Best: An Offense That Works

I've been saying for a couple of weeks now that I thought the offense was on the mend. Iowa was a speed bump but Illinois showed a team capable of putting up points in a hurry if they had to, and at the bare minimum capable of both running and passing the ball consistently. But still, it's another level of performance for Michigan to put up over 400 yards of total offense on a top-10 defense, on the road, and had to weather a couple of atrociously bad calls as well. They still made mistakes, but these felt like mistakes teams make in games because the opposition is trying to stop them, not because they are barely competent to read a play sheet. It's somewhat depressing we're 7 games into the season before it happens, but I'll be honest I'd rather see some evidence now than never.

Shea Patterson had a pretty good game all things considered; he threw a pick on an ill-advised screen (though in his defense had Charbonnet not tripped it likely wouldn't have been a turnover, just a minimal loss) that led to a PSU TD, and I'm sure missed a number of wide open* receivers and run pulls that will be the talk of the town for another week. But in a game where his receivers dropped a couple of very catchable balls early, were mugged in plain view of the refs, and were called for two offensive pass interferences (the DPJ one was correct; the Collins one continues to boggle my mind in a game where Freiermuth just shoved Hudson off him), he did well to keep drives going in the air and, maybe for the first time against an opponent with a pulse, showcase just how dangerous the passing game can be. Bell, Collins, and DPJ all caught at least 5 balls and were targeted numerous other times. He also ran the ball 12 times for 34 yards, a combination of scrambles and designed runs that, especially in the second half, left PSU's defense in a constant state of uncertainty. I don't know if the best game of his Michigan career or anything, but it was a heady performance by a guy who needed to pull one out on the road.

The rest of the offense looked pretty solid as well. PSU came into the game leading the nation in sacks; much of that is due to Purdue not understanding how football worked and why the angry guys in white jerseys kept hitting their friend behind the line of scrimmage, but it is still a skilled, talented unit playing at home and, at times, with unbridled aggression. Early on you could tell the offense was a bit rattled, especially as drives either failed to string together a coherent offensive flow or were undone by untimely penalties or missed opportunities. But after being down 21-0 the offense noticeably settled down as Haskins and Patterson methodically moved the team downfield, converting on some long plays and generally staying on schedule. They had a good chance to score more points to end the first half but a bad pass and a questionable missed PI left them with an ill-advised 58 yard FG which was promptly missed. But still, you could see a world slightly different than this one where the teams are within a score at the half, bullshit and all.

The second half largely followed suit to the end of the first; PSU couldn't do much offensively (they had 16 yards in the 3rd quarter) as Michigan scored again to pull within 7. The defense, after some early missteps, just ate up PSU's offense, as the Nittany Lions resorted to the "Clifford run and pray" offense we've seen before by teams stymied by Michigan's aggressiveness. But KJ Hamler, who kept getting favorable matchups against guys like Vincent Gray, Metellus, and Daxton Hill, ran past everyone for a 53-yard TD to make it 2 scores again. Michigan came back to close the gap, then had one final drive to tie. Again, the offense worked its way downfield with a forecefulness we haven't seen most of the year; PSU's early pressure and aggressiveness was gone, replaced by something resembling resignation at OT. But Michigan scuttled at the goal line, Ronnie Bell (who had otherwise had a really good game) dropped the game-tying TD in the endzone, and that was it on the upset bid.

On the one hand, this was an encouraging game even with the loss. Michigan got blasted by Wisconsin when they went to Madison; nobody would have been surprised had that happened against after being down 21 points this game. But Michigan fought back and, honestly, should have at least tied this game, if not won outright. Not necessarily because PSU played all that poorly (though this was the 4th time they've been outgained this season, and that shiny 3-0 record in 1-score games likely points to a bit of luck), but because Michigan looked good after that first quarter. And it wasn't so much that Michigan looked ill-prepared for PSU, just that PSU came out like you'd expect for a home night game and Michigan had to adjust.

