10/19/2019 – Michigan 21, Penn State 28 – 5-2, 3-2 Big Ten

This was a hard game to have an opinion about. Get down 21-0, and the only possible thoughts are "here we go again" and "when can I turn this off?" Wisconsin 2.0 beckons. That colors most of the rest of the game.

Then Michigan's within a touchdown and Penn State hasn't moved the ball an inch for the whole second half. This is not another road hamblasting in which Michigan gets down big and stays down big. When the dust settles Michigan has in fact outgained Penn State by almost 150 yards; they nearly double Penn State's first down count.

It wasn't that game. It was a different game, and then you have to remember things. Swap the first and second halves and the Michigan fanbase is expending all spittle reserves roaring about the refereeing instead of deleting their Linked In accounts:

pic.twitter.com/6MZQJIolCC

— Aaron Bell (@abellboys) October 20, 2019

I don't know what kind of idiot puts their real name and phone number on an email to a football player telling him to quit, but if you find out please let me know.

Anyway: you have to remember things. Things like Michigan committing back to back offsides penalties to turn second and goal from the five into second and goal from the one. Or calling a timeout before the first play of the game. Or having two guys attempt to return one kickoff and getting clunked inside the 15. Or having an OL wandering 6 yards downfield on a pass. Or dropping several passes, or turfing the ball, etc. There were three different situations where Michigan had fourth and short near midfield and they didn't go.

Penn State's only second half offense came after a third and nine where Lavert Hill wrapped his arms around a guy who hadn't seen a target all day. Immediately after KJ Hamler got one on one coverage he was never supposed to:

“Second half, we didn’t get the call. We didn’t have the right defense. Players didn’t get the call, so we didn’t have a post safety.”

That was the winning touchdown: Michigan shooting itself in the foot. The game didn't have to end with Ronnie Bell dropping a tying touchdown that hit the middle of his chest, but once he did that's the way it had to end. Singling out the one error in a game stacked back to front with them is something only the kind of idiot who puts his real name and phone number on a shitty email would do. 

--------------------------------------------

This is progress of a sort, to be losing games you should win instead of games you have absolutely no chance of winning. But the season context reinforces how disappointing it's been: this should have been the weird road loss in which you lose your shirt in the first three minutes and spend an incredible amount of time looking for it—it's a SHIRT how do you just lose a SHIRT I SWEAR TO GOD IT WAS JUST HERE did one of the children PUT IT IN THE BLENDER they can't even reach the counter.

It should have been dumb and stupid things conspiring to trip up a team with big ideas. It should have been a harsh reality check that indicates Michigan's not as invincible as they seem.

Instead it's a game where Michigan loses in a blizzard of their own making and the rational post-game take is cautious optimism because that wasn't as bad as we all expected. That was their best performance of the year, the weird road game where you walk into the kitchen, forget why you went there in the first place, and end up making beef stew. You don't even like beef stew. In my world the thing you do with carrots that have been boiled for five hours is throw them out. And then you lose.

What was I taking about?

Right: cautious optimism about what? This loss leaves Michigan pretty much out of the Big Ten title race—the PSU-OSU winner would have to lose two games—and staring down the barrel of SP+ projections in which Michigan is expected to get 7.8 wins before schlepping off to a bowl game in Branson, Missouri.

 

DOES NO ONE LEARN ABOUT THE APPROPRIATE NUMBER OF SIGNIFICANT DIGITS ANYMORE

I've reached the acceptance phase for most of this except for the people who wander into my mentions like so many ducks waiting to get sprayed, complaining that MGoBlog is too negative these days, like I should shoot heroin into my eyeballs and report that everything is sparkly. Well, it ain't.

[After THE JUMP: targets for Nico at least]

AWARDS

[Barron]

Known Friends And Trusted Agents Of The Week

you're the man now, dog

#1 Nico Collins. Six* catches for 86* yards that was really 7 and ~130. No drops. The one he did not catch was way outside of his frame. He did run a route on a bubble screen that was going to go a long way if he got a block.

#2 The whole dang OL. Some issues on the ground, though I think a lot of that goes to the TEs and a couple of missed pulls. Nearly flawless in pass protection. PSU entered the game leading the nation in sacks, got up 21 points early, and Patterson ended up with approximately 45 dropbacks. He got sacked once and was rarely under pressure.

#3 Cam McGrone. Michigan didn't get a ton of pressure in this game; what they did came from McGrone; don't think he was at fault on the Slade run.

Honorable mention: Shea Patterson was last year Shea Patterson and suffered some drops that held his stats down, but an ugly INT was important. Zach Charbonnet broke some tackles and made some of his own yards. Kwity Paye was a force against the run.

