Novel Theory of Football

Doctors urge you to take this common item from your fridge and throw it out immediately....

GTFO with that reasoned, somewhat balanced take! I want the gloom & doom report that our season is already ruined!!!!

4-0!

Oh, the humanity!

I won't believe it until we get a win this coming Saturday. And then I likely won't believe it until we get a win in Beaver Stadium 

The longer I am a Michigan fan the more I understand why people hate Michigan fans.  When this football team wins, WE SUCK AND NEED TO PASS MORE!!!!.  When they win again the next week (scoring a TD on every possession), the OPPONENT SUCKS.  When we again win, the OFFENSE AND COACHING SUCKS AND ... 

Wait, we're 4-0?

The rules and restrictions of BPONE do not prohibit you from making this assertion - however, they do require acknowledgment that an improved, better coached Rutgers, Maryland and Indiana only makes the already ridiculous imbalance between the conferences East and West worse. Thus this small glimmer of (possibly false) hope for the current moment really means Michigan will never, ever, have good things again. 

I've seen the Sagarin rankings several times over the last day or two to justify the game. I don't think Rutgers is a bad team this year, but Sagarin also puts Oklahoma at 3, Michigan at 4, and ND at 5, which don't seem right. Seems like a service that uses stats but has limited data set.

The issue with the Rutgers game is that it opened up more questions on our passing attack and whether Cade can remain starter or not. He is definitely the starter at Wisconsin, but we need to see more from him. Even more so, we need to see more from Gattis. Cade not hitting the open receivers were frustrating, but I was even more frustrated that we were running Corum and Haskins into loaded boxes instead of bouncing outside. And not using Henning on even jet sweeps on that game seems criminal. Michigan has never been super creative in offensive playcalling, but they have to better than curl up in a shell when things get tough.

I also have minor concerns about the defense. They did well to shore up near the end of the game, but I'm curious how MacDonald responds to teams with running QBs. Seems like we had major issues trying to stop them and we have players like Martinez and Tagovailoa on our schedule. I was also frustrated that we couldn't stop the screen passes at all and they kept going for chunk plays. So far, MacDonald has adjusted well in games so hopefully he can continue to do that moving forward.

Here are the Saturday scenarios:

1.  All week "Wisconsin will beat UM.  Wisconsin is a good team. UM can't win on the road, blah blah blah"

a.  UM wins the narrative will be "Wisconsin isn't that good, they already had 2 losses and they are unranked, call me when they beat someone good"

b.  UM loses the narrative will be "UM sucks, they can't even beat a bad team that came into the game with a losing record".

The only things I know is that our team is better than Rutgers, NIU, Washington and Western Michigan. I have enjoyed 3.5 hours of football this Fall and hope to enjoy another hour on Saturday.  

Rutgers is 53rd on SP+, ahead of teams like Minnesota and Indiana.

This is my first comment on the game because candidly I couldnt believe the garbage some of the posters here were saying during and after the game.  They won the game but to read what seemingly a majority of people here expressed that simply cant be right.  Given how much our team, our coaching staff, our play-calling sucked we simply must've lost and lost big - right?  To a horrible team without a win on their schedule.

No wait - we won?  Instead of focusing on the things that DID go right (like the entire first half until Cade got targeted) the board wants to talk endlessly it seems about the failings of the offense in the 2nd half.  Like the OP correctly stated - Rutgers is actually pretty good and has a pretty good HC (we almost hired him back in the day - remember?) so the fact that we didnt win 100 Jilliion to minus 4 shouldnt be a letdown but for some reason it is to many people.

I wish I had the time to match up the "Harbaugh sucks" comments to the pre-season predictions because I would bet anything very few, if any, had us at 4-0 heading into Wisconsin.  I predicted 9-3 with losses to Wisconsin, PSU & OSU but i believe we're going to win this Saturday and go to 5-0 so I may need to recalibrate my prediction to 10-2.  Some people just like to miserable and unhappy it seems.

FWIW I really love this year's team.  I love their heart, their encouraging of each other (absent last year) and the way they found a way to WIN a game that sure looked like it was going to slip away at the end.  I'm not discouraged and I'm not down on them a bit.  

Go blue and beat Wisconsin!

These things aren’t mutually exclusive. Rutgers can be good (more likely , ok) at football and Michigan coaching can still be very poor at making adjustments to respond to better tactical opponents. This leaves us in a state where we can dominate a team when they can’t solve our plan a. But leaves us struggling since we haven’t seen any indication that the coaches have a plan b. 

