So yeah, I'm UFRing the Spring Game. Did you want recruiting roundups instead? Yeah, that's what I thought. Anyway you're not supposed to read much into spring stuff except I noticed they were still doing a thing that annoyed me a lot last year.
If you missed all that, there was a running question through these exercises whether Cade McNamara's keep reads were hot or if they were determining what their post-snap mesh results were going to be beforehand. This was true for RPOs as well as zone reads. And it made life hard because I couldn't tell for certain if the coaches were telling McNamara to give no matter what, or if that was just how he was reading things, or maybe he was reading something else.
With the benefit of an offseason and Sherrone Moore's recent coaching clinic, where he echoed Josh Gattis's claim that they put reads on all this stuff, I think I can say it was mostly on McNamara.
However there were a few instances where his coaches gave him a read that wasn't the thing that turned out to be wide open. And I wanted to call attention to that, not because Michigan's missing out on some easy yards, but because I think they're making a conscious decision about this, and…you're going to laugh…it kind of makes sense.
The Wide Open Bubble
Let's begin with this play from the spring game.
Maize has Darrius Clemons in the backfield (the one on top) as a split-back flanking McNamara with Donovan Edwards. Clemons takes an orbit motion to the opposite flat, but nobody goes with him. The defense is blitzing the slot safety, Caden Kolesar, behind a crash from the OLB, Jaylen Harrell. That means there isn't anybody for Clemons until the deep safety.
McNamara is clearly looking at Kolesar. Kolesar is clearly the slot defender in the best position to be running outside with Clemons. Kolesar is clearly blitzing. And yet McNamara gives. Why?
We're going to ignore the play's result (it's a risky but successful demolition of Counter GT by Kris Jenkins) to focus on what McNamara does after the handoff. First thing he does is look at Clemons. And probably feels kinda bad.
But it's what Cade does next that interests me. This is a trot, but he's clearly been practicing this as a rollout/QB run.
The look to Clemons suggests that's an option. But given his reaction to Kolesar, I think I can say with some confidence that McNamara wasn't reading Kolesar on an RPO bubble to Clemons; he was reading Kolesar on a QB keep with a pitch option to Clemons.
[After THE JUMP: There's also something every familiar about all this.]
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