9/2/2023– Michigan 30, East Carolina 3 – 1-0

Well, here we go.

The best kind of thing to take from a game against a solid G5 program that's just turned over the vast majority of their personnel is one that is opponent-invariant, and the most opponent-invariant thing in football is quarterbacks dropping dimes. This space has long maintained that if the offensive executes perfectly, they just get to win. Via that lens the most important development from the opener is the prevalence of "nice try, I win" plays. ECU had some moments of excellent coverage that just did not matter.

McCarthy started out hot, casually dropping in an NFL-level 15-yard out to the field on Michigan's first drive that featured passes:

In addition to the Here Look At My Arm Talent plays he also moved opponents with the power of his mind. Folks have already pointed out the little pump fake on the third Wilson touchdown but this one is probably even better. Wilson isn't open until McCarthy focuses on Loveland:

ECU CB to bottom

Live I thought that was a weird coverage bust; no, it was just McCarthy manipulating the defense. This is something he did last year, particularly early, but it was an occasional thing. That felt like promise; here it felt more like a preview.

There is a warm blanket of a feeling you get when you are suddenly a fan of a football team with a quarterback who is obviously an NFL dude. The ability to drop back and rifle in lasers to guys who are sort of open changes the feeling of third and seven from "yikes" to "you have insulted my family by creating this third and medium situation and now I will exact my vengeance."

McCarthy did a version of this early last year as well, turning in 100% downfield success rate performances against Hawaii and UConn. This was different, though. ECU might not be good but this did not feel like the rote walkovers from last year. ECU asked McCarthy some questions, and he answered them. In addition to the two plays embedded above there was the throw to Loveland where ECU sent the house; McCarthy backpedaled to the left a bit to buy another half-second of time, then formed up and delivered a dart. This was not the McCarthy who went on a couple endless sojourns against Maryland last year. He was decisive. He was confident. He was in command.

He was locked in to the point where we can individually consider his incompletions:

• Wilson has the ball punched out early.
• McCarthy throws behind Johnson on a quick out during the one-minute drill.
• A linebacker with freaky long arms gets his hand on a ball that's arcing towards an AJ Barner touchdown in the back corner of the endzone.
• McCarthy breaks the pocket and can't quite get it to Wilson.

I don't think 1 and 3 are negatives, but just good plays from the defense, and 4 was a difficult proposition. I did think he'd broken the pocket enough that he did not need to pull the trigger immediately and could have run closer to the LOS. At that point the throws are easier and you can just run if necessary. So that is my complaint from this game. He's going to come in for a silly UFR grade.

The season preview said that if Michigan was going to Beat Georgia the McCarthy training wheels needed to come off, and they did. After the first drive 11/16 McCarthy first downs were passes. Michigan ran all the play action we begged for over the offseason, because ECU came in with an aggressive, OSU/TCU game plan.

Michigan said no, that's not going to work anymore. Try another idea.

AWARDS

Known Friends and Trusted Agents Of The Week

schwangle! [Barron]

you're the man now, dog

#1 JJ McCarthy. See above.

#2(T) Roman Wilson and Cornelius Johnson. Wilson was more prominent in TDs but Johnson had the best catch of the day, a leaping stab of a ball a bit behind him to pick up a first down. Between them they caught everything that could be caught and seemed to be on the same page as McCarthy in a Jeremy Gallon sort of way.

#3(T) Ernest Haussmann, Kenneth Grant, Mike Sainristil, and Josh Wallace. It is extremely difficult to come up with a defensive player for this game because of the huge amount of rotation. Only Keon Sabb and Keshaun Harris had more than 36 snaps and 25 different players had at least 10. But also ECU was held to three points so lets sprinkle some holy water on the D, too.

Haussman led Michigan in solo tackles and had a couple of legit sticks; Sainristil had a pick and shut off the outside; Grant induced the Sainristil pick; Wallace almost had a stunning INT of his own but for the vagaries of fate and gave up zero completions on his two targets. Two points each to distinguish them from the clawing pack.

Honorable mention: Tommy Doman blasts some balls, including a That's Bait Kickoff. Kris Jenkins and Mason Graham delete all interior runs at them. Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards both flash their ability in mercifully limited opportunities.

