It’s 2017 again
I can’t believe how similar this feels to 2 years ago. 2 years ago everyone wanted Speight out and Okorn was worse. We went to him out of necessity because of injury, but it’s still similar. Speight was fine the year before, just like Shea was fine last year. Both regressed. I guess I’m just hesitant to go with McCaffrey because things could get worse. But despite the offensive problems, we probably should have still beat MSU, and with a healthy Speight had a good shot to beat OSU at home. MSU looks really similar to 2017 also. Not great, but eeked out 10 wins.
I would start Shea at Illinois and if the offense looks stagnant after a half, go with McCaffrey and see what happens. Shea was the #2 rated passer in the conference last year so the ability is there somewhere. I don’t want McCaffrey starting his first game on the PSU stage with nothing but mop up time, so I would roll the dice with Shea for at least one more attempt. Agree or disagree?
October 7th, 2019 at 3:27 PM ^
I don't feel like myself.
Erm, who do you feel like?
October 7th, 2019 at 5:04 PM ^
Haha, very true. I'm Ron Burgundy?
October 7th, 2019 at 3:25 PM ^
I don't think it matters who is QBing Michigan at the end of November. I don't think Michigan can stay within two touchdowns of the Buckeyes on current form.
I say Harbaugh should rotate McCaffrey and Milton each snap to ensure they stick around next year. No guarantees at this point.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:53 PM ^
You sir are an idiot
October 7th, 2019 at 3:17 PM ^
You can go back further than that. This looks almost exactly like a Brady Hoke team.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:25 PM ^
I witnessed the Brady Hoke era. This is not a Brady Hoke team.
October 7th, 2019 at 7:20 PM ^
The 2012 UM vs. 2019 UM team would be a good match-up. I'd pick the 2012 team to win though.
October 7th, 2019 at 9:42 PM ^
It’s not a Brady Hoke team because of Don Brown and that is all. Offense is the same gong show when Brady was around, maybe worse.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:18 PM ^
you’re right, it could be worse... but it also could be a whole lot better. I’m ready to see what we have in the guys Harbaugh recruited, because Shea isn’t making good decisions, which cuts the passing playbook down. When the passing game is a shell, defense can focus on stopping the run.
this season is underperforming our expectations, and beginning to look like a loss, we might as well try something different.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:19 PM ^
People want to shoehorn this analogy into place just because things don’t feel super positive, but it’s just not there for a host of reasons.
This team’s issues are its own. It’s not 2017. It’s not 2014.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:25 PM ^
I can agree somewhat with that. It’s not exactly the same, but I still see similarities. I think if we had a do over that year we would have wanted Speight if it were an option. For some reason I feel it’s just too early to give up on Shea. Maybe Illinois is the game where everything starts to click. If it doesn’t, against a bad defense, i would make the move in-game to McCaffrey and see what happens. But I think benching him after a big win (even though he didn’t help the outcome much) would be the wrong move. Just my opinion.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:54 PM ^
What are the similarities? Both defenses were good? 2017's issues (and their 2019 parallels) were:
- Starting QB knocked out for the year (nope)
- Inexperienced (mostly Freshmen) WRs (nope)
- Best WR knocked out for the year (nope)
- Terrible OL play (nope)
- Terrible OL coach (nope)
- Replacement QB had never been good (nope)
- Replacement QB #2 was RS Freshman and then also knocked out (nope)
2019's issues (and their 2017 parallels) are:
- Significantly different offensive system that the OL and QB haven't been terribly comfortable in (nope)
- 2017 OL struggled with the zone blocking stuff early on, but we won all of the games where we were heavy zone, then switched back to power/gap stuff in the MSU game, ran it well, and lost. Also the 2017 OL was terrible, so I don't think this is comparable anyways.
- QB not seeing the field very well (maybe? for different reasons though)
- Potentially iffy DT play, maybe (nope, Mo Hurst)
That's pretty much it. Our D threw up a clunker in Madison that was mostly due to people getting out of position, and Wisconsin being good and able to murder you if you screw up. Our offense has different issues and for different reasons than 2017's offense.
It's not analogous.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:20 PM ^
Disagree...
Even if McCaffrey is worse, he seems to be less "nervous" and more energized to be out there. I'd rather have him running the show than Shae, who seems nervous and afraid.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:55 PM ^
Eats too much chicken.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:20 PM ^
I call dibs on starting the next thread about Shea vs. Dylan.
