Offensive Playcalling & Personnel

My only two playing annoyances are within our 5 yard line... The riskiness cost us two games. And using Peppers running upiddle, is silly, with two rbs in backfield with him. All it does is isolate where the ball is. Instead use a heavy TE package and have him run wide with option to throw...

Seemed like a wasted play each time, exception when he decoyed. And this was true throughout the season. I've never understood how the O scheme utilized Peppers and failed to adjust this over time.

That's my only real complaint for O play calling. Grant Perry had some key grabs this season partly because opponents' defenses focused on Butt. Darboh and Chesson experienced slumps, at times dropping catchable passes, although Speight did throw behind or ahead of them a bit too often. The O line was error prone and failed to pick up blitzers when the enemy concealed the blitz. Smith was an effective blocker compared with the other RBs, which is not a good situation.

The coaches had to work with all these quirks and more. I'm not going to second guess them with the outlier being Peppers. Next team we play is beyond our control, unless somebody here is a voodoo guru; on the whole, I've enjoyed the heck out of this season - the community vibe reminds me of the 80's under Bo.

There are national championships in our proximate future and the games inbetween will be fun to watch - our team will always be in the competition for #1. It's painful to recall how we played football beginning late in Carr's time until Jimmy was hired.

For most of the year, particularly mid-season, it was very creative. Speight threw some picks in the OSU game and missed a bunch of deep throws against Iowa. The game plan made sense, quick throws against a defensive line that could put pressure on M. However, look at the play that Samuel made to get OSU to fourth and 1. It's the type of play that a RB Peppers or RB Evans can also make and Michigan didn't really put them in that position often enough. It's not crazy to say that some of the double passes and jet sweeps might have been better utilized in the big game.

 

I think Michigan was at their best when they were stretching the field horizontally and vertically. At times, especially at the goal line, I think Michigan would benefit from using a shotgun formation and letting Speight read the field and throw. Sometimes the play action fake was resulting in a blitzing linebacker in Speight's face right away. Using a shotgun passing set alleviates that a bit as Speight doesn't have to turn his back from the defense. in the end, these are minor tweaks to a good offense. I thought it was great until the last three games of the year. Harbaugh and his staff know a shi- ton about football, and I'm glad they are coaches at Michigan. I trust or hope that they will reflect on some minor tweaks to play calling that could hlep them break open games like yesterday. That said, hit deep throws at Iowa or don't get the damn ball picked off, and we'd all be a hell of a lot happier. 

IIRC, they had success using him as a running back last year, handing him the ball with no gimmicks involved...But I don't know what they prepared for in practice but then didn't think they could use for whatever reason. And maybe Peppers wasn't up for playing 75 snaps (or whatever amount) for whatever reason. You have to have him on the field a decent amount for his presence not to telegraph that he's getting the ball.

Empty set shotgun formation on first downs in this game was dumb. Failure to seize defensive momentum.

One thing I didn't know.

When the chips are on the line - we shit the bed.

If you take out the 21 point turnover swing, we kicked the fuck out of them.

Just ignore this post - I'm still stuffing my face with the sourest of grapes.  But, when one team has what... 11 penalties and the other has ONE?

Regarding Gary: It doesn't matter at all that Gary was a consensus #1. Taco Charlton has been playing at an unbelievably high level, and Gary was not even remotely near that level. If Gary ever reaches that level, it will be the reason he was the consensus #1. Gary could have a fine career and be fully deserving of his 5 stars and yet never play as good as Charlton has played. If we ever see a UFR on this one, expect Charlton to lead the team in +. He was a dominator, and has been for most of the season. Charlton has been playing like a top 5 NFL draft pick.

I think the use of Peppers was a bit wasteful. He is most dangerous when he is in space. Using him at quarterback where he is always up against a stacked box seems like a poor use of him unless he is going to throw the ball occasionally. It worked against Wisconsin because they were surprised to see it. If we just used him as a WR or RB I think he would have had a greater impact, as he did last year. We could have tried to match him up against linebackers in space, but we never did. Would it have been that hard to give him an occasional crossing route or screen? If Peppers comes back, I fully expect his role to be more similar to what I described.

The offense has been below average for a month.  Michigan went from 6.32 to 6.44 to 5.35 yards per play over the course of the last three months.  In November, their 363 yards per game is 7th best in the Big Ten.  And those poor November numbers include the Maryland game when they had 660 yards of offense.  

Similar to last season, the team looks like it peaked too early.  Just on the other side of the ball this time.  No idea what happened to the play calling in the last month, but its been pretty bad.

1. JH is almost too steeped in NFL management of the game. MSU (both years) and OSU games were classic examples with creative & ball-control offense for roughly 3 quarters and UM had solid leads in both. With this D and just solid O output, UM should win those games. Unlike the NFL, college kids make mistakes and momentum swings more than the NFL. 2. As mentioned by others, the Achilles heel is the inability of the OL (mostly) and the RBs (partially) to take control. Given point 1, JH needs a reliable running game to finish the games once he has schemed 10+ pt leads. What continues to impress me about this turnaround is UM's ability to lead almost every game late. Only a few times have we really been in a hole in the 2nd half. Utah and OSU last year are the only games that we were not ahead late and not the better team. 2 of 25 games.

Need a real qb. Not some cast off or kid playing his first season. Speight was getting there but the injury took too much out of him and the back up, well we know what that looked like. Brady Hoke fucked this team over at quarterback so badly it's not even funny. If you have bad qb play in college, you will lose.

I agree with some criticism - the Pepcat is way too predictable and the lack of McDoom (assuming he's healthy) was hard to figure out.  But on the whole, I think the staff called a solid game in challenging circumstances, playing a top-10 defense on the road with a gimpy QB, shaky pass protection and limited run game.  

Some of the fan criticism feels like wanting to have our cake and eat it too - people complain about how the coaches were wrong to "take chances" on the two interceptions, but then also wrong to "not play to win" in the 4th quarter.  

Why can we never go up tempo to catch a defense off guard?

We have a bad to mediocre qb and offensive line.  The fact that we had an extremely potent offense this year was all a result of the team's play calling genius.  What you see as bad play calling was really a failure to finagle our way to success around a bad qb and ol from time to time.