Points per Game at Michigan

(Mods, if you think this should be a diary, please feel free to move it)

For those of you who have seen my diary series Iowatch!, we’re tracking how Iowa’s offense performs under Old Frenemy Cade McNamara. I had to cut the following piece from my Week 3 Iowatch! Diary, but I really want to acknowledge how difficult the road ahead is going to be for Iowa. So we’ll start this forum post where the diary intro had to leave off:

“Offensive” “Coordinator” “Brian” Ferentz has been tasked with scoring 325 points on the season, or an average of 25 points per game.

For reference, Iowa’s total scoring last year was 230 (!) total points for an average of 17.7 (!!) points per game. That INCLUDES the 46 (!!!) points contributed by the defense. To say their offense was putrid would be an understatement: they were 120th in the country on a Points Per Drive basis.

So Iowa needs to add 7+ points per game to their scoring. This is a MONUMENTAL goal that is being placed on Ferentz The Younger, who has duly turned to Old Frenemy Cade McNamara to helm his offense and “save” his job. (I will eat my hat if Brian Ferentz is actually fired.)

Context:

Cade McNamara has actually been in this position before! The PPG improvement from 2020 to 2021 at Michigan was +7.46 points.

If you’re like me, your next question is “wait, how often has a 7+ point turnaround happened at Michigan?” It’s a good question! Saying “2023 Iowa has to exceed 2022 Iowa like 2021 Michigan exceeded 2020 Michigan” is a powerful statement. This kind of improvement is a Big Deal.

Takeaways:

It took 40 years of back tracing, but I finally found a time that Michigan was as bad at scoring as Iowa was last year. 1984 (with none other than Jim Harbaugh as part time QB) saw us score 17.5 PPG, a whole 0.2 PPG worse than Iowa in 2022. Not even 2008 or 2014 were that bad. Michigan has occasionally been worse than Iowa WANTS to be this year…but not often.

Here’s the definitive list of 7+ point turnarounds since 1983:

Harbaugh Giveth, Harbaugh Taketh Away

You’ll notice that Jim Harbaugh has presided over 4 of Michigan's 7 largest PPG improvements (and QB’d one more!). But a couple of those turnarounds were over HIS OWN PRIOR MICHIGAN TEAM. Context: the ‘turnaround’ in 2016 is actually a huge point in his favor - it was a massive upward-trajectory improvement on a pretty darn good 2015…which was already right there with the best of the Carr and Moeller and Bo eras. 2016 could have been THE year.

But, uh… that 2017-to-2018 jump rankles. If you go back and read my diaries from a couple months ago, you’ll notice that over the course of the three diaries I get more and more bitter about the offense in 2017. I’m not kidding when I say that the PPG drop-off from 2016 to 2017 was, by far, the furthest a Michigan offense has dropped since AT LEAST 1985. Offenses just do not get that much worse in one year, like… ever (though by god both Bo and Hoke tried…):

And that abysmal 2017 offense was STILL ever-so-slightly better than Iowa is even ATTEMPTING to be this year!

“Offensive” “Coordinator” “Brian” Ferentz has his work cut out for him.