swinging gate

UFR GLOSSARY is here.

FORMATION NOTES: PSU gets weird so some nomenclature reminders. This is Gun Wk Stack, which they used a lot.

This is Pistol Diamond.

And a reminder for some of my nomenclature, this is Gun Trips (H) Y-SB:

Trips is the receiver alignment and I use parentheticals around the (H) because the slot receiver is covered/an ineligible receiver. A dash means motion, so Y-SB means the tight end motioned to a superback spot. "Empty 2x1" means 2 wide to the field, 1 wide to the boundary, and the rest are tight ends. You should be able to interpret the rest of the weirdness from there. You also won't need it again because PSU fired their OC on Sunday.

SUBSTITUTION NOTES: Penn State often used a TE as a slot receiver; M sometimes matched that with regular nickel personnel but often had an extra safety in the slot and moved Sainristil out to cornerback. Snap counts are in the chart now but there was finally a clear delineation between "starters" (Graham, Jenkins, Grant, the four DEs, Colson, Barrett, Paige, Moore, Wilson, Sainristil, and Johnson) and "rotation players" like Goode, Benny, Hausmann, Q-Jo, and Sabb. That's everybody who played.

[After THE JUMP: Draft ding-a-lings.]

(I wrote two this week. Second, longer one will post tomorrow)

Whether Michigan was correct to go for two to make it an 18-point game with over 20 minutes to play against an opponent with a top-15 offense is an argument best left for people who care if a team runs up the score.

HOW Michigan got its two-point conversion however is much more of mystery, thanks to ESPN's director failing to capture the play until a second after the snap, or show a review. I thought it highly unfair that Ryan Day gets the all-22 of this while Michigan fans never get to find out what happened. So I watched it a lot. And I'm pretty sure here's what happened:

Michigan used the old swinging gate tactic, caught at least one IU player (the WLB) napping, and ran a QB sprint option with the snapper as pitch-man and a travel pass option (plus two pick routes).

[After THE JUMP: How it worked, and how is it legal?]