transition costs

Bye week! Mailbag time!

I know we all thought there would be low to no transition costs because of style, but how much of the offensive struggles do you put down to transition costs within the staff (first time play caller, new OC etc)?

— Takao Yamada (@TakaoYamadaDeY) November 6, 2019

There were style transition costs, but these were mostly self-inflicted. Michigan's transition costs were larger than expected largely because they 1) went away from last year's running game for no apparent reason and 2) installed a bunch of stuff they barely or never used and then threw that away. Everyone's still waiting for that orbit motion to generate a QB pull with a pitch phase, except they ditched it.

I do think the first time play-caller stuff had an impact. Gattis moved from the box to the sideline after a couple games, which is evidence enough, but also: Michigan ran a ton of arc read stuff early in the season and almost never ran split zone, the play the arc read fakes. Speed in space was just a rumor until Penn State. It wasn't until Notre Dame that Michigan actually got sufficient RPS wins to come out significantly positive.

Also a transition cost: it feels like Gattis, who wasn't around Patterson last year, spent half the year finding out what didn't work well with him.

[After THE JUMP: slurry, but in a good way]