lovie smith

Moving towards a semester. This is a development:

BREAKING: @UMich Provost Susan Collins: “We are very optimistic that the University of Michigan will have a public health-informed, in-residence academic year.”

A change from “cautiously optimistic” in previous statements, one day after @michiganstateu announces in-person fall.

— Calder Lewis (@CalderLewisTMD) May 28, 2020

Michigan is still being more circumspect than MSU, which just announced it would be open this fall, and Notre Dame, which announced it would have a fall semester that ended at Thanksgiving. MSU is also ending in-person classes at Thanksgiving and finishing the rest of the semester online.

Still, everything is pointing towards a return. For the purposes of this website this means they'll try to play football like everyone else. The broader impact on the university is currently projected to be… not that bad, actually:

Not much new from Pres. Schlissel, although it now looks like the predicted losses ("for the year ahead" which I take to mean the calendar year) are in the range of $22M to $192M, which is much more optimistic than earlier projections.

— peter honeyman (@peterhoneyman) May 28, 2020

Although that's quite a range. We'll see how it goes. Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The current plans at MSU:

Stanley said. Physical distancing and wearing face masks on campus, as well as strict limitations and regulations on large gatherings are being imposed, he said.

The punch in the mouth is coming from Rick's, et al., this fall.

[After THE JUMP: More on the transfers]

10/12/2019 – Michigan 42, Illinois 25 – 5-1, 3-1 Big Ten

It is said that when you have two quarterbacks, you don't really have any. I wonder if that might change in the near future. Survey the landscape: modern shotgun offenses virtually require the quarterback to be a viable run threat. The prospect of losing your starting quarterback, as Illinois did last week, looms.

Previously: The Offense

Resources: My charting, UI game notes, UI roster, CFBstats, Tampa 2 primer

In the late '90s Lovie Smith, along with Monte Kiffin and Tony Dungy, helped develop the Tampa 2 defense, a Cover 2 variant that uses the middle linebacker as a quasi-safety, and finally forced the West Coast offense to get dinky. This (and Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks, Hardy Nickerson, John Lynch, Simeon Rice, Ronde Barber, Donnie Abraham…) earned Lovie a head coaching job with the Bears for the meatiest part of Brian Urlacher's career. On the strength of that defense the Bears went 13-3 in 2006, losing to Dungy in the Super Bowl. The NFL quickly adapted, attacking the seams with power forwards they called "flex tight ends" for lack of a better name, putting those MLBs in run-pass conflicts, and option-routing the poor OLBs to death.

By March 2016 Lovie was coming off two losing seasons in Tampa Bay and hadn't taken a team to the playoffs since the 2010 Bears, but to Illinois and their new AD, that was infinitely preferable to rolling with the post-Beckman interim Bill Cubit. The hope was Smith could fix the defense enough that their explosive offenses could do more than lose 67-65. Lovie brought in his longtime associates, including Hardy Nickerson as DC, and Donnie Abraham to coach the DBs.

Abraham suddenly quit in August 2018, followed in mid-season by Nickerson, who cited health reasons. Lovie raised his son from OLBs grad assistant to DBs coach, named himself acting DC, and spent the winter of 2018 searching high and low for a defensive coordinator. Instead, he found a bag coordinator type who'd followed Lane Kiffin to various places and knew how to recruit USC, moved his son to linebackers, named himself the DC, and grew a beard.

The beard is amazing. The rest is a comprehensive disaster. Longtime starters who weren't that good in the first place have regressed. The transfers who replaced them have no idea what the defense is trying to accomplish. Even the guy PFF thinks is the #2 linebacker in the conference right now graded out with double-digit negatives when faced with something more terrifying than Akron or UConn. I know you're all gonna BPONE this with "Just like our offense [clapx5]." That's because you've forgotten what the end of 2010 was like.

The film: Illinois was super-lucky to be in this game due to some Minnesota drops and weather stuff.

Personnel: My diagram: 

PDF Version, full-size version (or click on the image)

[After THE JUMP: Beard game is strong]