Is it safe to assume this is the beginning of an offensive awakening? I don't know. Notre Dame could come into Ann Arbor next weekend and hound Patterson into a couple of picks, stymie the running game, and we'd be back to full-on panic mode. But this feels sustainable to a degree, a team that took some time to digest a playbook and the coaches figure out the right mix of calls. And while it likely won't matter against OSU I'm more confident Michigan will be able to move the ball against everyone else on the schedule, and that includes whatever ju-ju MSU will pull out. I guess this is what optimism feels like.

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.

Worst: The Blake O'Neill Brigade

All of the following can (and are) true statements:

• Ronnie Bell is one of Michigan's most consistent receivers.
• He was instrumental in Michigan's comeback in this game, including a huge 35-yard conversion on 3rd down where he had to make a guy miss in space and he did.
• He's had a couple of drops this year, including the crucial one on 4th down in the endzone that could have tied the game late.
• People who threaten or otherwise disparage unpaid college athletes because they had a bad play at an inopportune time should be shot into the sun.

We've been down this road before, and the same rules apply. I'm not going to dive into a discussion about how discourse online is virulently toxic generally and becomes an absolute cauldron of the foulest shit when personally-irrelevant-but-emotionally-SUPER-RELEVANT sports gets mixed in, but none of this surprises me. At a qualitative level, I'm sure very few "Michigan fans" are sending awful messages toward Ronnie Bell; I tend to ascribe to the notion that a vocal minority who demand to see the manager for most asshole and asshole-adjacent behavior is smaller than even their presence would suggest. At the same time, though, I'm fairly certain Bell has received more than one awful message from an actual Michigan fan, likely sporting an avatar of him (and it's going to be a him) staring at the camera with some self-satisfied expression and a bio/handle featuring some combination of Michigan slogans, images, and rhetoric of about his level of fandom. And frankly, that's one message too many.

Bell dropped the football; he knows it likely cost Michigan a chance at tying the game and possibly pulling off an upset on the road against a top-rated foe. By all accounts, he was inconsolable after the game. His QB defended him but recognized that what's done is done, and to continue to harp on a mistake isn't useful. This isn't some technique issue, or forgetting the play, or some other "teaching" moment; when you try to catch an oblong ball thrown at you while a 200 lb+ guy is hovering around you, your success rate isn't going to be 100%.

There's a frustration around the program that is totally understandable; as is oft-repeated we're in year 5 of Harbaugh and Michigan has returned to the historically good-but-not-elite position they occupied for most peoples' lives. Most fans expected more than that, and the hoopla surrounding his arrival and the bold proclamations it ushered in have largely gone unrealized. He's basically .500 against the top teams in the conference, hasn't beaten OSU once in 4 tries, and has never fielded an offense that really struck fear in the hearts of opponents. While I may not share the sentiment that these failures deserve an immediate termination as head coach, it is very fair to be critical of the state of the football team.

But it's really gotta end there, or at least that's where it has to end for me. No matter how much it sucks to watch a team lose, I can't find myself getting mad at the players. Now, that doesn't mean I can't point out when they make a mistake; to say "he dropped that ball", "that block was missed" or "that throw was off" are all valid criticisms. But as I've often noted, I'm rapidly getting farther and farther away age-wise with the average player on the team, and so with that distance is the realization that being mad at someone for failing to do something I'm not remotely qualified to do, at a pace I couldn't remotely keep up with, is stupid. It's basically free entertainment to me, and it's guys subjecting themselves to a myriad of abuses and dangers to produce it. YMMV on how far up my ass I am, but the minute that ball slipped through his hands I knew a bunch of people were searching Twitter, Instagram, and any other services available to dispense vitriol toward Bell. And that's embarrassing.

