So is Jim talking to Gattis on that headset, discussing plays ?  How does this work exactly ?

Cannot agree enough!  This is a diary, and it needed to be - it provides the basis of my complaints from years prior, that the consistent stubbornness all points back to one common denominator.  

Gattis has zero credentials as a power run offensive coach.  His DNA is WR, his most recent coaching experience is Joe Moorehead and Mike Locksley.  Does anyone recall seeing PSU or Alabama stubbornly refuse to adapt when the defense took away one specific set of plays (ie: inside runs)?  No, you don't.  You remember watching big play scores because the ball went where the defenders weren't.  

I've seen a LOT from this team that I needed to see to keep off the 'Fire Wagon' - organization, hard play, preparation, teamwork.  Unfortunately, we just saw the very thing I didn't want to see - forcing the ultra-conservative inside runs into a stacked box just waiting for it.

You got it all wrong! Harbaugh is playing chess! It's the looooooong game. He's been holding back amazing, explosive plays specifically so Ohio State doesn't see them for the last 6 seasons! Ingenious, I know. So stop complaining! 

 -Half the fans on this board

"Running up the middle. No creativity. Bad QB play. Seemingly just ignoring opportunities to gain yards and score touchdowns. Tight games against physically inferior opponents. A close win that doesn't feel much like a win.

Sound familiar?"

Here is my problem.  Yes, it does sound familiar.  It sounds familiar like many games/teams under Brady Hoke, Lloyd Carr, Moeller and yes, Bo.  The point is you seem to make your whole argument the simplistic take "well the only thing that has not changed is Jim" but you could also apply that line of reasoning to Michigan (or many other programs) when Jim was not coach.  So it must be that Jim is not at fault but the Michigan athletic department is (that's the only thing that has not changed).

Yes, I was VERY frustrated by the play calling/results in the 2nd half (1st half was fairly good) and they need to adapt but for seven consecutive halves that same approach had worked quite well.  And they were adapting to Rutgers by throwing it more and quite effectively.  Then it stopped working and they did not adapt well.  That is on the coaches (and the players who were not making plays) but I don't think that one half of terrible offensive football nullifies what they accomplished in the other 7.  And all indications seem to say Gattis is calling the plays (admittedly under Jim's influence).  Jim is also going to be stubborn with establishing the power run game, we should not be shocked by this.

This weekend, Jim Harbaugh plays for his coaching job. Or--barring that--those decades of U of M stadium attendance firsts are going to fall off precipitously. Said it in another thread, but it bears repeating: there is a near-unanimous consensus, at this stage, about what needs to happen. 

The issue I have in this game wasn't the offense. It was Rutgers chewing up the defense the way it did in the second half. Rutgers!

A lot of that might be due to Ross' injury. Still. It was bothersome. Rutgers had a big edge in time of possession in the second half. The defense couldn't get off the field, so the offense got fewer possessions. Granted, the possessions the offense had were wasted.

I'll take the win. I don't think Harbaugh is in jeopardy of losing his gig, unless the team starts losing, nor should he.

Maybe Harbaugh doesn’t trust Gattis.  It’s possible an experienced OC like Joe Moorhead would be left to run his own show.

Who the fuck knows but some type of intervention might be needed on the staff. 

As you say, it's been the same scenario. Year after year. Wash, rinse, repeat.

I like this team, and this staff, for the most part. And every opportunity that we hope for is before us. That said, it does seem like this will be the final straw if we continue to fail against quality opponents on the road.

Good diary. Hopefully, as this season unfolds, and this team grows, an evolution beyond the same old issues that have habitually hindered us will finally happen.

4-0. Onward and upward.

Go Blue.

La-la-la-la. I've read Best and Worst and I'm not listening! La-la-la-la...

Thanks for posting Stephen. This explains my feelings as well. I was really hoping that Harbaugh coaching for his job this year would lead him to self-evaluate and realize that cultural AND philosophical changes were needed on both sides of the ball. He is willing to let his D-coordinators be who they are, but his offensive DNA gets imposed on his OC regardless of who it is. I’m happy that the team isn’t a train wreck so far this season, but also disappointed that Harbaugh is unwilling or unable to change on one side of the ball. 

Nice piece, and dead-on. I keep hoping Manuel will pull Harbaugh aside and say, "Jim, what are you doing -- tell me there's a plan here beyond 'we'll run the ball up the middle non-stop every fourth quarter.'"