KFaTAotW Standings

NOTE: New scoring! HM: 1 point. #3: 3 points. #2: 5 points. #1: 8 points. Split winners awarded points at the sole discretion of a pygmy marmoset named Luke.

14: Josh Uche (#3 MTSU, #3 Army, T2 Rutgers, #2 Illinois), Aidan Hutchinson(#1 Army, HM Rutgers, T1 Iowa, HM Illinois)
11: Jordan Glasgow (HM MTSU, T3 Iowa, #1 Illinois), Zach Charbonnet (#2 MTSU, #2 Army, HM PSU)
10:  Ambry Thomas (#1 MTSU, HM Rutgers, HM Illinois), Shea Patterson(HM MTSU, #1 Rutgers. HM PSU)
9: Nico Collins (HM Rutgers, HM Iowa, #1 PSU)
8: Kwity Paye (T2 Rutgers, T1 Iowa, HM PSU)
7: Cam McGrone(HM Rutgers, T3 Iowa, HM Illinois, #3 PSU)
6: Khaleke Hudson (#2 Iowa, HM Illinois)
5: Whole Dang OL(#2 PSU).
4: Ronnie Bell (HM Army, T3 Rutgers, HM Illinois)
3: Hassan Haskins (#3 Illinois)
2: DPJ (T3 Rutgers), Dax Hill(HM Rutgers, HM Iowa), Josh Metellus (HM Army, HM Iowa), Lavert Hill (HM Army, HM Iowa)
1: Will Hart (HM MTSU), Josh Ross (HM, MTSU), Sean McKeon (HM, MTSU),Brad Hawkins (HM Army), Christian Turner (HM Rutgers), Christian Turner (HM Rutgers), Nick Eubanks (HM Illinois)

Who's Got It Better Than Us(?) Of The Week

Michigan punches in a touchdown to make it 14-21 and hope blossoms.

 

Honorable mention: Ronnie Bell jukes a guy for a 35-yard bubble; Charbonnet gets a TD off that bubble action opening up Bell; all but approximately five PSU snaps.

​MARCUS HALL EPIC DOUBLE BIRD OF THE WEEK.

This is probably going to be a flat drop on a would-be tying touchdown on fourth down late in the fourth quarter. [opens envelope] yuuuup

Honorable mention: KJ Hamler things. Patterson throws an INT on a screen. DPJ has about 3 drops. The other two PSU snaps that got yards. Michigan calls timeout before the first play. Michigan tries a 58 yard field goal.

OFFENSE

[Barron]

It made sense and fit together. Michigan got approximately one MAKE PLAYS item that didn't get wiped out by the officials. That was the Ronnie Bell bubble screen on which he dusted a guy and turned a would-be loss into first and goal. Charbonnet broke a couple tackles; 85% of everything else was earned by the play design and the blocking.

Michigan threw a bunch of bubble screens which were largely successful and would have been much more if Nico Collins hadn't run a route instead of block on one bubble that caught a blitz and super soft coverage; that was a 20-30 yard mistake.

Later the run game opened up a bit because Penn State was spending guys on the perimeter. It is not a coincidence that Charbonnet got an easy 12-yard TD on belly when the DE widened out—he was thinking about pursuing the bubble. That kind of conflict for profit has been exceedingly rare this year.

There were a couple of things that were frustrating but on a cursory initial rewatch this was probably the best gameplan of the year, and it didn't seem like Harbaugh hijacking the offense, it seemed like the mix of old and new that was what we wanted this offseason.

Okay but… the shots? While this gameplan was an improvement there was exactly one downfield shot taken, that the Collins completion overturned by a ludicrously bad OPI call. Every time you do this you get a ton of yards. In the game preview I noted that PSU was going to get it to their playmakers more often, and while that wasn't quite right on a per-snap basis, it was on an impact basis. PSU took four deep shots in this game and got completions on three; Michigan took just the one. I'll never understand this.

One of college football's greatest traditions. Ex-quarterbacks on color commentary exclaiming "there's nobody open!" while the skycam calls them a liar. We had a Joel Klatt item earlier this year. The Kirk Herbstreit edition from this game is an all-timer:

yes this is a beat after the moment a rhythm throw should get out

This turned into the first DPJ drop-type substance where he caught the ball and then the safety punched the ball out the instant he secured it. So, yes, Patterson did a thing that could have been a completion. He had an opportunity to come off Black and throw to the wide open guy, which would not have given the PSU safety an opportunity to do anything but tackle after the catch. Patterson did a good job of rescuing a play that he messed up, and that throw had a lower EV than the programmed one.