October 7th, 2019 at 9:30 PM ^
There’s probably been 3 posted since you posted this.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:25 PM ^
Wasn't 2017 the Amazon show? I hope this isn't 2017 because I remember how depressed and lifeless the QB group looked on that show, and in some ways, the team overall.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:28 PM ^
I disagree. I feel like it's 1957 again. Ike is President--the Dulles boys are running foreign policy. HUAC has those dirty commies on the run. Though the Yankees lose the World Series to the Milwaukee Braves Mickey Mantle soars with a .365/.512/.665 triple slash. The first frisbee and also Sputnik fly over American skies...wait. What were we talking about again?
October 7th, 2019 at 3:30 PM ^
I have stated before I'd like to see the move to McCaffery. The experience he'd gain from this year would be beneficial for next season.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:31 PM ^
When Brandon Peters came in against Rutgers, at one point he completed a 13 yard pass and the big house crowd exploded as if we had just scored a touchdown.
Things are frustrating right now but I don't think we're 2017.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:36 PM ^
I think the D was better in 2017 and that team crushed Florida to start the year. This team got destroyed by Wisconsin. It’s not the same, but both teams had a returning qb that struggled to start. The 2017 offense got worse after a change.
October 7th, 2019 at 6:07 PM ^
That Florida team was terrible. They were 4-7. It seemed good at the time but was a mirage. So not sure what your point is there.
I agree the defense was probably better that year, but still might be a little early to say given the emergence of guys like Dax Hill and McGrone and the return of Dwumfour.
The struggles of the returning QB in 2017 were at least partially attributable to a very leaky OL. This year's line isn't close to that level of bad and is downright good most of the time.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:34 PM ^
The only reason you wouldn’t start Dylan is because you don’t believe he’s ready.
October 7th, 2019 at 6:08 PM ^
Or you keep hoping the things you taught Shea that week will actually translate. At some point, you have to give up. I don't think the coaches have, but it's looking bleak for him right now.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:34 PM ^
Starting McCaffrey wouldn't be a silver bullet. Everyone's seemingly regressed on offense. It doesn't matter what offense you run or who your QB is if your offensive line can't block.
I just know the coaches know more about football than I do and they see the players pretty much every day if McCaffrey was measurably better than Shea, he'd be playing. I am hesitant to say 'it can't get worse' because I lived through Rich Rod and Hoke and know that it certainly can get worse.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:45 PM ^
I think the "the coaches see the players every day" argument isn't valid. It seems like it would make sense, but we've seen plenty of cases where a backup comes in and lights it up. A good example of this is Florida's QB. He looks much better than Franks, but wouldn't have had a chance if Franks didn't get hurt.
I think we give the coaches too much credit. Look at Wilson in the Iowa game. He comes in and has 2 great runs and is promptly taken out of the game.
And sure, it could get worse, but Shea is still there if they try Dylan and he doesn't do any better.
October 7th, 2019 at 4:09 PM ^
You're right, but I'll still be deferential to them. I'm wholly unqualified to make a statement like "Dylan McCaffrey gives us a better chance to win than Shea Patterson". I simply don't know that to be true.
You probably could use an example we're all familiar with: keeping O'Korn in over Peters (granted O'Korn did have a good debut game against Purdue).
Switching QBs is a big deal, it's not something you do on a whim. I'm ambivalent.
October 7th, 2019 at 6:08 PM ^
The offensive line has blocked pretty well this year though. Certainly well enough for a good QB to do a lot better than what we've done.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:35 PM ^
2017 was weird. We should have had a huge drop-off on D but it was almost as good as the '16 D. We should have had moderate drop-off on O and it fell off a cliff.
2019 We should have had some drop in D and we have. 2019 we should have shown improvement, maybe even noticeable improvement, and the O has mostly fallen off a cliff. Return 9 starters including a senior QB who had a very solid Junior year and back him up with a very capable and talented junior yet we have a QB problem among other problems on O.
Coming into this season I felt we had to have considerable improvement on O to have a shot at the B1G. The O has 2 weeks to figure it all out or 8 wins is the ceiling this year.
As for Shea vs Dylan...can Shea fix his game? That is the fundamental question for me. If he can't, go with Dylan.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:36 PM ^
Disagree. This is a game where DMac should start. We've seen enough of Shea to know what we have there. See what Dylan can do. Shea is always there to go back to.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:42 PM ^
At this point, this team is looking like an 8-4 finish is very real. Going into 2020, would you rather have Dylan with 7-8 starts worth of experience, or a relatively unknown Dylan? At some point, it's time to build for the future.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:43 PM ^
There is zero chance MSU wins 10 games. What team have you been watching?