I just read a summary of Harbaugh's radio show tonight. No sign he even knows that people are anxious -- let alone why. Just more "Cade played well, we had trouble running, tough game."

Sigh.

I think the saying is much more applicable to certain posters than it is to our coach or this season.  Quoting multiple pages of your own year-old posts might be a tipoff that you are repeating yourself.  Nice to see that the Matt Campbell encomiums have died down now, though.  (Losses as the higher-ranked favorite against lower-ranked or unranked teams are bad, right?) 

The simple explanation is that when Cade went in, the basic gameplan that was assembled early this week, the gameplan Harbaugh would be in meetings about, perhaps dropping suggestions that he wants a good run-pass ratio, that he wants to establish the line of scrimmage and so on, got thrown out the window. And suddenly Gattis was calling the plays he wanted to call with a QB who could hit the passes.

I hypothesize that Gattis wasn't calling the plays he wanted, but with Cade could only run the base offense, which was "Speed in Space," and (like you surmised) was untainted by Harbaugh.

Look at this year's run game: it's 100% Harbaugh. It's exactly the shit he was doing at Stanford and SF.

I would also hypothesize that Harbaugh is a micro-managing CEO type you find all too often in business. The ones that say they give you freedom but when you present your ideas, they shoot ridiculous holes in them that also cannot be refuted by logic and data--or when they are, they say their vast experience proves they're right. Eventually they bend your ideas to their will so that the eventual plan is really theirs. And when it goes wrong, they blame and eventually fire you for poor performance. Fuck these people, and if you're out there reading this and you're one of these types of "leaders," fuck all the way off straight to hell.

(Okay, that escalated quickly, but it's a sore spot.)

I've read many places, and it's been emphasized by Chris Balas over at The Wolverine, that it's Gattis's offense and he has 100% been calling the plays. The obvious missing pieces are that the schemes emphasized and the game plans are not his, even though they say so.

Stephen I think you are one of the best posters here, but this is such a tired trope. It essentially boils down to "good play = Gattis, bad play = Harbaugh". The counterfactual is that literally every insider on both 247 and Rivals have unequivocally stated that Gattis is in complete control of the play-calling and game-planning. Furthermore, the scheme that has been deployed by during the Gattis years looks NOTHING like Harbaugh's Stanford/49ers attacks when it comes to personnel: no fullbacks, little emphasis on throwing to TEs, and going exclusively out of shotgun with no pistol just to name a few differences.

The one thing that is fair is that Harbaugh likely does influence overall strategy, but let's dive deeper into specifics. Harbaugh, at his core, is a believer in a strong gap running scheme that creates new holes where the defense doesn't expect it, with Inside Zone as a changeup. Prior to this year, once Gattis joined, we have switched to being a primarily zone running team with gap as changeup, with heavy emphasis on Inside Zone, Split Zone, Arc Zone, and then Down G as the changeup. Having a zone running scheme better aligns w/ the reads and the deception built into Moorehead's scheme. No way that's Harbaugh. This year, with the help of Weiss, we've focused on installing more gap focused runs: Counter, Pin & Pull, Power, and then Split Zone and Inside Zone as changes. And it's worked to perfection - we essentially countered Washington to death!

Now let's dive into the run game vs. Rutgers. After annihilating 3 teams with a gap-based attack, we revert to 60/40 zone runs, primarily Inside Zone and Split Zone. I just don't understand why! But it's not Harbaugh's offenses that have historically relied on zone runs. And don't get me started with not trying the edges, and that's 100% on Gattis. They tested the edges numerous times against Washington, even when it was getting blown up, to keep them honest. But, for some reason, Harbaugh tells Gattis to stop doing it against Rutgers? Huh? Did you see the post-game sideline interview w/ Harbaugh? He specifically said we tried running outside the one time and it worked. And he sounded REALLY annoyed saying that. Almost as if he couldn't understand why is OC decided not to call those sooner.

