Previously in 2021: The Story. Podcast 13.0A. Podcast 13.0B.
Last year: 5Q5A: Offense 2020. Quarterback. Running Back. Wide Receiver. Tight End. Interior OL. Offensive Tackle.

Your productivity is safe; there will be no positional previews this year (see: The Story). Hail to the Victors was finished so late all of that is still good except perhaps [checks Nebraska preview] yep, all of it’s still good. Let’s ask the questions, starting with the saddest, and working our way back to hope.

1. Who’s running the offense?

Somebody’s going to jail. [Bryan Fuller]

It’s Josh Gattis. I’m sure Jim Harbaugh is involved, but the popular fan theory that the old man trapped in Schembechlerian thinking is dictating smashmouthian football hasn’t held up, at least so far. The evidence is all over. They made BEN MASON a tight end, for one. Gattis said he is going to get best athletes the ball in space where they can make plays. The receivers have been running various takes on levels that clear out space underneath for their star wide receiver, who led the league in average YAC.

Michigan's Ronnie Bell is dangerous after the catch pic.twitter.com/JvohoDqzkj

— PFF College (@PFF_College) July 10, 2020

They passed far more often—44% both years—on standard downs than any other year under Harbaugh. Half of those passes went to a slot receiver, and another chunk went to slants off RPOs. The base running attack remained the Buck Sweep, which we’ve been calling Pin & Pull. That has been their thing since the back half of 2018. Screens have remained mostly left out of the offense. This is all pulled from UFR data since 2008:

STANDARD DOWNS, NOT IN COMEBACK MODE

Era	Pass Rate	Pass Short	Bomb	Power	QB Run	Screens	Dropback%
Rodriguez	23%	14%	5%	6%	40%	9%	56%
Hoke	37%	17%	7%	20%	16%	6%	52%
Harbaugh 15-18	38%	17%	7%	35%	4%	4%	59%
Gattis	44%	23%	10%	19%	12%	5%	74%

[QB run includes zone read/arc stff]

Also about 8% of the offense has been RPOs, up from negligible prior. Where Gattis is an outlier is he’s been more likely to have his quarterbacks throw it deep on early downs.

The other interesting thing about Gattis on early downs is he doesn’t use much play-action, something we have tracked consistently across eras. Sometimes there’s a tiny wave of the ball at an RB going by—that doesn’t count as PA in our charting (and gets the old guys on Twitter furious).

When Gattis is able to run his offense, his offense passes more, and drops back more. It still doesn’t screen, but it’s substantially different than the “Harbaugh”-called offenses under Drevno/Pep/The Cast of Too Many Cooks. What he does so much differently than Pep Hamilton is create space to throw to the guy who can pick up extra.

Pep’s overarching philosophy for his routes—I believe— was in creating levels reads that pop open one after another. Gattis is the contrast: look how the targets are spaced out in the four corners of the field, drawing defenders until there’s just one to read. He steps deep with the WR who ran right at him, and the underneath is thrown.

It might just be that the reads-on-everything, defenders getting pulled in multiple directions, QB run threats, RB wheels, and bombs we hoped Gattis imbibed from Joe Moorhead did not take, or that they did but are muted by the paralyzing conservatism of James Franklin.

The thing I can’t show in the charts is there has been a lot more of the Mike Locksley/get people moving across the backfield stuff. It’s mostly been a dud. The kings of that kind of football right now are the Baltimore Ravens, and Matt Weiss was supposedly a big part of that design. They run jets and orbits and then have the receivers kick out or turn into wheels. Gattis has mostly used those guys as flare routes or fake pitch options—the football equivalent of putting a Just a Shooter™ in the corner to increase spacing. Because the Michigan offense ignores that guy out there, so has the defense.

Ideally this year the presence of Weiss and the co-coordinator role for Sherrone Moore give Gattis a sharper edge. They CANNOT slip back into this “we’re reading nobody” idiocy that we saw again last year after it was banished post-Notre Dame 2018. I wish I could blame that on Harbaugh.