Worst, Then Best, Then Gah: The Defense

I know there's this sentiment with a subset of the fanbase that Don Brown is some overrated defensive coordinator, that because his teams do get scored on at times in bunches he's inflexible, unable to adapt quickly. I saw people argue it took him until halftime to figure out how to slow down PSU. Well, here is what PSU's offense did after scoring to start the 2nd quarter:

• 7 3-and-outs.
• 1 4-and-out.
• One 50-yard TD drive after a Patterson interception.
• one 75-yard TD drive that featured a KJ Hamler mismatch for 53 yards.

Brown had trouble keeping an eye on Hamler; some of that was obviously by design as PSU moved him around the field often. When Josh Metellus is asked to track Hamler off the line, that's an RPS minus for you. But PSU also got away with a pretty blatant OPI on their first TD, and a long ball to Dotson was impressively covered by Thomas and was just a great pitch-and-catch that could just as easily been picked off. So he's not off the hook, but the idea that the defense was abused by PSU doesn't feel right. This was 2017, and nothing PSU did was particularly atypical or against type. They just happened to bunch their big plays together into scores.

Still, Michigan was able to hold PSU to barely over 100 yards rushing (half of them coming on that one Slade run), while half of Clifford's passing on the day came from the 53-yarder to Hamler and a 37-yarder to Dotson that, again, Michigan had covered pretty well. PSU came into the game with the nation's #10 offense, and while that was probably a bit inflated Michigan played a big part in making it a rough go for the Nittany Lions. Kwity Paye returned and led the team in tackles up front, while McGrone and Hudson pitched in with 6 tackles each. As a team Michigan picked up 5 TFLs and consistently generated some pressure on Clifford. It was a performance worthy of a road win, and one can hope it'll translate at home in the coming weeks.

Worst: Everything's a Penalty

For the record, Michigan didn't lose this game because of some awful calls by the officials. It wasn't a bad call that left Hamler streaking through a wide open defensive backfield; it wasn't an official who led to Patterson's pick. But in a game where the two teams were pretty evenly matched, the unevenness of the calls was jarring. I'm fine if you don't want to call an OPI on PSU's first TD, but that means you can't then call an OPI on Collins for helping PSU's corner run past him on Patterson's deep throw. On 4th-and-3, Black was hit a solid 2 or 3 beats before the ball got to him; whether or not you believe in "let the guys play" that has to be a penalty, especially after Lavert Hill got called for a ticky-tack holding in the same game.

It's college football and these referees are going to make mistakes, but it's been years now where these guys consistently make bad calls and nobody is allowed to criticize them in any meaningful way because it's been decreed they are off limits. Harbaugh did go off a bit after this one, but even then it felt muted. The NFL, a league that pays top dollar for professional referees who, on a daily basis, find ways to mess up calls in spectacular fashion. But for some reason, college football still labors under this false assumption that you can get top performance out of a bunch of lawyers and financial planners doing this job on the weekend, and it's just not true.

Worst: St. Anger

So much of sports is a proxy battle between what your perception of reality and what it actually is, of how you view yourself as an individual via your choices and how those choices are perceived by others. If you root for a team and they lose, then by some tortured analogy, deep in the lizard part of your brain you can't quite touch, you have a bit of that loser stink on you because, again, you actively chose to root for these people. For all fans, teams are an extension of your person in some way, and if you don't believe me remember you're reading a diary post analyzing a game played days ago on MGoBlog, written by an unpaid weirdo, when you could be literally doing anything else, including just pooping and getting off the pot.

I don't have any connection to Michigan sports beyond the fact I went to college there damn near 20 years ago for non-sport reasons. The origin of everyone's fandom likely varies, and for a select few perhaps you are deeply connected to the fabric of the school and its athletic feats I can somewhat understand the emotional baggage of wins and losses. But for the vast, vast majority following sports is a one-way street, where you feel some attachment to the school and players in some Pavlovian way because of the uniforms, the music, the history you latched onto when you were a child. When they win, the euphoria that rushes through your veins is as potent as any drug; when they lose, every blood cell pulls a knife out and looks for a fight. But your sense of ownership as a fan is mythical, a figment of one's imagination dressed up in a novelty jersey and an unnecessarily deep understanding of the depth chart.