KFaTAotW Standings.

(points: #1: 8, #2: 5, #3: 3, HMs one each. Ties result in somewhat arbitrary assignments.)

8: JJ McCarthy (#1 ECU)
4: Roman Wilson (T2 ECU), Cornelius Johnson (T2 ECU)
2: Ernest Hausmann (T3 ECU), Kenneth Grant (T3 ECU), Mike Sainristil (T3 ECU), Josh Wallace (T3 ECU)
1: Tommy Doman (HM ECU), Kris Jenkins (HM ECU), Mason Graham (HM ECU), Blake Corum (HM ECU), Donovan Edwards (HM ECU).

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

JJ McCarthy looks off a flat defender and lays in a gorgeous touchdown to Roman Wilson in the corner of the endzone. 

Honorable mention: Replay official has the over and lets the first Wilson TD stand. Blake Corum bursts off the left side, giving us some of them good Blake Corum feelings. Mike Sainristil picks off a pass that's a duck because the quarterback is trying not to be flattened by Kenneth Grant.

MARCUS HALL EPIC DOUBLE BIRD OF THE WEEK.

Michigan runs dive after dive in an attempt to get Edwards a touchdown, resulting in a goal line stand after a fumbled exchange on fourth down.

Honorable mention: Michigan's first drive is three runs under the shadow of their own goal line that gets stuffed. ECU's punter is annoyingly good at dropping in line drives just inside the sideline that roll forever. XP is missed.

OFFENSE

Quarterback takes have been expressed. Moving on.

Tackle: I continue not to get it. I'll have to UFR everything to get a definitive score but when I went over Michigan's busted runs Myles Hinton came up a lot. The frustrating first drive had multiple examples. On second down Zinter chips a DT and moves on; Hinton doesn't pick him up because he's doubling a DE with the TE. On third down ECU has a DT/LB twist on that's pretty clever and delivers a linebacker to the POA, but that guy is only cleanup after the backside DE slants under Barner:

Bad job Barner, I guess, but historically I cut guys some slack when they're trying to block a guy who 1) starts inside of him and 2) slants away from him. And:

Look at that gap in the line. Someone's filling it, and in this situation it is highly likely that the hand-in-dirt DE, who's shaded outside of Hinton instead of inside of Barner, is shooting inside. Hinton needs to help his TE out here; instead he releases to nobody and doesn't touch a Pirate on this play.

Contrast that to Trente Jones getting a late shift from a DE, anticipating the slant inside, and putting that guy on his ass:

"TE" #53 to bottom of line

Jones was also the point-of-attack blocker on Corum's long power run and blew a guy halfway across the formation.

This appears to be a consensus view since Hinton came in for PFFs lowest M OL grade in this game and Hinton himself told the assembled media that he "didn't play very well." He also said he "didn't play like [he] practiced," which is a thing that happens when people are in new situations. Jones should get the start next week if Michigan's following the same pattern they did last year, and if he performs like he did a year ago I'd imagine he holds onto the job.

do something about… that guy [Fuller]

Run blocking: withholding judgment. I tweeted something during the game that asserted that Michigan's shotgun runs weren't very effective because JJ keeps were off and ECU got to shoot unblocked guys at the ballcarrier repeatedly. On review this was only true a couple times, but there's a reason that the gun was generally regarded as a passing formation before the dawn of the zone read, and Michigan did little to control backside ends. When they did pop Bredeson into the flat it was an easy chunk gain, and I'm pretty sure that Edwards run that popped all the way out the backside was an intentional cutback. They ran a few things like it a year ago.

Anyway: new center, still figuring out the tackle situation, going up against some serious blitzballers. It'll get better. The weak YPC isn't the whole story because 1) a couple of successful Edwards runs were those touch handoffs that are very very technically passes and 2) Michigan decided to run the all dive redzone offense again when they tried to get Edwards a touchdown instead of just running plays that would score.

I'm not too concerned.

