Devin Gardner talking about Cade/Rutgers

Okay but where was Henning? Why do we continue to NOT use the electric players we have available to us? 

Truth is always somewhere between the extremes. But it's been 5+ years of wasting athletic ability on offense.

Yea, I really like Devin on Monday Morning quarterback, and he did provide some pretty good context related to the second half play calling - that I know everyone is aware of, but perhaps are not putting into frame properly - through the first 4 series of the second half, Michigan ran 12 offensive plays. 6 of those 12 plays were incomplete passes. 

So basically, fans are trying to discern if this offensive staff is a bunch of neanderthal, manball running oafs based on six rushing plays in the second half. We now have the luxury (as do the coaches) of going back and evaluating what Rutgers was doing, and can confirm running into the B and C gaps was playing right into the adjustments Rutgers had made on defense. But we also didn't get an opportunity to get to some of the other things perhaps we had in store for the second half because we missed on six first down throws in a row, most of which were open, just misses by the quarterback.

All of this is not to justify Michigan running into stacked boxes. Just that we can see the snowball effect when the offense gets off schedule and misses on opportunities to pick up first downs. The offensive staff has fewer opportunities to evaluate what Rutgers is doing, and we place a much greater emphasis on the success of each individual play because each play call is such a scarce opportunity.

It was an ugly second half for sure. There were some not great play calls in the second half, yes. The bigger problem in my mind was the execution of the pass offense, because we couldn't get anything to build off of and force Rutgers defense to stay on the field so Michigan could better diagnose what they were doing and respond. A couple of stuffed runs and some badly missed throws, kept Michigan from moving the sticks, paired with Rutgers drives that chewed up tons of clock and we get the result we got on Saturday. It was ugly, I don't know that it suggests the offense is broken or the play calling was asinine. Again, we only got to run 12 plays.

For whatever it is worth, most old players won't blame play calling.

That doesn't mean play calling is never bad, or that the players are necessarily right. It's just that they tend to believe they should execute under any circumstances, and that they tend to believe that fans overweigh the importance of a few bad calls.

He did not like how Cade played, and said JJ needs at least some plays off the bench.  Talked about how in football since it began that the best players play, and that Clemson replaced a starter, who took them to the playoffs, with true frosh Lawrence.  Gardner is provocative at least. 

One of the most interesting insights was his observation that Cade's mechanics have been deteriorating the last couple of weeks.

Sometimes in the heat of the moment when a defender is bearing down on you, a QB has a tendency to revert back to his natural instincts...like turning his back to the defense and changing directions in Devin's case or slinging the ball sidearm off your back foot in Cade's case.  Shit happens.  This is why you practice.  But, some things are God given and/or can't be untaught.  You accept that as a part of the player, try to limit the times he is in those positions, teach him to recognize the pressure and find the right target, and give them other strategies to practice when you can't avoid it.  That may or may not change what they do when pressure arrives.  Pressure reduces the performance of a lot of good QBs.  Ultimately QBs have to make plays under pressure to be championship teams unless the rest of your team is just supremely talented.  I don't think many folks see UM as a national championship contender with Cade, but we'd all be happy if he can find a way to be effective enough to get us to 9-10 wins.

"Not necessarily a playcalling issue."  The more I think about it.  I just might have to agree with this.  Of all people in the stadium, the obvious can't escape the coaching staff.  

there must be some reason why AJ Henning gets only one official touch (I know he had a drop and was underthrown)  But I was expecting more tests of the edges like jet sweeps, etc.  

If he's right about McNamara regressing - and I have no reason to doubt he is - we may be closer to seeing McCarthy than previously thought.

My biggest concern with McNamara was a subtle one. Halfway through the game he started hitching/double-pumping on a lot of throws. That is a sign of a QB unsure of what he is seeing and not having confidence in his reads. Maybe once they are off script he isn't reading well, maybe once he was hit he was rattled, or who knows? All I know is that is a bad sign from a QB. 

Will be interesting to see how it goes when fucc OSU visits Rutgers this Saturday.

Something that always gets lost when people grumble about play calling is that coaches can only call plays during games that the players already know and have practiced well.

I'm just completely making up plays here, but for example, if a defense is playing differently than we had anticipated during the week and is stuffing our run game, the OC might be well aware that a certain type of screen to the outside is what he wants to call and he thinks it would work well to break the defense's back. However, maybe they didn't have enough time to practice that play during the week because they had to spend all their time mastering the easier plays that they believed would match up well against the opposing defense, or maybe they did practice that one particular play but the OC knows that one or two players kinda sucked at it in practice and will fail to execute thereby ruining the play. Maybe you'll have time at halftime to get the guys together and drill this play into their brains for the second half, but if it's already the second half, it's too late, you may be screaming internally because you desperately want to call a certain play but you have seen plenty of evidence that your players just don't have it nailed down yet.

The finite allotment of practice time is a big burden for a college coach. Which just makes me all the more infuriated when it becomes clear that they spent a bunch of their finite time practicing sideshow gimmick plays like the VillariCat.

Regarding mechanics... it seemed like he was throwing off his back leg in the second half for no apparent reason.  Wasn't a guy in his face.

The part where he talks about the smash concept and cade locking onto the corum check down when pre snap you knew you had free yards to CJ was the most eye opening to me. 
 

He also frequently refers to Gattis as being “handcuffed” by the execution on the field 

I respect Gardner's analysis and think he nailed a couple of things about the playcalling and some of the blocking.  And McNamara did have some issues with his mechanics.  But I will point out that every guy can talk about how the play should have been executed when reviewing it with a birds-eye review.  It's much harder in the moment and plays that look bang-bang might not be as obvious or even intended given what you're seeing from the defense.  Like, this article the Ringer put out about starting rookie QBs in the NFL and their struggles highlights how much analysis goes into every play, and how even when you do everything right you can face decisions that don't have a clean answer.

I do think McNamara borked a couple of plays but he was also let down by the playcalling and, frankly, execution.  Guys fell down, they ran poor routes, they didn't dig a ball out that was at their knees.  They're all small issues that can manifest in a game, and my hope is this week is spent addressing them all.

Devin's been calling the Air Force games on FoxSports2 the past couple of weeks and while it's been fun to have him as a blast from the past and he has good insights, I look forward to him learning to dial it back a little and let the game develop more.

As far as his insights here, I think it's an interesting data point, but agree with reader71 that its hard to get former players to blame playcalling and so this becomes a good data point, but I don't know if its definitive.