[After THE JUMP: Make sense please.]

2. Why can’t they run the goldang quarterback?

Perhaps this was unfair? [Bryan Fuller]

If you recall, the takeoff point for the 2018-2019 offense was when they shelved the fake zone reads that got them killed against Notre Dame and started actually running the quarterback. They turned off QB keeps against Army and that almost resulted in disaster, then held back the offense all season. It happened again last year against Indiana:

Well. Here we are again.

Here we are. I cannot tell you how sick I am of pointing at a flailing Michigan offense and pointing out the various things that make no goddamn sense. Called QB runs in this game: zero. RPOs: maybe two or three. Zone reads: one, I think.

There was a screen, so there's that.

What is going on?

I don't know. I don't know how you can see Milton run against Minnesota, and see the easy touchdown it should have generated, and then completely drop that from the offense. I don't know how you go back to turning your back on the line of scrimmage like it's 1984. Michigan ran play action on second and twenty on which Milton turned all the way around and popped up to find a DE in his face that he could have avoided if he wasn't looking at the wrong endzone for half the play.

You lost to an abysmal MSU team. You're down the whole game against a team you haven't lost to since 1987. Run the goddamn quarterback.

One difference we saw with McNamara versus Milton in the Rutgers game was Michigan put the reads back into the game. Nobody has explained why that is so we just have our theories. Brian’s is that Milton must be terrible at them.

Milton got filed for zero RPOs, zero zone reads, and zero screens in this game. McNamara had six screens, four RPOs, and three zone reads. I may have missed something here or there but I mean… one of these had speed in space elements and the other absolutely did not.

At this point I have to assume that Joe Milton is terrible at executing reads. Perhaps unfathomably so. I've complained about the near-total absence of them in the offense for a month now, and this was no exception. M continually handed off with Milton while there was no conceivable read:

A popular one during the Pattersom era was they didn’t want to expose him to hits: Wisconsin went headhunting on McCaffrey the second he seemed poised to take over, and Patterson had a major brace on after the first play against MTSU. Anyway that makes two (with Shea) QBs in a row who mysteriously stopped making zone reads, or just pretended to and handed off no matter what the optioned guy does. It extended to RPOs so Brian was probably right about Milton.

Anyway McNamara was making reads when he came in against Rutgers. This was an RPO that victimized a CB trying to do what IU got away with all day. The next play Gattis hit them with an RPO AND GO! and there’s no chance.

Best case scenario, that’s the offense Gattis intended to run. That scenario means they picked the wrong quarterback for that offense last year, shelved it to keep riding with him until he gave them no choice but to bench him, and then he transferred to Tennessee. That isn’t very comforting either. But #SpeedinSpace lives!

3. McNamara INTANGIBLES or Joe Milton’s Arm?

Just a few more days to empty the McNamara spring practice 2019 folder [fortuitously filled by Bryan Fuller]

The difference between the two gets exaggerated because the most present thing in our minds is the part of the season when Joe Milton got benched in consecutive games and McNamara immediately scored. The UFR charting (with my MSU grades included) tell us nothing except how much Milton deteriorated over the course of the season.

CADE MCNAMARA

	Good				Neutral			Bad					Ovr			Reads
Game	DO	CA	SCR		PR	MA		BA	TA	IN	BR		DSR	GRADE!		RPOs	ZRs
Wisconsin	3	1								3			57%	+2
Rutgers	2++	20(6)			3	3				5	2		70%	+8.2		4/4	1/3
PSU-Before		2(1)	1			1							100%
PSU-After		7(3)	1		2	1		1		8(1)	1		30%	-8.2

JOE MILTON

	Good				Neutral			Bad					Ovr			Reads
Game	DO	CA	SCR		PR	MA		BA	TA	IN	BR		DSR	GRADE!		RPOs	ZRs
Minnesota		17(6)	1			1			1	2	1		75%	+4		2/2	2/2
MSU	7	20(3)+	4		3	3		2	5*	5(1)**	5x		64%	+15
Indiana	7	19(2)++++			3	4				6**	4		71%	+10.7
Wisconsin	1	8(1)+				1		1	1*	4*	3*		47%	-7.2
Rutgers	2	3			3	1				3	1		56%	+0.5
PSU		1								2			33%	-1

That drop after IU was deep. It also wasn’t injury related. Milton was not seeing anything. Watch this safety creeping into become a sixth lineman as Corum is running the other way:

!!! ! ! !!! ! !!!! !!!

