Indiana Snowflakes: The Coaching

My kingdom for an offensive staff that proactively attacks their opponent’s weaknesses as option 1 rather than option 3 or 4.

We have so much potential and so many options…use them from the beginning! Why wait until we’ve rolled in the mud and thrown rocks at each other for 2/3s of the game before finally opening things up?

OK, the fist half was poor. After the opening drive, they laid and egg. They weren't able to counter Indiana's adjustments after the opening TD drive. Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards were visibly shaken after Mike Hart went down and didn't look the same but they got it together in the second half.

The second half was a reset and Michigan showed it's dominance. It was a 21 point win. I'll take it.

The game plan vs a horrible secondary was very ill conceived. Really weird choices once we scored early. 

Good adjustments after halftime. 3 TD win on the road and the D dominated pretty much the entire 2nd half! Onward! 

When Joel Klatt announces on national TV that no motion = pass, and motion = run, after the fundamentally flawed Indiana D pantsed you in the 1st half on the Fox Big Noon game, maybe some self scouting is warranted.

So is anyone going to hold Joel Klatt to his game observation that if Michigan puts a man in motion, it signals the defense that it will be a run and if nobody goes in motion, it is a pass play?Would be curious to see whether that tendency is true or not.

Outstanding job by Minter. IU was cornered into passing every down and Minter turned loose the pass rush.

Offense was molasses for large sections but also effective for a few stretches. Hopefully they worked on some things so the O comes out hot vs PSU.

Great coaching day. Good coaches take adversities, calm everyone down and prevail. Coaches are human. One of their colleagues went down. If that did not affect them, I would be perplexed. They got it together despite the concerns for their colleague and called heckuva game on offense and defense. 2nd half is a thing of beauty. They broke some tendencies today. They didn't let the shitty refs ruin their day. Great work. Onward.

Coaching 1st half?

Coaching 2d half!

First off, hopefully Coach Hart is ok.  That was such a bizarre scene in the 1st QTR.  I'm thinking maybe one of the older coaches was having a cardiac situation on the sidelines and there you see Mike Hart on the stretcher.

Klatt seemed to think there was a tell with pre-snap motion = running play...no pre-snap motion = passing play.  It didn't seem to be a thing though.  I think he did make a good point that the passing game could do a better job putting defenders in conflict.  I also think his comments about more play action and downfield passing game were fair.

One thing that bears watching with the "college of play callers" approach...do we continue to see our opening drives of the half pay off and struggle with play calling on non-scripted drives?  I don't know, but it's worth keeping an eye on.

I'll also say for as irritating as that game felt for 2+ quarters, if a 3 TD win over a B1G opponent on the road w/college crappe fully engaged is us playing poorly, then things are probably going pretty well.

Hard to imagine they pulled all nonsense that to keep stuff off tape for Frames J.  I'll be looking for some play-action, the back pitch to the QB for a TD, etc. in the first quarter next week to prove me wrong.  Nice adjustment by defensive staff, though.   

There’s gonna be a lot of rabbling this week.

But given the adversity faced, especially losing Hart (hope he’s ok!), I’m really proud of their performance today. Indiana never took a lead, Michigan weathered the “storm” in the 1st half, when it felt like it was all Indiana after the first drive. The defense figured them out and dominated the 2nd half. The offense was sputtery and vanilla, but still put up 31 points and 469 yards of offense. At the end of the day they almost covered the spread. I’m not looking for style points, fuck that. I just want wins. We’ll find out next week what we *really* have as a team. 

We still have to be 100% run out of the pistol.  IU was keyed on it.  Need to change that tendency.

Good adjustments but the play calling is too predictable. Against inferior teams, our talent/execution can overcome the predictability but not against Penn State/Ohio State

Some disappointments.

But also it’s a trap road game between two big games and you literally had a coach riding an Ambulance mid-game. So the first half might just be an aberration. 

It took too long to get away from run-run-pass.

Good adjustments at the half on both sides.  We opened up and remembered we have wide receivers. 

Per Twitter. Take it for what it's worth:

I think the coaches (and players) deserve a mulligan for the first half.  Watching one of your colleagues collapse and have a seizure is an extremely traumatic event that would shake anyone.  And it wasn't just some assistant who joined the staff recently - he's a MichiganMan legend.  And on top of trying to deal with your own emotions, you have to try to manage the emotions of 80+ kids ranging from late teens to early 20s, most of whom have never seen something like that and are likely even more traumatized.  It was painfully obvious watching the game that everyone was affected.  But they got into the locker room, dealt with it, and adjusted.  

That's great coaching.  The results spoke for themselves.  There are very few staffs that could (or would) have done better in the first half, and they probably lack Hart (sic).

First off, I give the coaching staff a pass for the period immediately after the Hart situation, since I'm sure that threw everyone for a loop just because of the general shock of it all. 

Aside from that, the first drive turned out great due to the long run, and late part of the third and then the whole fourth quarter was nice. The coaches need to focus on what they did to set that up. Was it one particular playcaller? Was it an attitude of allowing JJ more freedom to explore downfield? Was it a certain blocking scheme in the run game that allowed that to flourish? Whatever it was, it's this, and not lighting drives on fire with predictable "we're tipping this, and we're doing it, so you stop it" playcalling, that will lead to success against the better teams on the schedule.

So yeah, figure out why things worked, and call the game that way.

I suspect it's that they expanded what they were calling to include more downfield plays, and that opened things up. It was actually a good case study, because JJ had the INT, but the offense still ended up being tons more productive. 

TL;DR The odd interception isn't horrible. Open things up and stuff starts to work. You coaches saw that today. Stick with it.

1st half? Abysmal. Awful. No ways around that, both sides.

2nd half? Pretty much the baseline of what I think this team should do with the talent available. It's not perfect or 2-deep with 5* kids across the board but a bad game should be about what we got in the 2nd half and it was the better half today. With this roster? The 2nd half has to be the floor for this team on offense in particular.

At first I thought our second half offensive adjustments were a bit late.  But then I got to thinking that delaying your offensive adjustments is maybe a luxury that makes the adjustments that much more significant when you finally implement them.  Now I have no idea.  The TE was pretty much a golden option once chosen to be an option and then everything Indiana D turned into dominos.  It worked.  

Crazy but I was happy when JJ threw the pic. I feel like it was his opportunity to show moxie. And he did. Being able to bounce back strong after when things aren’t going your way is the trademark of a championship QB. Awesome to see him prove that to himself. Should be a big confidence boost for him. Now throw DEEP young man!! You can overcome. 

2nd half only:

Michigan 270 yards and 21 points.

Indiana 44 yards and 0 points.

Harbaugh is a predictable conservative coach that plays not to lose rather and that puts a ceiling on the offense at just above average. We will never be an elite offensive team without him being willing to open it up and if he won’t do it this year it’s probably never happening.

Our coaches are selling results. Other coaches are relentlessly selling hope to the tune of 95M.

The thing that is going to irk me a little this week is all the talk from Schembechler Hall will undoubtedly be about the penalties.  Yes, there were a ton but many of them were simply bad calls.  The stat sheet looks worse than how the guys actually played on the field.  But coaches are probably going to harp on that with little to no talk about the first half offensive play calling, which deserves its own set of explanations.  Second half was better but it doesn't get the coaches and their play calls off the hook for the first half.

I dont think you can say anything about the 1st half after Harts seizure I doubt the team had heir heads into the game