WTKA Roundtable 7/20/2023: Excuse Enough to Talk 45-23
Things Discussed:
- Let's talk 45-23: Klatt says OSU wins 6/10? OSU had to play a gambler's defense with their safeties in the box because they could not play their base defense against Michigan.
- Try that B12 shit against Olu and he's going to spot it.
- Usually don't have one of the all-time stinkers from a safety like they got from Lathan Ransom.
- Flipside: M practiced the right defense to beat OSU as their base defense all year. OSU's offense is predicated on the fact they can beat anyone's athletes, and that was true against even Georgia.
- Michigan's defense is designed to screw with NFL passing offenses, and OSU's is the most NFL passing offense in CFB.
- Northwestern: Brian Kelly says coach is responsible for everything, good to see a head coach saying this, unfortunately it's the biggest hypocrite in football.
- Hockey: Good hires for Naurato, the Chicago Steel are the best place to get a coach from if you're moving a guy up.
- Hockey facilities: They have a Wrigley Field problem: their house is both one of the most iconic hockey barns in the sport, and literally the first fieldhouse ever built. They already have to go up and down stairs to get to their locker room, and they have the visitors sitting behind a tarp. Probably need to build an extension on the building into the Schembechler lot. That's also what's holding them back from having a women's team.
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Segment 2 is here. You can watch the video here:
MGoBlog Roundtable https://t.co/XEsU11PLfo
— The Michigan Insider (@michiganinsider) July 20, 2023
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Spencer Petras is like hey, don't do any of that Petras stuff.
Re: Brian Kelly…
Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made a Great Point dot jpeg
i might be one of the few people here that has walked up and down those stairs at yost in skates. i think there might only be one other rink that has that arrangement. i've seen pictures of the steps since my days playing there and it looks like they fancied everything up to the Nth degree, but there are still stairs.
Michigan has more than enough money. Build a state of the art hockey rink. I don't think Yost is iconic as a hockey rink, especially when I saw Cazzie play there and watched hockey at the Coliseum where it was played from 1920-1973. Turn Yost into another gym, just like the Coliseum.
Build a state of the art practice and game facility that will support both men's and women's hockey programs and be able to host multi-team tournaments. That means multiple sheets of ice, of which Yost can certainly be a centerpiece.
I dunno, I think plenty of people (me included) find Yost very iconic. Maybe not quite as much since the renovations (many were necessary, but I'm still partial to the mid to late 2000s feel, especially in the seats (as opposed to the concourse), where I feel the renovations have made it more sterile), but the brick work, the styling, the character. You just don't get that anymore. So to be able to play in a building like that, it's special.
Turn Yost into another gym, just like the Coliseum.
No, no, no ... you can't replace Yost. A new arena wouldn't be the same. You could build a separate venue for the women (I believe Minnesota has done this?) but Yost needs to stay.
- Flipside: M practiced the right defense to beat OSU as their base defense all year. OSU's offense is predicated on the fact they can beat anyone's athletes, and that was true against even Georgia. Michigan's defense
Looks like this bullet got cut off, curious what it was supposed to say.
HUGE props to craig for the 'blazing saddles' reference.
I think the Klatt comments are being over-interpreted, and he's generally correct. Both wins the last two years were upsets by every definition - betting lines, predictive fancystats, and pundit predictions.
There is an inkling of truth to the "five explosive plays" line. On a distribution of game outcomes, 45-23 is on a tail because every big play broke in Michigan's favor (and the opposite happened in the TCU game). It's impossible to know the true odds but out of 10 (or 100 or whatever) hypothetical games between M-OSU, I don't think either team wins more than 60%.
It seems very homer-y of Sam, Craig, and to a lesser extent Seth and Brian, to draw a straight line from the last two games and assume everything has changed and Michigan is now an overwhelming favorite over OSU. We know that's not how football works.
And I know that talking heads talkin' doesn't affect anything on the field, but it still reminds me of the confidence after the 2019 win over Dantonio and MSU ("it's over"). While it was over for Dantonio, obviously Michigan lost the next two games in that particular series. Things can change and there are lots of random things that affect game outcomes.
Sambo, I agree.
The games were incredible. The preparation and game plans were, for the most part, excellent. The final scores were decisive.
But, one or two plays going the other way early in each game could've swung either or both to OSU's favor.