!!!!!!!!!!

Our data on McNamara are 10 drives versus Rutgers, and two each against Wisconsin and Penn State. Our memories converted all of that into this:

Immediately followed by this.

Those are indeed consecutive plays. This was two plays later.

And this one play after that.

His next drive was three inaccurate throws, and the last wasn’t charted. Your brain also wiped out this throw because it conflicts with the hot take about Erick All.

What none of those show is an NFL arm. McNamara has to be that good because he doesn’t have a cannon, and that puts a ceiling on what they can do. Nobody got a week to prepare for McNamara before. Now he will get hunted by zone defenders.

McNamara says bring it on. Brian said on the pod you have to be a Tom Brady or Drew Brees-level savant to make that work. Those guys also happen to be two of the most success quarterbacks in history because they are savants. I’m not putting McNamara in that category; I am arguing that picking up subtle cues the defense gives you before and after the snap can make quarterbacking look easy.

And as I said on the pod, the lower ceiling should not be mistaken for a low ceiling. Michigan didn’t get a chance to design the offense around his strengths either. He was a four-star who obliterated Nevada’s high school records. If he’s passed by J.J. McCarthy this year or next, I think the chances are higher that’s a good thing not a benched thing. The evidence against that take is mostly “Well look what happened to all the dead quarterbacks before.” I’m not going to predict Michigan’s going to injure their starter the first game of the season (Patterson 2019), or first Big Ten game (Speight 2017) or two games before Ohio State (Speight 2016) or the first drive against Ohio State (Rudock 2015). The cosmic bad luck is just that.

Also the receiving corps could be as productive (if not as talented) as Ohio State's. Ronnie Bell is a star, period. Cornelius Johnson and Dylan Baldwin are a guy Ohio State would take and a guy they tried to. Giles Jackson leaving is a bummer but AJ Henning might be better.

The more worrisome QB trend under Harbaugh is regression—Speight and Patterson got worse in 2017 and 2019 after solid 2016 and 2018s, and Milton slowly came apart over the course of last year. That never happened before with Harbaugh’s QBs. It might be that can all be explained by Patterson’s oblique and issues at pass protection in the other circumstances. Speaking of…

4. Is it wise to replace Ed Warinner with Sherrone Moore?

You’re the man now. [Patrick Barron]

One of the more frightening moments of this offseason’s coaching turnover was when we learned they had jettisoned grizzled, undeniably successful OL coach Ed Warinner to promote Moore, a former Oklahoma tackle who’s been mostly appreciated at Michigan for his recruiting prowess, e.g. he landed Dax Hill, but has never coached OL before.

The insiders have made it loudly clear($) that the players are very happy with the change. Brian said on the podcast yesterday that he doesn’t care what the players think. What we left unsaid is offensive line coach is really one of the few positions on a football team where your recruiting ability matters less than your ability to coach, because linemen usually need two or three years of development before they’re ready to be judged on the field, and anyway the position (except for elite tackles) is much harder to rate than others.

No doubt the 60-year-old Warinner is an excellent OL coach, especially with centers. He left a trail of them from Army to Air Force to Kansas, Illinois, Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Minnesota. At each stop he was named an OC or co-OC before he left. It’s doubtful he’s going to remain long at FAU. Also there is no question whatsoever that Cesar Ruiz became the player he was so quickly at Michigan because of Warinner’s coaching.