Heck yeah catchy guys. On review the first incompletion to Wilson was a PBU, not a drop—Wilson was just about to complete the tuck into his elbow when the ECU defender punched it out—so there's virtually nothing negative to report from the wide receiver corps. They helped McCarthy out a few times and there were no routine drops. Sometimes you take this for granted, and then you watch FSU-LSU and are suddenly very grateful that Michigan receivers have not regularly dropped throws in their facemask for a long, long time. The last guy who was an inexplicable drops guy was… Braylon Edwards?

Fred Moore unexpectedly prominent [Fuller]

Notable depth chart items. First game, actual depth chart reveal:

• Fred Moore appears to be WR #4, give or take O'Leary. He was in front of Derrius Clemons based on snap counts and targets. Clemons did get in earlier but there's a bullet about this in a sec.
• Backup OL was T/El-Hadi/Crippen/Gentry/T. This seems like good news for Gentry, who appears to have booted Reece Atteberry to defense, at least temporarily, because he was clearly on the two-deep.
• Kalel Mullings is indeed RB3.
• Davis Warren is QB2, although Harbaugh said the competition between Warren and Tuttle is ongoing.

 

Self-scouting ho. Michigan had some serious personnel tips in this game. Colston Loveland was 80% pass. Cornelius Johnson snaps were almost 70% pass; ditto Roman Wilson. Max Bredeson was the inverse, as was Trente Jones. Jones, ok, bonus OL whatever, but the starting WRs were very heavy pass tips and anyone else at WR was a heavy run tip. Clemons was two passes, 11 runs. Other guys were less extreme but third and fourth quarter snaps play into that.

hoss [Fuller]

Still on team Mullings. Mullings has kept his nose in front of Ben Hall for RB3 and he had a couple of late runs on which he was able to escape tacklers with nimble feet and then plow a rugby scrum forward for significant YAC. Mullings also intrigues as a second back with either Corum or Edwards, because he's big enough to be a reasonably good fullback and a good enough runner to be a lone back. Michigan ran out a few plays featuring both Mullings and Edwards; will be something to keep an eye on going forward.

DEFENSE

that kind of day [Barron]

Rotation items. Game one always gives you a chance to find out the actual depth chart. This is what it looked like to me:

DE	DT	DT	DE
Braiden McGregor	Kris Jenkins	Mason Graham	Jaylen Harrell
Derrick Moore	Kenneth Grant	Cam Goode/Rayshaun Benny	TJ Guy/Josiah Stewart

Goode and Guy actually got the first snaps when the second team rotated in, which was constantly. No DL had more than 27 snaps; 10 had at least ten. Guy and Goode, despite getting in first, look like third string options based on snap counts.

No need for a linebacker chart as only three guys got in before garbage time. Ernest Hausmann actually led Michigan in snaps and rotated through both MLB and WLB. Jaydon Hood and Micah Pollard are apparently third string, assuming that Jimmy Rolder is in front of them when he's back from injury.

The secondary:

CB	CB	NK	S	S
Will Johnson	Josh Wallace	Mike Sainristil	Rod Moore	Makari Paige
Keshaun Harris	Jyaire Hill	Ja’Den McBurrows	Keon Sabb	Zeke Berry
DJ Waller	Kody Jones		Quinten Johnson

There had been rumors that Berry was practicing at nickel but McBurrows got all the non-Sainristil snaps there. I assume Amorion Walker factors in the CB depth chart somewhere but I have no idea where.

FWIW. Johnson warmed up with the ones and at that point I assumed he was playing. Sitting him was a very narrow decision, it appears. One dollar he's back for UNLV.

under duress [Barron]

Pass rush: ask again later. ECU did not suffer any sacks but they resorted to tactics that indicated they didn't think they could block Michigan at all. A large majority of plays that went downfield were quick fades, especially after ECU faced down the terrifying possibility of a Kenneth Grant stunt up the gut:

There were a lot of plays where ECU barely avoided disaster despite the gameplan. I think it'll come out decently in UFR.