Rutgers is a decent team, and they will get better with their coaching staff. Our fanbase doesnt want to get their hopes up because we have all been let down so many times. 

Beat the shit out of Wisconsin! 

Everyone on earth is probably suffering at least some PTSD due to the pandemic.  Cases seem to be significantly more severe in Ann Arbor.  It's like we've spent the last two years in a trench on the western front.

Rutgers certainly isn't bad anymore, there's a night a day difference with Schiano vs Crys Ash.  However, QB play does not inspire confidence at the moment.  Cade gets rattled in home games, I don't have a good feeling about him leading the team on the road.  I believe Gardner is correct that he's handcuffing Gattis to a certain extent in play calling when he can't hit easy throws.  They're not going to make him do something complex when he's failing the easy stuff.  Not diversifying the ground game is another story to which I don't have an answer.  Only the coaches can answer that question and we know they aren't actually going to. 

So yes, Rutgers might be good.  If we score 6 points over the last 45 minutes of games against better teams, we'll be holding a bunch of Ls by the end of the season.   

It doesn't change the fact the coaching was absolute garbage in the second half and the efforts of the defense saved their hides.

Rutgers is really well coached and played a good game. They're certainly not the dumpster fire they were in 2016. 

It seemed like a game where they brought their A game, and we showed up with our C game. To still win that without too much doubt, is pretty good to me.

I can't stand the negative Nancy's on the board.  We beat the shit outta Rutgers in the first half.  Cade threw more on-target and catchable balls in rhythm than he threw ducks in the 2nd half.  We were 1 overthrow in the endzone away from a 24-3 lead near the half.  We have more long explosive pass plays at this point than we've had in years.  Our "not so dominant run game" marched right down the field on the first possession while only passing twice.

And people concerned about the defense, we lost Josh Ross to a weird injury that appeared to not be that serious, but yet the medical staff held him out and our FRESHMEN linebackers made freshmen mistakes.  In Mac's defense, the linebackers are the glue that holds the thing together so it makes sense that it looked a bit wobbly when our SENIOR CAPTAIN was held out basically the whole half.  He should be back next week, I would imagine.

Rutgers is a good team, people must not know that.  I watched Syracuse (thinking they sucked) but they pummeled a decent Liberty team at home.  And Rutgers beat that Syracuse team on the road.  They're gonna give Ohio State a challenge this week in Piscataway.  

And our offense should have time to feel itself out on Saturday against a Wisconsin offense that's terrible, and features a QB more likely to throw a pick than a completion (seriously, watch the 4th quarter of the Notre Dame game)

We're fine.  People need to grow some stones.

Michigan definitely turtled hard in this game and it almost cost them. But, I would make the case the Rutgers isn't terrible - they're not particularly talented but they're well-coached and I think they could knock off a Michigan State or a Penn State this year. 

I agree that Rutgers looks to be much improved this season, but the overwhelming complaint people have is with the offensive game plan and particularly the play calling in the 2nd half. Hopefully that is a one off brain fart from Gattis and crew, and in the future they will be quicker to recognize and attack what the opposing defense is doing, and get touches for our skill position players in doing so. (I'm sure the game plan wasn't for AJ Henning to have 0 touches, but when you run so few plays due to a quarter and a half of three and outs....)

Also the talent and technique of the defensive line may once again provide a ceiling for the team's success. I'm not an expert and was a bit distracted during the game, but my thought was that run defense woes weren't entirely caused by poor discipline and tackling vs. the option. I'll look forward to someone much smarter than me watching the tape and grading the d-line.

Also I thought the defense was very "bend but don't break". Obviously the results point to that with long drives that ultimately resulted in field goals, but looking at how they actually played, the corners seemed to be giving the receivers an awfully generous amount of space until they got into the red zone. There are game situations which call for that, and perhaps this was one of them, but I'd like to see them change it up with taking a risk here and there to get off the field sooner.

Anyway, the Wisconsin game should be VERY interesting. Wisconsin is going to be fired up to salvage something from their season, and will play very physical. They aren't going to turn the ball over 5 times like they did against ND (who they played extremely close until that 4th quarter meltdown), and I'm sure they will look to bully Michigan's defense and establish the run, as they have done in the past.

Meanwhile, Michigan's offense will need to be balanced in order to beat them. Cade has looked pretty good making difficult timing passes crossing over the middle. Can we supplement that with some quick outside passes, as well as some play action to really get the passing game going and have a versatile offense to punish defenses for overplaying the interior runs?

I think Rutgers is definitely improved, and probably makes a bowl this year. Vedral ran that offense tremendously well in the 2nd half so if he stays healthy they've got a bunch more wins left.