It’s very likely Harbaugh was in a spot where he knew Warinner was the better coach but the players didn’t like him. I could also see why Moore might be integral to everyone keeping their jobs—would you chance losing Dax?—and looking to move up from TE coach, putting Michigan in a tight position.

Warinner also left Michigan with a trail of unused eligibility at the position he worked with most. I learned at the start of 2019 that Ruiz wasn’t planning on returning. Stephen Spanellis transferred the same offseason, and then sniped at his old coach from Twitter. Zach Carpenter took off when last year ended and was enrolling at Indiana before Michigan had a chance to talk him out of it. I would be more inclined to believe in Andrew Vastardis if the program hadn’t spent spring and most of fall trying to move true sophomore Zak Zinter over.

I got my tongue tied up on the podcast while trying to convince Brian that Moore deserves a chance. What I wanted to say is he’s done an excellent job on the coaching front—we were talking about using Erick All at receiver until Moore taught him how to block. Also the coaching Warinner gave the current group is still there. I’m not thrilled either about handing this position over long-term to a first-timer, but the effects of that are uncertain and down the road. The loss of Warinner shouldn’t affect Michigan any more this year than it did  2017 Ohio State, or 2012 Notre Dame.

5. Will they get to use these running backs?

Step 1: GET THE FURK OUT OF HIS WAY [Fuller]

How they want to use them isn’t a mystery. Running back is a fairly simple scout for fans, especially Michigan’s running backs. There’s truth to the “Thunder/Lightning” concept, as discussed here by Brett Kollman when the Saints had great big mauling guards and a pair of RBs with very different styles.

It cannot be repeated enough: Hassan Haskins put up 6.15 YPC despite the state of last year’s offense, and that offense spending almost half of its downs either in passing downs or trailing too late to run. And he earned those yards, both when the maulers got him the first chunk, and when he had to do it himself.

How do you stay tethered to your Michigan fandom when things are falling apart? Watch that play above. You can watch it again and get upset that Gattis’s motion with Ronnie Bell didn’t fool the Spartans anymore than the Badgers in the example earlier if you really want to be miserable. That play is the reason my first NIL purchase was this guy’s jersey. Other guys are going to have to step up, but Zach Charbonnet is an excellent running back who didn’t have a role at Michigan anymore because he was going to be stuck behind this guy. This that annoy us about this program—like they run the Wildcat but never seem practiced enough at it—work anyway because of Hassan.

And once you’re sick of getting pounded outside the whole thing changes. This is actually some botched blocking at the frontside by Michigan’s TEs and OL. It works anyway because Corum is too fast and too sharp.

Ideally you use both of these guys in the same drive, softening up the defense then forcing them to deal with Corum in space. People who played football understand better than those of us who didn’t or didn’t play enough: getting hit sucks. It wears you out. The way you stop a good thunder/lightning is you don’t let them get started.

Last year Michigan would often go on long drives then come up short near the end zone. The three-and-outs came when they either blew something terribly, or when they got behind so much they had to throw 75% of the time or more. Indiana brought a zillion cornerback blitzes to force Michigan to pass on first down.

The other thing they can do is throw to them when they’re wide open, on the plays you designed for just that purpose. Corum is too fast for linebackers to stay with him…

…and if he starts taking away defensive backs, Michigan has the receivers who should be able to feast. If running wheels tires Corum out a bit, throw in Donovan Edwards for a spell. Or go back to Haskins.

Last year did seem a bit crowded with four, but the real reason they didn’t get fed wasn’t the roles, it was that Michigan wasn’t throwing to them when they had the chance, and then Michigan was down by two scores and had to throw. To me, that’s just a way to turn a glowingly positive depth chart into another negative. If your heart is struggling this pre-season to find its way back under the banner, my advice is to pick one of these guys to be your dude, and follow him.

5b. Well?