With regards to Gattis and the passing game, they called 6 passes as part of the 12 plays that comprised their 2nd half 3 and outs. Drive #1 went: pass (8yds), run (1yd), run (0yd); Drive #2 went: pass (Inc), pass (Inc), pass (scramble); Drive #3 went: run (1yd), run (4yds), pass (Inc). Does that sequence look like a guy who is determined to always establish the line of scrimmage and only pass if absolutely needed? Also, Harbaugh has been pretty open about how the offensive brain trust works. In 2017 and 2018 he openly said it was OC by committee. And he defended because that's how it had always worked his entire career, going back to Bo's days. When Gattis was hired, Harbaugh explicitly said he's handed all play-calling responsibilities to Gattis. And Gattis has reiterated that multiple times. Contrast that to Pep in 2018, when he explicitly said "this is what Jim wants". If Gattis has HC aspirations, and he feels like he doesn't have play-call responsibilities, there's no reason why he wouldn't make that known in some way. 

Where I will agree is that Jim probably does tell Gattis that he wants the identity of the offense to be run-first. Nothing wrong with that! It's on Gattis to then install the best run plays and then create the appropriate pass plays out of it. We are relying on Gattis to make a synergistic run and pass game that puts our athletes in the best position to make plays. And, against Rutgers, Gattis' run calls were absolute garbage. That being said, his pass plays had people open! But Cade hit next to nothing outside of that first pass. Thing is, Cade had been hitting those passes all year, and all game up to that point. 2nd half Rutgers was a lot like his game against Washington. He was just off.

Now let's visit the whole QB thing that I just feel is so overblown. Has Harbaugh been good to great? No - and that is disappointing. But he hasn't been destroying his QBs either. Let's go one-by-one:

• 2015: Jake Ruddock - improved exponentially from Utah to the bowl game; got drafted!
• 2016: Speight absolutely improved from Hawaii to Iowa, then broke his collarbone, and did not play well against OSU and FSU (tbh, he was having a bad game against Iowa before the injury; off day)
• 2017: Speight - he did regress, but the OL was also an absolute mess that literally got his back broken. See Devin Gardner for what can happen when the OL doesn't protect you. And it was also when they replaced Jedd Fisch with Pep, and Speight and Pep didn't vibe in the same way. Remember, Pep was essentially the QB coach- we had grad assistants coaching the WRs <facepalm>. O'Korn - he literally stayed the same. He was not great to begin with (2016 Indiana) and he was not great to end (2017 Ohio State). He had one game against Purdue...but...it was one game. 
  Peters - I don't know how you could say he regressed. He came in against Rutgers because O'Korn stunk it up, and then started two games, wasn't asked to do much. And then got decapitated against Wisconsin and was concussed. Then he had a bad bowl game against South Carolina, his first game in over 2 months, as a Redshirt Freshman. Unless you're saying he regressed/didn't improve because he couldn't beat out Shea? I just don't see how that's reasonable. Does Ryan Day suck because he couldn't develop Tate Martell and got Justin Fields? 
• 2018: Shea certainly improved from the Notre Dame game onwards. He never turned into a world beater, but he was quite good by the end. 
• 2019: Shea regressed, but, you know, it's almost as if he had to learn a completely different system under a brand new coordinator. Weird.
• 2020: Milton - Joe Milton has convinced two separate QB gurus (Harbaugh and Heupel) that he was the man to be at QB. So I don't think Milton is an indictment of Harbaugh. And, when he gets in games, he just can't handle it. At Michigan and at Tennessee. I really do believe that he is probably one of the best practice performers of all time. I think it's also fair to say he was a LOT better when he left than when he got in. 

Harbaugh hasn't been a game-changing QB developer, which is disappointing. But this narrative that he "breaks all his QBs" is just an overreaction to Speight and Shea. And there were other, more likely causes for those regressions (OL for Speight, new system for Shea). The crazy thing in Harbaugh's entire tenure, Speight is the only returning starter who returned in the same offensive system. And we fucked that whole year up because the line was such dog shit. Nuts! Why is that relevant, see below:

• QB A per game averages: 13/24 (56.3%); 215 yards; 1.1/0.33 TD/INT
• QB B per game averages: 10/16 (61.3 %); 120 yards; 1/0 TD/INT

QB A is Andrew Luck. QB B is Cade. For all the revisionist history that Luck was an obvious generational talent, he was the #42 player and #3 QB coming out of HS, same ballpark as Peters and JJ (below Shea, higher than Cade). And, his R FR year, he wasn't exactly tearing it up. Stanford went 9-5 and rode Toby Gerhart all year. And there were more than a few 11/24, 14/20, 7/14 (Washington LOL) games. But, in Year 2 as a starter, Andrew Luck went boom and had >3000 yards passing and >30 TDs and Stanford finished 11-1. 