OSU is still - and will always be - a force with which to be reckoned.
polite disagreement with that idea. like you, i was at the 2021 game. i was pointing out to my son early on, like, late 1st quarter, that ohio's bench was dead, their body language was downtrodden and seemingly uninterested in anything other than getting out of the weather. no big play luck, turnovers not a factor, simply out-played them, out-charactered them. we win that game 10/10 or something like it.
2022 game is much like it, with no weather or tummy ache excuses for ohio. they were home. even without edwards' big plays we still are grinding them down the field. all edwards did was give them more clock to try and come back.
polite disagreement with that idea. like you, i was at the 2021 game. i was pointing out to my son early on, like, late 1st quarter, that ohio's bench was dead, their body language was downtrodden and seemingly uninterested in anything other than getting out of the weather. no big play luck, turnovers not a factor, simply out-played them, out-charactered them. we win that game 10/10 or something like it.
I dunno, I'm not so confident. We had trouble all day stopping their offense from moving the ball. To me the 15-point final margin comes from mainly from two things: The 3rd and 2 stop on their opening possession of the second half, and scoring TDs on all four of our real (i.e. not kneel-down) drives in the second half. Change the outcome of even one of those things, and all of a sudden it's staying a one-score game, at which point anything can happen.
Maybe it's just the BPONE, but I spent the second half of that game waiting for the inevitable bad thing to happen, and us start to lose our grip on the game, until it never did...
Didn’t we score every drive we had in the second half? Maybe I misremember that, but whatever trouble we may or may not have had stopping them, they absolutely could not stop us.
Yes, 4 possessions, 4 TDs. Let's not treat that like a fluke.
It wasn't just 4 TDs, it was 4 bludgeonings. As they said in the round table, the second half of 42-27 was like the Wisconsin game where Jordan Glasgow was a DE at the goal line.
We had trouble all day stopping their offense from moving the ball.
Against that offense, the objective was to keep them out of the endzone. They were going to get their yards.
Yup, the definition of bend don’t break defense
We had trouble all day stopping their offense from moving the ball.
That's somewhat true. You don't really "stop" that offense in the sense of shutting them out, but they also had drives of 1 yard, 32 yards, 6 yards, and 15 yards to start both halves. Ignoring the first-half kneel-down drive UM only had 1 drive that that picked up fewer than 10 yards, while they scored on drives of 75 yards, 82 yards, 81 yards, 78 yards, 66 yards, and 63 yards. Especially in that second half OSU had to string together this long, pass-happy drives with multiple long 4th-down conversions to keep them going. Again, drop the jerseys and it sure looks like one team is methodically dispatching a team while the other has to pull out a ton of tricks and high-leverage plays to stay within 2 scores of them. I agree that BPONE (the worst thing this site has every created, IMO) is real but I do think this fanbase needs to stop thinking that OSU is some juggernaut because they just aren't anymore. They were to a healthy degree under Meyer but Day just isn't that type of coach and it shows.
OSU damned near beat Georgia last year. They're really, really good. They're not as absurdly good as at the Urban Meyer peak, and Harbaugh has a formula for blowing up the death star. But let's not overstate Ohio State's decline.
OSU is good but the gap between them and UM is smaller than a lot of national pundits portray it to be, such as what Klatt is sort of insinuating here. Also, I'm sort of done with people reading so much into one game, a month after the season in a dome, where Georgia's corners suddenly couldn't cover anyone for shit and OSU did a bunch of atypical things. Hell, 6-7 Missouri nearly beat Georgia last year, and held them to way fewer points in the process. One-game sample sizes really don't tell you a lot but OSU has, for a couple years now, struggled against more physical teams and in conditions that aren't optimal for throwing the ball, and that's not something you saw with Meyer-led squads. So yeah, they aren't in danger of going 5-7 any time soon but they also aren't the juggernaut they looked, at times, under the past regime.
The counter-argument is “if your opponent plays a style of defense which INVITES you to break big plays, is it really THAT much of an outlier??”
Ohio State is a juggernaut, yes. But they brought this particular loss on themselves.
And, as always, “we win that game if you only take away all our opponents’ scoring plays” is a WEIRD thing to say. Especially if you’re counting your OWN big-play, high-variance, high-risk scoring.
TD passes to a well-covered Marvin Harrison Jr. count, but not TD passes to a wide open Cornelius Johnson who breaks a tackle?
The counter-argument is “if your opponent plays a style of defense which INVITES you to break big plays, is it really THAT much of an outlier??”