That said, the B1G as a whole looks pretty weak this year. Anyone other than OSU/PSU/maybe Iowa? dropped into the SEC would easily be heading for a losing season. The conference just looks full of a bunch of 'meh' teams and hopefully Michigan can take advantage of that to put up a nice record this year.

agreed - rutgers is a competent football team, and we played a terrible half of football.

both things can be true.

Fair. I for one have long scoffed at the notion--pervasive here--that just because Rutgers sucked in the past it would suck in the future. That doesn't follow.

Likewise this team. Has some talent, discipline, can beat Wisconsin, irrespective of season-long performance OR second-half performance Saturday.

But to do that I think there's a consensus that we need to be more flexible with our play-calling. In fact, I'm not sure there's ever been such a complete consensus among the posters and writers I admire here. 

Let’s assume Rutgers is not bad at football.  That still does not explain Michigan’s utter inability to counter Rutgers stacking the box as the game went on, or excuse our insane refusal to deviate from running into that stack.  If Rutgers was not bad at football, the second half should have looked like the first half, given the talent discrepancy.  That it did not tells us plenty about how Michigan is bad at coaching football.

You make a good point, but I think the view that Rutgers still sucks had ample justification prior to the game last Saturday. Review the detailed breakdowns of their offense and defense posted on this site. They played some very bad teams enroute to 3-0, and had some really bad play that was opposition independent. For example, was there any sign that Rutgers' QB was going to be that accurate in the second half? The preview was emphatically no.

You may be right about Rutgers. CFB has such a small sample size that we really know much less than we think we do. Now we have a data point that says wait a minute, Rutgers might be pretty OK. Next Saturday at Wisconsin will tell us a lot. And, I think a won at Camp Randall even against an unranked Wisconsin would still be very significant (as well as a Conference W).

I'm happy to be 4-0....it's much better than 2-2.

You know there's a BUT coming, right.....

BUT

My first concern comes from Cade missing easy throws after the targeting play. Either:

(a) Cade got injured on the play, which means the staff is unwilling to play JJ for some reason and is fine with rolling with an injured player at the team's most important position. Or....

(b) Cade was physically OK but got rattled and lost his ability to perform. Again, the staff was willing to roll with a less-than-effective player rather than put in a 100% healthy JJ.

OK, fine, if you're willing to put that aside, then my second concern comes from the lack of edge attacks in the second half. We simply did not use our speedy playmakers on the edges as we did in the earlier games. There is lots of evidence of this happening in prior years if we are ahead in the second half of games. The staff's collective anus tightens and we go uber-vanilla. This has, and will bite us in the ass in tougher games.

Ask yourselves -- are we beating Wisconsin, MSU, OSU, PSU with this offense? Are Nebraska, Maryland, and Indiana likely victories with this offense? 

I can be happy about being 4-0 and simultaneously have concerns.

I wasn't able to watch Saturday's game live, so I came across comments/reactions before I saw it, which may have colored my interpretation. After clobbering the spread in the first three games, it was disappointing to trail it; but the Vegas odds OUGHT to overestimate the margin in our favor ~50% of the time assuming close to efficient gambling markets, so 3-1 relative to the spread makes some sense.

I do also feel like the lack of flash maybe triggered some people's BPONE to kick in. It was a bit of a let-down seeing all of the inside runs. At the same time, can you really argue with wanting to play a low-variance, controlling game that has worked all year against an opponent you know you have a talent edge against?

Cade threw well in the first-half, but also mostly to mind-blowingly open receivers. The throws later were a little off, but mostly not radically so.

I've never played a down of competitive football, and I can't imagine how hard it is to make the split-second decisions RBs have to, but it felt like both Haskins and Corum left yards on the field in their decisions. Curious what the UFR shows and if it's that or line errors that got them bottled up.

Rutgers' version of "bend, don't break" should get some credit here too; where in the previous games we'd been able to hit some home runs, eventually they were able to (maybe even bound to) get some successful stops.

I don't feel quite as warm and fuzzy as I did before this game, but at no point in this game did I feel like we were going to lose. That's not nothing. Beat Wisconsin.
 

Rutgers does seem to be a well coached team that is better than many of us gave them credit for.  It was great to pull out a win despite the 2H offensive ineptitude, but as I’m sure the coaches and players know, there are a number of things that need improvement.  Play calling,  missed assignment on defense, RBs missing holes to start.  
 

The team looks a lot better than I thought pre season and my 7-5/8-4 prediction seems conservative now.  However, if Saturday’s 2H performance becomes the norm then 8-4 feels right to me