Does that mean Cade is Andrew Luck? No! But what this does indicate is that the QB story under Harbaugh is the same problem as the rest of the team: structure. Disorganized recruiting (2017 OL, 2019 DL, 2020 DB) and shifting offensive systems (2017 --> 2018, 2018 --> 2019) has led to sub-optimal results overall. This has led to the good, but just good enough of 2017, 2018, and 2019. Last year was an absolute tire fire, but that's really been aberration his entire coaching career thus far. This offseason, he finally invested in building out a true recruiting operation that doesn't dump a lot of responsibility on his position coaches' plates. He's brought in a more sustainable defensive philosophy for modern college football, and he's prioritized bring in coaches who are excellent at relating to players. Direction makes sense to me. 

The situation with Cade is a big TBD. But, overall (not just 2nd half Rutgers), the returns look good! I love his decision making, his overall ball placement, and his deep ball accuracy. But things seriously spiral with him; when he makes a couple mistakes, it usually leads to an avalanche of more negatives, as seen against Washington and Rutgers. Big problem in a sport where adversity is guaranteed, especially in the biggest stages.

If we're going to win against Wisconsin, both Gattis and Cade need to show up. But one thing is almost certain: Gattis is in complete control of the play-calling. So Harbaugh is not the one calling Inside Zone up the middle. Gattis just chose exceptionally poorly for the running attack overall against Rutgers. Gap is the way. 

Where is the part where Michigan's offense takes what the defense is giving them?

It seems that Harbaugh insists (in big games) on beating the other team with strength-on-strength rather than chipping away to set up unexpected plays.

Well done, this diary summarized the issues with the offense in a rational, level headed way. 
 

It seems that the offense will continue to overwhelm less talented teams where getting RPSed can be overcome with superior athletes. But as we’ve seen many times, against equal or better athletes getting RPSed means a loss. 
 

When people from message boards, coaches and journalists all point out the same flaws I tend to think those flaws are real. It’s impossible to know what really goes on in Schembechler Hall but I would  pay money to be a fly on the wall

Bravo. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Tight games mean turtleball. Outside of tomato cans, only when the game is clearly almost lost do we take the restraints off. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

It's maddening, and it's Harbaugh. Also, it's awful to watch the wasting of offensive skill talent in favor of X tight end or Y practice warrior. But that's perhaps another story for another post.

In the years we don't have an elite defense, 9-3 is the regular-season ceiling with this philosophy. Also, the teams in the Big Ten East are improving. Rutgers and Maryland are no longer pushover wins. Indiana has improved overall. MSU seems to be trending up. Penn State is solid as usual. And the Death Star may have an exposed exhaust port, but we can't hit it without cleverness and a healthy dose of the Force.

Lastly, it's difficult to enjoy this brand of neolithic football in a contested game. 

Thanks for an excellent diary!

I mean, Michigan had an incredible amount of explosive plays coming into the game, and they hit three big pass plays in the first half. I agree that they shat the bed in the second half, and the lack of PAP is a huge issue. That's how you get guys deep! You can't just run a straight drop, which the Gattis offense tends to do. But to pretend like the offense is unsalvageable when teams like Iowa, Okahoma this year, and Clemson exist. IDK, man. 

I'd say DB had several bad games when it mattered, not just one bad year. A bad game vs. UW 2019, bad games vs. OSU 2018+19, South Carolina Florida and Bama bowl losses, PSU 2017, etc.

Last Saturday, I think JH fell into a lull when Rutgers went 3-and-out 1st series and we returned the punt to the 39. It was vanilla from there and Greg S. figured out what JH was doing to burn the clock.

The real question I'll ask myself about the JH era is this: what was the biggest ROAD game he's won? Perhaps 2015 at PSU, Maybe 2018 at MSU after the pre-game dust-up, but that's all I can think of.

Mark Dicktonio found a way to win at UM (twice), OSU, PSU during his 1st 4 years. 

Until we can win at places like a less than excellent UW, we can't expect to win vs. OSU anywhere.

As much as I hate to admit it, the one common denominator is Harbaugh. I like him, I pulled for him, but this obsession with being uncreative and trying to lose games by running the same dumb shit ad infinitum has to stop. It probably only changes with a new head coach.  I don't want this to be true but that's how it looks.