Rooster Uche issues. Josiah Stewart came in after TJ Guy. He ended up with almost twice Guy's snaps so I think Michigan wants Stewart to blow up and get through the WDE depth chart until he's obviously the guy after Harrell. This implies there is a reason Guy got in before Stewart and in the limited time we got it seems pretty clear: Stewart's not very good at setting an edge. Almost the only ECU success on the ground all day came when guys bounced outside of Stewart. This only happened ~2 times, but that's not good relative to the other options unless you're ripping the quarterback's spine out of his body. That's pending.

you have our attention [Fuller]

About those fades. Michigan defended all of them, with Josh Wallace one ill-placed foot from an eye-opening interception:

I know this INT doesn’t hold up, but the body control and concentration by Josh Wallace (26, grad transfer from UMass) is too good to not highlight. pic.twitter.com/PbUEL26FMg

— Due# (@JDue51) September 3, 2023

Keon Sabb got tested on a slot fade on ECU's first drive and got a PBU; on the podcast there was some debate about how good this defense actually was. Sabb didn't get his head around but he didn't get lucky; instead he looked at his guy and got a hand between his mark's arms. I'll take that from a sophomore safety.

Hello Hausmann. I was a little skeptical that Hausmann was deserving of his #1-in-the-portal-until-Travis-Hunter-shows-up status midway through the offseason transfer cycle, but after one game featuring a couple of thunderous sticks and scattered plays between he looks like a keeper. This is another scouting win for a program that has them coming out their ears; despite the fact Hausmann was the #6 kid in Nebraska he was a "top target" for M, per Lorenz, and when things went south with the hometown school they leapt on the kid.

SPECIAL TEAMS

sproing [Fuller]

It's all new, so by relative confidence level:

PUNTER. Tommy Doman booted 44 and 45 yard punts that were obvious fair catches as soon as they came off his foot, one of them on a snap from the one yard line. He booted all of his kickoffs into the endzone aside from one James "Doug" Foug memorial pop-up to the two that had so much hang time that I was actively hoping the ECU returner would take the bait; he did and ECU started at the sixteen—actually the eight thanks to a penalty.

Doman looks like a seamless transition to another Brad Robbins tenure of approximately four opponent punt returns per season.

KICK RETURN. There was only one and it went in the endzone.

KICKER. A missed extra point isn't a banner way to start your Michigan career but Turner, previously 1/6 from 50+ on his career, was 2/3 in this one, although one of the makes didn't count because ECU had called timeout. His career record under 40 is such that I'm not worried about XP goofery.

English was not one of the four potential PR guys Harbaugh mentioned [Barron]

PUNT RETURN. Jake Thaw probably didn't have a shot at the first punt since it was a line drive that was just down the sideline, but other attempts were iffy. This feels like the brief Caden Kolesar experiment a couple years back, where the guy who did the best job at not putting the ball on the turf in practice got early-season snaps until the fast guy people wanted to take the job got it. In that case it was AJ Henning; here Karmello English got the last one and might be the long term solution.

MISCELLANEOUS

hang the red hat, hang the red hat, hang the red hat [Fuller]

Hope you like ads. All of that offseason garbage about how games needed to be shorter was just that. Through week one the new clock rules have cut off somewhere between four and 15 plays per game—there are a lot of competing claims out there—and all of that time has gone directly into commercials. Somebody crunched the numbers on the FSU-LSU game:

A reader crunched the numbers, hope you enjoyed last night’s event that included 131 ads and also some pretty great football in between. pic.twitter.com/y0TEAxw1Fd

— RedditCFB (@RedditCFB) September 4, 2023

In this game, Peacock—a streaming service that is making basically nothing off ads if their rotation is any indication—went to timeout with 19 seconds left in the third quarter and 46 seconds left in the fourth quarter.

What's the other thing that's on Peacock all the time? The EPL. NBC got six years of EPL rights for "more than $2.5 billion" two years ago. As of a year ago their all-time record for viewership for an EPL game was 1.4 million. College football absolutely dwarfs that. There are ways to make this less miserable, but no one is interested in exploring them.

Fox went to commercial seven times during the 2nd quarter, or once every 2 minutes and 9 seconds of game time. Good thing they changed the clock rules to shorten games.

— Tom Fornelli (@TomFornelli) September 2, 2023

Corporations should figure out that at some point your brand is being associated with "I hate you, give me the football back."