October 7th, 2019 at 3:56 PM ^
They won’t win 10 games but they are of similar caliber as they were 2 years ago. That team was lucky to win 10. They are in my opinion about as good as they were 2 years ago when they beat us. My point is, we should have beat them. I’m just hoping we don’t have another debacle against them.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:45 PM ^
OP I agree, I'm having deja vu as well. I've been thinking of our QB situation over the past few years.
2012 - Denard injured, Gardner takes over
2013 - Gardner starts the season with a great game against ND, slowly gets worse
2014 - Gardner sucks by this point, board wants Shane Morris in there. Season is dumpster fire.
2015 - Ruddock starts the season poorly, actually improves over the season (this is the outlier)
2016 - Speights starts well, but has poor game against Iowa and not great at the end of the year. Don't worry though because JOK is lighting it up on the practice squad - or so we are told.
2017 - Speight starts well against Florida, but gets worse and is terrible/injured by midpoint in the year. JOK goes in, has a good half game and then sucks. Brandon Peters gets his shot but coaching staff has no trust (limited playbook) and he gets injured as well.
2018 - Finally we have Shae Patterson, 5 star transfer QB who stabilizes the position
2019 - LOL just kidding, Shae sucks now the board and everyone else wants to put Dcaf in
Meanwhile our arch-rival is great so matter who they put in as QB, and in fact wins a national championship with their third stringer. I'm not sure what we do to improve things but it is getting tiring.
October 7th, 2019 at 4:11 PM ^
It sounds like we need a better coach.
October 7th, 2019 at 4:27 PM ^
As Brian pointed out in the game column, OSU knows who it is and what it’s doing. They’ve done the same thing for years and they just bring in other people who know how to do it.
Michigan hasn’t broken through yet and keeps throwing things at the problem hoping something will be right answer and none of it has been so far. Different coaches, different coordinators, different schemes have all failed. Why? Is it a Michigan problem or is it something else?
I was just as on board as everyone else with a change in offense, but now I wonder if we wouldn’t have been better sticking mainly with the Harbaughffense and adding it some flavor of something else. I think this team running last year’s offense beats Iowa 24-3. Blows out MTSU. Beats Army by a couple of scores and probably scores more than 15 against Wisconsin. I don’t know if it beats OSU, but I think we’d have a good chance at winning 10-11 games with the defense we have and an offense running the same thing for 2 straight years.
I hate OSU as much as anyone, but I think we all should have expected transition costs with the offense. It is very clear to a lot of people (including me) that Shea cannot run this offense. Maybe McCaffrey can. Hopefully he gets back because I would love to see him start this week.
Michigan lost its identity when Bo died and doesn’t know what it wants to be anymore. And I think that’s why we struggle so much. Pick a system and perfect it. Run it year after year. Eventually it will be an OSU-like machine, but it’s never going to get there changing everything after a few years.
October 7th, 2019 at 6:07 PM ^
There is no guarantee we run the same system for years and it gives us "OSU like results". MSU has run the same system for years and their offense has gotten worse since 2014 considerably. Also OSU doesn't even run the same base offense that they did in 2017 when Day got there, so I don't know what to tell you. If you're going to constantly have coordinators leave then the offense is going to change a bit, thats just how it is. Problem is our head coach hired two people who were poor choices.
October 7th, 2019 at 6:17 PM ^
Michigan has only recently decided that it wants to modernize its offense (save for the brief period with RichRod/Denard) and it first tried to do it with with Pep Hamilton who wasn't really capable (so it was like Borges) and then took a huge gamble on a guy that had never done it.
Harbaugh has traditionally been a good hiring manager and delegator so I'm not really sure why he reached so much on this guy. I think he probably is overly confident in his own ability to help on offense and would be better served to do what he did with defense: find a guy that's running a really successful unit, one who is in charge of that unit and is outperforming his talent for multiple years, and then letting him do what he does best. He didn't do that at all with Gattis.
October 7th, 2019 at 7:25 PM ^
I think the big problem is that the OSU offensive philosophy is a clear tier above the Harbaughffense.
The offense Jim was running at Stanford and San Francisco, even if fully implemented with elite players, isn't the best approach out there anymore.
Jim is trying to play catch up with the other teams that adopted a far superior offensive philosophy, and I don't think he's ever going to catch them.