In the aftermath of this game there are a lot of folks being rather zealous about defending Patterson; I get the impulse. I don't think it's quite right. He exceeded expectations set by the previous half-season. It should have been enough to get the game to overtime. It's still pretty frustrating to see the above and the FFS KEEP THE BALL read, which happened again in this game, and he's probably going to come in with 5-7 balls marked inaccurate in UFR.

He was better; he was still just okay.

Protection for days. Patterson was sacked once in this game, that by safety Garrett Taylor. On plays like the above screenshot he had forever to make a decision. That was a theme for the day against the team with the most sacks in the country. I thought going in that the tackles would have problems; they did not. Superb performance in pass pro.

On the ground… it was much iffier, oddly. My initial impression is that the tight ends had a terrible day. This will leak into initial OL assessments, naturally. It was pretty rough watching Patterson pull on the first drive and get to the edge only for Micah Parsons to run him down for two yards, and then skip back to see what was going on: Luke Schoonmaker had Parsons sealed and gone, and then he left for a hypothetical downfield block.

After beating up on the junior varsity last week Nick Eubanks had a number of plays where he was blown through by Shaka Toney, who is very much a WDE. (The junior varsity then held Jonathan Taylor to his worst output of the season and won 24-23. Sports!) Sean McKeon was a big miss in this game.

Charbonnet. Good to see him break some tackles and have another couple of those subtle shifts in tight quarters that are tough for backs his size to do. I wonder if we'll ever find out what the injury issue was early in the season; I wonder if that affected him through this dolorous section of the season.

DEFENSE

[Barron]

Yardage to points conversion. 283 yards. 28 points. Just like last week against Illinois, Penn State sandwiched a whole bunch of nothin' around four scoring drives. This is truly incredible:

• Four TD drives: 254 yards.
• 9 other drives: 62 yards*.

No Penn State drive was longer than six plays. PSU got three first downs on the other nine drives.

*[These include penalty yards and thus don't match the total yard stat cited just above.]

Cost of crossers. I haven't done the deep dive yet but I wonder if Michigan's first stop was related to the Hamler TD later. First stop: drag route from Hamler, Lavert Hill takes a couple steps inside as if he's in man, trailing it, and then he stops and drops on a zone; Hawkins then picks up the crosser and makes an instant tackle on the catch.

Later Hamler blazes by Hawkins on a slot fade for a touchdown. Harbaugh made it sound like that was not necessarily the plan…

“They got us on a long one in the first half,” Harbaugh said. “Inside fade route, they had a good call on there. They got KJ (Hamler) on a safety, that was a good play."

…so I wonder if this is a cost of being more of a zone team. Harder to follow Hamler around with a guy like Lavert Hill if you're in a zone.

[Barron]

The other big plays. The Dotson fade was obviously Thomas getting beat but mostly just a perfect throw; the Slade run was on the DTs and probably Khaleke Hudson for burying himself in the line; and given the Harbaugh quote above the second Hamler TD was Hawkins not playing in the deep middle.

So two of those are on Hawkins, except the first one was just Hawkins getting a horrible matchup he's probably not going to win.

Should have had more Dax. I don't believe that Dax Hill would be barely in the frame on the above photo. He did end up getting beat by Hamler once or twice, but then he tackled, because he was within tackling range. It seems like if there was a game to try the freshman who runs a 4.3 flat it was against the slot guy who also does that.

The other… game parts. Michigan didn't get a ton of pressure but Clifford bailed on a lot of plays that he didn't like, and aside from the Slade run Penn State's ground game went virtually nowhere. This has been PSU's pattern all season: they do nothing for large sections of the game and then hit a series of explosive plays to score. Iowa was the exception, because Iowa.

I do think Michigan's interior OL got a clear win, with the exception of the one play, and that would be a bonafide trend for Carlo Kemp if it bore out in the grading.

SPECIAL TEAMS

Don't try 58 yard field goals when you have a makeable fourth down. That is all.

MISCELLANEOUS

Facial hair of the week. I have no idea who this is but he is 100% PSU's strength coach.

[Barron]

I hope he has them lifting spherical barbells and calls every beverage a "tonic".

Obligatory ref bitching. Good thing I'm in the acceptance stage, because if I was in anger, hoo boy. Michigan got boned on three massively important plays:

• Pat Freiermuth pushes off to make Khaleke Hudson's very good coverage bad coverage, scoring a 17 yard TD instead of setting PSU up with 1st and 25 on the 32.
• John Reid decides to turn into Tarik Black's backpack on a fourth down attempt, well before the ball arrives. No call, and instead of Michigan having a first down at the PSU ~30 they turn the ball over on downs.
• Whatever the crap that was on the bomb to Collins.