I really enjoy this site; at its best it's one of the best places online for independent analysis for college sports generally, Michigan sports in particular. Other sites and resources have copied (or at least augmented) some of it's best parts, from detailed game plan analysis to UFR-style play-by-play breakdowns. It's not perfect and nobody here infallible, but I dare you to go visit other sites for similarly popular teams and see how long you can scroll through the pages before your eyes roll back into your head. But good god, if I could Endgame one piece of vernacular it injected into the discourse it would be the Black Pit of Negative Expectations, or BPONE for short.

I get the reason it exists; Michigan has been stuck on this treadmill of irrelevance for decades now, a steady stream of "maybe behind THIS door is the answer to all our desires", which basically include competing for playoff spots and being competitive in a sport where the moneyed elite have enjoyed an outsized amount of the spoils in the sport. Well, everyone except for Michigan. They're the doofus with the designer clothes, the expensive watch, the nice ride standing outside the club while everyone else passes through the velvet rope freely. You look at OU, OSU, Alabama, Clemson, Auburn, PSU, etc. and you wonder how they can be so good at winning football and Michigan can't. And as a fan, you've got to cope somehow.

But around here BPONE has gone from being a sardonic way of dealing with disappointment to this mantra that must be placed on literally everything Michigan does. Michigan beats Iowa and nobody wins because it was ugly, boring, and so very Iowa. Then they beat Illinois by 17 on the road (after admittedly putting a scare in some during the third quarter), and people have a conniption because there is no way a ranked team should ever be in a position to lose to Illinois. Every win a brief reprieve from impending doom, every loss further proof that we've angered the gods somewhere and they're going to hold that grudge for eternity. Maybe that's the new reality, as maybe Michigan has permanently fallen back to the pack instead of surging with the leaders. Maybe it's time to recalibrate expectations. I don't know. But going through 13 games a year expecting the next shoe to fall isn't healthy for anyone, and creates the type of manic responses you see where once-heralded stars take to shitting on college kids and a decent contingent of people shake their heads in accordance.

This season isn't going to end how I (and most fans) expected it will. Even if Michigan miraculously wins out, they're still looking at some random bowl game in a southern city where guys in expensive suits and whitened teeth chortle along as college athletes fill 4 hours of air time during which to sell millions of dollars in ads. People around here will still be mad, angry at missed opportunities and failed goals. And that negative sentiment will only calcify more. Everyone is entitled to his or her way of being a fan generally speaking, and if this just reads as one big virtue signal so be it, but it feels like being a fan of Michigan is making a whole lotta people miserable, and that's not healthy.

Quick Hits

• I know people (including Ace) will focus on Michigan missing out on KJ Hamler. That is, in hindsight, a missed opportunity, though I'm not sure anyone could have projected he'd be this dynamic given his good-but-not-mindblowing recruiting profile. But recruiting is such a zero-sum game that it's weird to get worked up over losing a recruit. Both Lavert Hill and Khaleke Hudson were lost by James Franklin and my guess is those losses still smart.
• Haskins had a couple of solid runs during one of Michigan's scoring drives but I was surprised that Charbonnet didn't get the start. He ran with the mix of power, speed, and elusiveness everyone saw in him in HS, and the running game just looked more dynamic with him out there. Hopefully that continues.
• The threat of Patterson taking off in this game helped to stymie PSU's pass rush, especially in the second half. I don't know if Patterson will ever run the offense as it's intended, but at this point there's a way he can be integrated into the rushing offense that does seem to work.

Next Week

It's Notre Dame. I'm not confident by any means that Michigan will win, but if you told me they'd go 1-1 over this 2-game stretch I sorta figured this was the game they'd pull out. Notre Dame will have had two weeks to prepare for this contest but I'm not sure if that's a positive or negative for them; opening on the road with some rust isn't always a recipe for success. It'll be a close game, but hopefully the positive signs against PSU translate over to this game.