You have to make the plays, though. How many times was Roman Wilson wide open last season and JJ overthrew him? How many times were there big plays to be had against OSU that could have swung the game, and we didn't make them? Dropped INTs, Peppers missing the TFL on 3rd down in OT in 2016 (the play before "the spot"--Peppers makes the tackle on Curtis Samuel, and it's 4th and 17 from the 32 down 3 with a shaky kicker who already missed 2 FGs, instead of 4th and 1 from the 16). Etc. There have been enough instances of us not making the big plays that were available such that we shouldn't necessarily discount the fact that we made those plays last year.
TD passes to a well-covered Marvin Harrison Jr. count, but not TD passes to a wide open Cornelius Johnson who breaks a tackle?
Are you conflating Johnson's two touchdowns? The truly wide open one was the bomb; the CB screwed up, CJ was wide open, and walked into the endzone, but there was no missed tackle. The missed tackle was the first one. Yeah, CJ was open, but I'd say it was more "open for a curl/out" than "wide open." If the CB makes the tackle like he should have, it's a first down, but with the way our offense was bogging down to that point, it's very plausible we end up having to punt.
I agree. It's also true that CB's miss that tackle often enough - maybe 2X a game. Generally there is a safety or LB arriving to clean up.
Go back and re-watch CJ's curl/out td. Roman Wilson was ridiculously wide open on that play. The only reason OSU even had the opportunity to stop CJ for a first down was because JJ didn't hit Wilson. Just another instance of the OSU secondary being out of position because of the way they chose to defend us.
OSU is "out of position" because the DB falls down. JJ can't see Wilson because he's going to CJ the whole time. He knows it's a blitz, there ends up being a guy in his face and he hits him.
Man coverage allowed Michigan to make these big plays. But the pressure that comes with it can keep the QB from seeing open guys. Hard for JJ to count on the DB falling down.
It seems very homer-y of Sam, Craig, and to a lesser extent Seth and Brian, to draw a straight line from the last two games and assume everything has changed and Michigan is now an overwhelming favorite over OSU. We know that's not how football works
Ryan Day is now 1-2 against Michigan, and both losses were by double-digits while the one win was four years ago, against a very different Michigan staff (Harbaugh aside). Right now the burden of proof is on his program to show it can beat us.
Anyway, what bugs me about all the what-ifs about the OSU game is that no one ever brings up that we played effectively the entire game without our Heisman trophy frontrunner.
OSU was at home, played a shorthanded Michigan team with a first-year QB and still got embarrassed by three TDs.
"There is an inkling of truth to the "five explosive plays" line. On a distribution of game outcomes, 45-23 is on a tail because every big play broke in Michigan's favor"
The problem is, that is not true. The jump pass play would have been a touchdown if it had been thrown by a QB. The Stroud "sack" that was actually a fumble recovery would have been a touchdown if it had been called correctly. The JJ run before the phantom OSU "timeout" would have set up a FG at minimum if the refs hadn't credited OSU with a timeout after the snap.
Every big play that actually happened went Michigan's way, sure. But there were other opportunities that didn't. OSU's defense set up those opportunities, and I don't think they hit at an unreasonable rate.
Last season OSU allowed plays of:
40+ yards 18 times (115th FBS rank)
50+ yards 11 times (123rd FBS rank)
60+ yards 6 times (120th FBS rank)
70+ yards 5 times (128th FBS rank)
Seems to me that allowing explosive plays is something they were just categorically really bad at, and a couple of decent teams took advantage of it.
Yes. Well said.
Maybe this is overly philosophical, but are we saying they play ten times in a vacuum? Like there is no previous game to learn anything from? In that case, I think Michigan came in with the correct gameplan, Knowles came in with an arrogant and insane gameplan, and Michigan wins the majority.
If the ten games are played in succession and you have learned history to look back on, then I think Ohio State likely learns lessons from game to game and the talent level is too much to overcome and they win in a larger sample.
I agree that the idea of Michigan being the overwhelming favorite vs. OSU is wrong, but it's been 2 years now of people saying UM just got a couple of explosive plays to beat OSU. Michigan was down Blake Corum and had a lead back with basically one arm, against a team that was sending 8+ guys into the box on almost every play. Corum had gone down the game before, so they didn't have really any time to play and scheme with Edwards as the feature back and it sort of showed early on, especially as McCarthy also missed a couple of throws. But Michigan clearly had a plan and much like in 2021 it focused on just pushing OSU's front 7 back consistently until things started to break open because at some point if you have to dedicate 8+ guys to stop the run you're putting a ton of pressure on your mediocre corners and safeties to keep up with good WRs. And when it did that's when you saw the "big" plays kick in, but they were almost a lagging indicator of the game itself.
