the starting quarterback. That may seem like a strange pick considering that there isn't actually a specific player whom I can definitely name here, but there's pretty solid circumstantial evidence to back up my prediction.
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| Beeeeeee goooooooooood. [Fuller] |
Harbaugh's long had a reputation as a quarterback guru, and for good reason: he developed Andrew Luck and Colin Kaepernick while helping resuscitate Alex Smith's career. Smith had a career completion percentage of 57.1% and threw for 6.2 yards per attempt in the five seasons before Harbaugh arrived. In two years under his tutelage, Harbaugh simplified the offense and Smith's stats benefited for it; his completion percentage in those two years rose to 64.3% while his yards per attempt rose to 7.4.
After years of suffering through Brady Hoke and his offensive staff trying to slam a round peg into a square hole over (Denard) and over (Devin) and over (Shane) again, it's going to be a breath of fresh air to watch Harbaugh implement an offense that's supposed to work to a quarterback's advantage. In the Smart Football article linked above Chris Brown discusses how Harbaugh erased sight adjustments from his offense so that the quarterback didn't have to hesitate when the defense presented coverages that shifted post snap. Instead there were built-in hot routes in every play that didn't require the quarterback to hope the receiver reacted the same way to the coverage they were presented with.
If the past is any indication of the future then whoever wins the quarterback battle is going to have a firm grasp of progressions as well, because Harbaugh tries to make this as simple for the quarterback to rapidly work through as he can (more on that here and here). I expect Harbaugh to implement similar concepts at Michigan, where the power running game should open up options for the quarterback to create the type of big plays that we didn't see last season.
[After the jump: someone will take Butt/Bunting. Eventually.]
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