Had there been a spring practice to watch it’s plausible we could be hyped for this offense. I can’t state this enough: the decision not to broadcast a spring game was a decision somewhere between boneheaded and catastrophic for a program whose fans are already short on tethers keeping us from the state Brian’s fallen into. A spring game is football minus strategy. The players are easy to like and the thing that most bothers us about their offense is coaches have been consistently botching strategy since 2017.

Unless you’re being purposefully negative about McNamara or think Stueber's ceiling as a pass protector is a huge deal, the biggest complaints about the offense have nothing to do with the talent on offense. It’s the coaching. The running backs are great, and even if you don’t buy that having defined roles is better than having Chris Evans and Zach Charbonnet around, those carries go to Hassan Haskins, a year older Corum, and maybe some Donovan Edwards. The linemen seem fine but the elder coaching them is gone. The design of the offense makes sense but they stop running it in the middle of games. They can’t seem to settle on being one thing and staying that thing for a season. Harbaugh can’t get a quarterback (since Rudock, not counting Patterson’s 2018).

So, the coaches are on thin ice. McNamara is going to be fine or else he’s going to surrender his job to a 5-star true freshman whose projected takeoff point is next year. Their third option is a beat up Big XII castoff who once went throw for throw with Kyler Murray as a freshman. The running backs are great. The receivers haven’t shown it as much (or at least not at this level) but all the arrows there are pointing up. The line gets a Wile E. Coyote year before we really find out if Moore can develop guys. We’re down to can the coaches get out of their own way, and I don’t know. I’m willing to ride it out with Harbaugh but if they run one more read play that isn’t a read I might just turn on him too.

The lack of a spring game is the reason I can’t defend him anymore. The fans who don’t care weren’t going to care. The fans who want to care need reasons believe. Maybe a Western Michigan game can do that. That often seems to do the trick.

I had to go through all of these and significantly downgrade them so I wouldn’t come out insanely positive. The things that could sink this offense are:

1. Missed protections inside. Vastardis wasn't great at this last year but a 6th year guy should be alright. The dropoff from him to sliding Zinter inside or going with a freshman could be steep.
2. McNamara getting hurt and having to dumb down the offense to get JJ comfortable.
3. More dumb coaching.

There are a lot worse places to be in than “I hope I don’t have to play my 5-star quarterback or 6th year former walk-on returning starter at center doesn’t get hurt.” And there are all kinds of places to find upside here, like “one of Baldwin/Johnson/Wilson is more than a WR2” or “our OL isn’t all injured by game four,” or “excellent blocking TE who caught everything in his zip code as a high schooler remembers how to catch” or “McNamara is a Steely-Eyed Missile Man” or “For once Michigan just runs their offense all year.” Michigan can take a hit to any of the other four OL positions, receiver, or running back and be fine. If optimism didn’t sound insane, you could almost be optimistic.

BETTER

• Any semblance of a QB run game >> Milton 2020 UNLESS THIS COACHING STAFF ACTUALLY LIKES PUNCHING ITSELF IN THE FACE. DO YOU? LIKE PUNCHING YOURSELF IN THE FACE? STOP DOING THAT!
• Baldwin/Johnson/Wilson >> Sainristil/soph Johnson/frosh Wilson
• Junior Ryan Hayes > six guys at LT in six games
• Sophomore Zinter > true freshman Zinter
• Keegan after epic battle > Filiaga beats out various freshmen
• 2nd year starter Vastardis > Injured 1st year starter Vastardis
• McNamara reading a defense >> Milton reading a defense
• McCarthy/Bowman/sophomore Villari > Freshman McNamara/Villari
• Sophomore Corum > freshman Corum
• Matt Weiss, Analytics Whiz Kid > Ben McDaniels
• Mike Hart+more carries for Corum/Haskins > Too Many Cooks

PUSH

• Ronnie Bell == Ronnie Bell
• AJ Henning == Giles Jackson
• Stueber at RT == Mayfield/Stueber at RT
• Not having a fullback == BEN MASON screwing up assignments as a TE
• All & Schoonmaker == Eubanks & All
• OL like their coach == OL hate their coach
• Harbaugh+Gattis coaching for their lives == Harbaugh+Gattis

WORSE

• McNamara’s arm <<< Milton’s arm
• First-time OL coach << OL coach w excellent 25-year resume
• True freshman or Zinter is backup at C < Carpenter

LAST YEAR’S STUPID PREDICTIONS

I’m grading lightly because these were Brian’s not mine.