And then in the second half Edwards had those huge runs but they were preceded by a 7-yard completion, 5-yard and 9-yard JJ runs, a 12-yard Edwards run, a 9-yard Edwards run, a couple of OSU DPIs, and a general sense that their defense was spent and could be moved. And we saw the same pattern in 2021, where the first half was a bit of a stalemate and then UM just ran over OSU in the second half. If anything, OSU was the beneficiary of a lot of flukish plays, especially in 2021 where Stroud got bailed out repeatedly by his all-world WRs making crazy catches on passes that, even if they were thrown well, are still 50/50 balls in coverage.
I do agree with any rivalry it's not realistic to declare it "over" for one side vs. the other but even the MSU run recently has been the definition of sorta-flukey, non-reproducible patterns that don't change the narrative that UM is the better program by a clear margin after that not being the case for the previous 10-12 years.
excellent details on the 'why' of both wins. piggy-backing on the 2021 catches by the ohio kids, a couple of them were insane. and for both games, i was shocked at how poorly their defensive backfield played. caveat, of course i don't know their defensive sets and assignments, but if nothing else the 'soft as charmin' element shows up on our very first TD in 2021, that WR reverse sweep. if i had a kid on our team mail it in as bad as the ohio DB's, i'd be in their grill about it and i'm not a hot-button type of coach. that was pathetic effort and hustle and the ohio DB's just didn't want to engage beyond 'meh' level.
I sure don't believe UM is or should be a huge favorite against OSU this year at this point. I hope I didn't say so. I don't think UM's program is better than OSU's, but with the current states of coaching I think it is reasonably close. I just don't think the games the last two years represented any sort of an outlier or weird result. UM was just better in those games.
I don't think it's "BPONE," but some of us grew up thinking of Ohio State as an almost-unstoppable force (even though Bo and Lloyd, of course, held their own against the Buckeyes). And then of course the past 20 years have sort of hammered that home. I still go into every game against them thinking of them as a behemoth, and ... I doubt that'll change next year.
Plus, it's not true that every big play went against us last year. I still can't quite believe Ohio State missed on that 4th and 2 throw in the first half — first time all game we were able to get them off the field without a score — and while that Loveland TD to start the second half was amazing, it was also clearly a cluster-fuck of a play that defeated coverage, not a planned route. (That being said, it's great to have breaks like that going our way, now). And even Sainristil's play, as flat-out amazing as it was, could easily have been a touchdown for the Buckeyes. Not to mention Stroud's INT near the end. We certainly got some breaks too.
Finally, I think part of the reason this game still raises some questions is that the Buckeyes were actually winning at halftime, and I can understand how that confuses the analysis. I certainly wasn't thinking, "sweeeet, we got this game won, baby!"
I don't think anybody's saying that we didn't outplay them, or didn't deserve to beat them. I certainly don't read Klatt's comments as suggesting that. We did. We flat out beat them. And they don't get a replay, any more than we do for 2016. But I simply didn't see anything during the season leading up to the game that would have led me to expect a 20-point win in Columbus, and the final result was — to me — wonderfully surprising, rather than fully expected.
All that being said, by the way, I was intrigued by Seth's comment today that the reason the lead-up to the game may not have prepared many of us laymen for the extent of the dominance in Columbus is that our defense was actively practicing and playing a beat-OSU defense all season, which may have actually hurt us a little bit in select games. I'm not expert enough on defensive tactics to be able to see it myself, but it's a fascinating suggestion, and it kinda makes sense. That was interesting analysis!
It's too Neck Sharpies for live radio--Cody Alexander's article in HTTV is on this. The gist of it is that Michigan runs zones that switch around who's covering what zone, but those zones are going to give up yards underneath and take away material from the running game that opponents were able to exploit. The thing about the Don Brown defense is he usually had 8 in the box and five guys attacking the LOS, which meant you had to beat someone to get any yards at all. The Ravens approach makes offenses guess at and prove where the weak spots are before the extra guy finds you. That strategy normalizes talent differentials, which is a noon against Ohio State and a negative against Illinois.