Harbaugh tribute o'clock. JJ McCarthy got off the bus with a "FREE HARBAUGH" shirt on, several other players wore Harbaugh-themed T-shirts, and Michigan's first snap not on the shadow of their own goal line was a train formation where the players held up four fingers—for the Alex Drains reading this, Harbaugh wore #4 at Michigan*. None of this really matters, but I guess it's nice to see that the players are upset about this in a way I bet one dollar no Brian Kelly team could ever be. Team seems tight-knit.

*[This is completely unfair to Alex, who has watched far more 1970-80s sports than I have, but in my defense I am very upset that he is so young.]

New scoreboards. I imagine they'll work out the kinks, but one man's initial impression:

• What's the point when replays don't take up the whole board? Make the football guys bigger for that bit.
• I do not need to know the score of a game that happened three days ago or that is scheduled for tonight. Keep it limited to ongoing games and the Saudi Premiere League.
• The stats were poorly presented. They were about 50% too large, forcing various drill-down stats to take up two pages. Attempts were presented on two different lines instead of "12/13," which was a thing that actually happened, and all of it was maize, which is a horrible background color. Shrink the stats, only rotate through the drill-downs during commercials. Make it look like a webpage, and when was the last time you tried to read something with a lurid yellow background? This isn't Geocities, baby.

HERE

State of Our Open Threads:

There were only 19 fucks given the entire game, and several of those were about the portions of the game hidden from view by Xfinity's wondrous creation. The same really goes for the mere 24 shits given as well, although a few of those were from people who were already in mid-season form in the open thread. I do wish some of you wouldn't take the first game quite so seriously, but whatever. For a bit of contrast though, we managed 34 fucks and 30 shits in last year's Colorado State open thread, so by first appearances, we enter this season in a slightly more serene state, relatively speaking for Michigan fans.

With pics:

We were all excited about JJ's performance, and rightly so, but what jumped out to me on rewatching was how easy so much of it was. Here's a capture I took at random from later in the game:

Look at all that space in the middle. Michigan's receivers were running dig routes into the middle of the field all afternoon; this one is notable because you can actually see defenders on the screen, something that did not always occur.

Best and Worst on the Fingers Aloft:

It was a bit cheesy but in a season where we already saw Northwestern players wear shirts saying “Cats Against the World” because their coach got fired for (checks notes) allowing a locker room culture of sexual humiliation and hazing to fester for decades, it was a harmless sign of support for their suspended coach.  Most people seemed to agree in this assessment, though a couple of the usual suspects such as Steven Godfrey, whose entire personality appears to be just the physical manifestation of Calvin pissing on a Chevy logo and has a burning hatred for Michigan that seems to emanate from some time when Brian called him an idiot online, tried their hardest to make it some convoluted, premeditated middle finger from Harbaugh to the NCAA, as if Jim doesn’t have access to a pulpit (and used it) when he wants to roast his enemies.  Regardless, we’ve got two more weeks of this insanity before Harbaugh returns to the sideline, but at this point it remains a bit surreal that a team as cocky (and good) as Michigan helmed by the deeply-weird and sometimes off-putting Jim Harbaugh would be receiving so much public support, but apparently the NCAA was able to mine deep enough into the core of the world in their search of continued relevance to cause that type of tectonic shift in public perception.

And your Michigan War Dad content of the week:

In 1844, the United States looked nothing like the country we know today. Texas was still in its brief period of independence, and nearly everything west of the Mississippi was unsettled, untamed, and and incredibly dangerous. Despite the images of the West subsequent decades were to produce, both the technology of the 1840’s and the strength of the local native populace put the settlers at a huge disadvantage.

In the summer of that year, Comanche war chief Yellow Wolf launched another in a stream of seemingly unending raids into Texas, hitting remote Bexar County. Yellow Wolf’s war band was large, around 80 warriors, and the Comanche were the dominant mounted force in the Americas. Captain John Coffee Hays of the Texas Rangers set off with just fourteen men to find Yellow Wolf and stop the raids.

Jack Hays

War on the frontier had taken up a more or less familiar formula by 1844.