October 8th, 2019 at 10:23 AM ^
The Harbaughffense was never going to make Michigan competitive at the national level, and it's pretty clear these days that an elite defense is no longer sufficient to win it all. I still think Harbaugh made the right move and we need to stick through it. The lack of development at QB is very concerning, but we definitely need more than 1 year of data (more likely 2-3) to really evaluate whether Gattis is the guy. I also think switching to McCaffrey or Milton is the right move since Shea is just making really bizarre reads and is probably still struggling with the oblique thing. Unfortunately, if Harbaugh starts out 0-6 against OSU (which is a very real possibility) the calls for his head will be overwhelming.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:49 PM ^
The similarities are that the team had some offensive struggles and unsurprisingly they were related to QB play. That’s about it.
Comparing the talent of Speight / O’ Korn to Patterson / Mcaffrey is pretty ridiculous. Not to mention how much better this years O-Line and reviving group is. Plenty of reasons to believe this team can put it together in a way the 2017 team never could.
October 7th, 2019 at 4:52 PM ^
Yeah, the 2017 offense was hopeless from a personnel perspective. We were starting Nolan Ulizio at tackle for half the season. We had Patrick Kugler out there at C, a true sophomore Bredeson after a very shaky freshman year, true soph Onwenu...that line was bad.
We had true freshman receivers all over the field, and they had a lot to learn.
Not to mention the obvious differences at QB. We currently have two top 100 guys. Not a 3 star who wasn't available after the line got him killed and a guy that was benched at a G5 school.
The talent and experience on offense is LIGHT YEARS ahead of 2017. That entire offense was a disaster. It had 99 problems.
This offense has just two problems. They are huge problems but it's isolated to two: QB and OC. QB should be fixable too. Just put in the other guy who can't be as bad. That'll help but not sure how much given the coaching situation which appears to be dismal.
That defense was a bit better though, thanks to Hurst and Co.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:49 PM ^
Agreed and I think its the only reasonable take. If the offense is as broken as it looks then it will only break McCaffrey with it.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:52 PM ^
We need a weekly state of the program snowflakes thread
October 7th, 2019 at 3:53 PM ^
McCaffrey will absolutely not be a fix-all for this offense but at the very least he’ll be aggressive in the qb run game and maybe just throw the fucking ball. At this point I would take a pick more a game if it meant having a little bit of courage throwing into zones
October 7th, 2019 at 4:32 PM ^
If he can run it's a huge plus and opens up chucking it down the field.
We don't need to be executing like the NE Patriots at this point...we need some hope and some big plays.
Run the qb, chuck the ball downfield to your 4 uber talented wideouts, and hopefully other shit opens up.
October 7th, 2019 at 3:57 PM ^
Has McCaffrey even cleared the concussion protocol yet? Has he been practicing?
October 7th, 2019 at 4:02 PM ^
McCaffrey deserves at least a full game of QBing to show what he can do. He and Patterson were supposedly 1a and 1b in Fall camp. Well, 1a is not doing so well.
October 7th, 2019 at 4:10 PM ^
I feel like this season is 2014 all over again. The parallels are somewhat recognizable today. New OC that has failed miserably. A broke QB with no solid back-up options. A coach losing the faith in the alumni and fanbase. The only difference is we have a better record at this point.
DCaf doesn't appear to be playing anytime soon, so we can kiss that option goodbye for now. Milton is so still raw, but yet, may have more quality passing attempts than DCaf....that's mind-boggling. Must have been saving those plays for later down the road, when the defenses would be totally surprised to see a QB pass the ball.
October 7th, 2019 at 5:05 PM ^
No. Not at all. 2014 was more like 2017 and neither of them are at all like this year because both of those teams had disasters on the O line after losing guys from the previous team.
The 2014 team had lost Lewan and Schofield and started Mason Cole at LT as a true freshman. That's all you need to know about how terrible the rest of the line was so that was a virtually hopeless situation caused by poor late RichRod/transition OL recruiting.
2017 was similar as we were starting Nolan Ulizio, Patrick Kugler (both awful) and a bunch of underclassmen.
This year, we definitely have very good players at every position besides perhaps QB, but even there, we're supposed to have two good players.
We just have the worst offensive coaching we've ever had, and that's why we're bad despite a ton of talent and experience: because we rolled the dice on a 35-year-old WR coach to be fully in charge of our offense. Terrible mistake.