Milton has a better YPA and completion percentage than Patterson (8.0 and 56%, respectively) last year but throws 50% more INTs per attempt.

Milton had 7.6 YPA and a completion percentage a half point (56.7%) higher than Patterson’s. His INT rate was 2.8% while Patterson+50% would have been 3.1%, or one more interception. Since opponents dropped two I can think of off the top of my head we’ll give Brian half a point.

Ronnie Bell is the clear leader in targets and has 85 yards per game there; the competition for the #2 spot is a complete free-for-all that sees four or five different guys in a relatively tight band.

Bell had 67 yards per game and 42 targets, followed by Cornelius Johnson (28), Erick All (25) Giles Jackson (22), Mike Sainristil (17) and Roman Wilson (14). Full point.

Between Giles Jackson and Chris Evans, spread H is a real thing. Combined they average 5 catches a game.

Jackson was their starting slot receiver but did most slot receiver things, and Chris Evans was a running back who got 8 targets. Together they averaged 4 catches a game. If you throw in AJ Henning I’ll concede the point, but only because 5 catches a game was a low bar to clear for Spread H being a thing.

The offensive line is a B+ unit with a couple guys PFF loves.

PFF loved Andrew Stueber. Everyone else gets an incomplete because nobody else made it through a six-game season.

Erick All is the leading receiver amongst TEs.

Eubanks started the year hurt and replaced All when he returned. In the end Eubanks had 10 catches for 117 yards on his 12 targets to All’s 12 catches for 82 yards on 25 targets. That prediction was not about All having a crappy year that edged Eubanks on one volume statistic so no points.

Ben Mason emerges as a short-yardage snowplow once again, this time as the lead blocker. There's a two-back package that features him and gives the business to the first team that sees it.

This is absolutely true in the absolute worst way it could be. They had him playing an H-back role that’s a quasi-TE. There was a two-back pistol package that featured him, and it gave the business to the first team (Minnesota) that saw it. Then he started screwing up his assignments against MSU and it was shelved.

No SP+ prediction this year because the lack of nonconference games is likely to throw that system for a loop; I will assert that the offense will be better overall than last year's, which finished 21st.

Michigan finished 42nd so no.

THIS YEAR’S STUPID PREDICTIONS

• McNamara is an opponent-variant (kills bad teams, struggles vs good secondaries) QB who matches Patterson’s 8.0 YPC but with a completion % much closer to 70 than 50. He starts every game that he isn’t injured.
• We still see J.J. McCarthy in a competitive situation. He makes at least one throw that’s bonkers and at least two things that are only excusable for a freshman.
• Blake Corum and Hassan Haskins get about equal carries, suppressing each others’ bids for all-conference, and we think that is unfair.
• Corum sees an uptick in his target rate, but it’s still not enough because Michigan doesn’t throw a lot of RB screens.
• Ronnie Bell remains the clear leader in targets and finishes the year just under 1,000 yards. Cornelius Johnson has more targets, yards, and TDs than Daylen Baldwin, but Baldwin leads the team in yards per target.
• The running game is right-handed. Their favorite plays are Pin & Pull and split zone behind Stueber/Zinter.
• The offensive line does some 2019-style face-mashing but has too many 2016-style interior protection breakdowns that prevent it from being more than B+ unit. PFF grades Stueber higher than Zinter; MGoBlog is the reverse. Vastardis grades out the lowest to both.
• Erick All is a secret weapon as a blocker and his drops go away, but he’s not the contested catch maven we hoped he would be.
• Josh Gattis isn’t back next year. Mike Hart is.