Our O line dominated once OSU stopped bringing the house, but they also blew our guys off the line in the first half until they stopped running the ball. I think Michigan will win again, but Day and Knowles aren't stupid and they'll have a better gameplan this year.
Yeah. And maybe that was an adjustment to something we changed that's too nuanced for us amateurs to notice, but I certainly didn't notice us changing our approach; OSU just seemed to give up running the ball. There's definitely the feel that Day stopped their offense almost as much as our defense did, which continues to baffle...
That's who they are. When push comes to shove, Day will opt to pass, and Knowles will put a ton in the box and leave his DBs on an island. They may beat us, but it won't be because they changed their spots.
okay. if you say "we need to upgrade the hockey facilities" you are implying that "yost is a hindrance," in some way, shape, or form.
this is, of course, pure batshit crazy on an objective level. we aren't losing games due to poor attendance atmosphere. even if you ascribe to the notion that less-than-perfect facilities can hurt recruiting (i don't), that hasn't actually, you know, happened. we're putting the visitors in a crappy locker room. we're asking our players to (apparently) go up and down stairs in skates? i guess?
oh, it's the oldest "fieldhouse" in the country. yes, and? so what? fenway and wrigley are the oldest baseball parks in the country. i'm guessing that lambeau and soldier field are the oldest nfl stadiums. soldier field screwed up their last renovation, but the others on this list are jewels, worthy of preservation up to the point where they fall into the sea.
you want to renovate yost, fine. we did a great job on michigan stadium, it can be done...and it needed it! but we don't "need" to do it.
/rant over.
To be fair, it isn't just people here saying it. There was a free article recently on Michigan Insider with Naurato himself talking about the need for updated facilities. That doesn't mean ditching Yost, but it does mean that the head coach himself perceives some issues there. There isn't a lot of (or any) open real estate right next to Yost, but something will have to be done eventually
And if updating the facilities means that we also are closer to being able to accommodate a women's team too, then that is even better.
More 45-23 content? Yes please. I can't get enough!
Inject it directly into my veins, please.
Kind of a confusing misread by Sam on Klatt's UM-OSU comments. It clearly was meant that the last two years were upsets, but a third Michigan win this year would not be one. Seconds later, Klatt says "Michigan is the class of the Big Ten."
It's July, I guess...need any reason to get fired up.
The Game talk, the reference to the game comes down to 5 plays or so imo is dismissive of so many great plays made all game long. The difference wasn't 5 plays. Imo it was 60 minutes of keep making plays. Sanristil has two massive pbu's, McGregor massive plays on 3rd and short to force bad throw or get the pbu, and force a punt. The punt cover teams, osu had an option fake, punter keep called and when the punter flashed backside for a brief second he saw the contain guy show the outside shoulder, turns back in and punts. Osu fans said that's an easy first down when it was the smart play but the reality is, if our contain guy isn't in position, it is a first down. Db's making tackles when the rec catches a pass, get them to the ground. Force fg's..
On offense, this game was put on JJ's shoulders because Edwards wasn't 100% and he was hesitant early. The offense kept driving the field. Heavy pressure on the double A gap blitz, 3rd and 9, JJ had his choice but his first read was Cornelius Johnson, who simply runs a great route, JJ hits the out with velocity and Johnson gets the ball turns up field fights out of the tackle and TD.. JJ had Roman Wilson in the middle of the field behind the blitz for a td if JJ see's that.. nobody there. The play action to Colston Loveland for the td in the 3rd qtr, just awesome.
Everyone talks 3*,4* and 5* and while there is a difference it isn't massive. The biggest difference is the player buy in and effort all year long to win, to be better. The difference is many things, a scheme that puts everyone in position to win, to be successful and doesn't have them do what they aren't capable of doing. By all recruiting experts osu's roster is significantly more talented. And yet, the highest ranked receiving group with nothing but nfl caliber qb's, receivers, rb's oline held to 23pts at home in perfect weather. That offense is going to throw 3 more receivers into the nfl, likely 2 of them 1st round, will put another qb, rb, te and a few oline into the nfl draft. Yet held to 23. That's coaching, that's player evaluation by our staff, development and complete total buy in by our players to bust their tails all season long to play on the biggest stage and win! They were trusted to make the plays against players supposedly a lot more talented than they are and they beat them, straight up, no excuses beat them. No need for officials to screw the game like 2016 cause even the officials can't deny this one!
great synopsis!
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