That is easily eight points worth of WTF. Maybe you can expect to only get one of the Freiermuth/Collins calls, but for both of those to go to Penn State is a rogering.

Obligatory fourth down bitching. Michigan did special teams things in the following situations:

• They punted on 4th and 1 from the PSU 47.
• They tried a 58-yard field goal on 4th and 6 from the PSU 41.
• The punted on 4th and 3 from the 50, down 14 with 5 minutes left in the third quarter.

All of those are wrong. You can maybe make a case for the field goal since there were 50 seconds left in the half… maybe. If Nordin is around, which he's not. The 4th and 1 on the opening drive is crazy, especially since you have a punter that puts a lot of punts in the endzone. He duly did, so Penn State got one first down and then Michigan started the next drive on their 15.

Even more absurd: punting on fourth and three down two touchdowns when you're about to have three more possessions the rest of the game.

I don't expect better than Harbaugh at this point. I do have to mention these things.

Frames! One mote of brightness in the darkness of the first half was James Franklin calling timeout with 21 seconds left so he had to punt the ball to DPJ. Could have run it down to three seconds and have a Hail Mary instead of punting to a guy with TDs the past two seasons.

HERE

There are some scenarios where Michigan can get to Indianapolis but they all require winning out in conference and unlikely results elsewhere.

Best and Worst:

Worst: Secret Yards

This diary is going to be focused less on nitty-gritty details of the game and more holistically on Michigan football in 2019. Feel free to skip it. There will be a ton of analysis this week on the X's and O's, and you aren't likely reading this because you expect some fantastic insights on that front. But I do want to focus on two numbers for a minute: 12 and 6.

In the first half of the game, Penn State's average starting field position was their 33; for Michigan it was their own 21. So over the 15 total drives during that first half, Michigan started over a first down deeper in their own end as Penn State. Perhaps not coincidentally, Michigan was down 21-7 at the half. In the second half, Michigan's average starting spot was their own 26, while PSU's was all the way back at their own 20 yard line. And if you're playing at home, Michigan wound up outscoring PSU by 7 (14-7) and were 3 yards and a dropped TD from a tie.

You hear all the time about hidden yards in games, how turnovers, special teams, and the vagaries of the game can obfuscate or accentuate differences in performance. Michigan nearly doubled PSU in first downs (26 to 14), had over 130 yards more in total offense (417 to 283), and dominated time of possession (37:45 to 22:15). But they lost because PSU had a 44-yard run by Ricky Slade, two KJ Hamler mismatches where he torched various safeties for TDs, and a half dozen questionable officiating calls that almost uniformly went to PSU's advantage. And that's basically how you lose a road game against a good team; you give them too many breaks and you let their limited punches land hard.

Where the program's at.

ELSEWHERE

Hello. [Barron]

Maize and Blue Nation:

I don't know how often it happened last night, but it was more than twice. The DJ at Beaver Stadium blasted "Circle of Life" from the Lion King over the PA system. Aside from this being an odd choice, at least IMO...I've never heard another stadium do this and probably for good reason. I know they're the "Nittany Lions", but that kind of lion isn't the same kind of lion as the lion from the Lion King.
It's also a strange song to blast to a football crowd, right? Especially when you can just hit play on Zombie Nation for like the 150th time or whatever and whip the natives into a drunken white-clad frenzy.
Also, Michigan Stadium has Mufasa and Darth Vader doing their intro video...so...yeah!
Anyway, that's how I feel about that.

Hoover Street Rag:

There is a strain of Michigan fan I have seen, most frequently on Twitter, who is having a terrible time fathoming why Michigan isn't Michigan again in Year Five of Harbaugh.  Essentially, a "this is not what I signed up for" sort of breakdown that looks at all of the ways in which Michigan is failing to live up to its historical grandiosity.  I understand that feeling on a primal level, that this is just another false messiah after a decade and a half of wandering in the desert.  Though some may accuse me of setting up a straw man, if you've been on Michigan Twitter, you more than likely have seen someone like this or you have the best curated follow list I've ever seen.
I'm not going to call this a moral victory, because it's not and because Michigan shouldn't do the moral victory thing.  It's a loss.  It's another brick in the narrative about Harbaugh's teams.  It's plenty of evidence to those who want it that Michigan cannot beat teams of equal or superior talent, especially on the road.  Acknowledged.