Prior to taking on OC duties, Brian Ferentz was supposed to be a decent offensive line coach. Iowa did win the Joe Moore award in 2016 when he was the OL coach and running game coordinator.
I realize there are any number of ways this might have been a mirage (and that OC was way too much for him), but it could also indicate that he'd be a good position coach.
I don't know about steroids--entirely possible--but Emtmann had bad luck with injuries. Blew out his left knee as a rookie, tore up his right the next year and had a neck injury the year after that.
I think the only bright spot in that particular Rose Bowl was Ty Wheatley's long TD run after the game was out of reach. Signs of what we'd see the next year.
There's clearly at least some regional bias in recruiting rankings; the question is how much it affects them. To give a trivial example, recruits in SEC territory are far more likely to be scouted than recruits in the northeast. Kwity Paye, for instance, coming out of Rhode Island was mostly a low three star--except for ESPN, which at the time Ace suspected was the only one of them that had done any in-depth scouting.
This may hold true for other areas, but it may also be negligible (depending on the area in question). Is there any other bias? I'm inclined to doubt it, but it's also possible that scouts in one area tend to over- or under-rank recruits enough to affect rankings.
Recruits that commit early often don't seem to get scouted as thoroughly as other players. Which will tend to affect rankings. I think that tends to be a small minority of players these days (although that's just my impression).
Cone was more of a Lloyd Carr holdover than anything; according to his stats he threw a pass in 2007 as a sophmore. He was also a pro-style QB who Rodriguez almost certainly never would have recruited.
I looked quickly through the highlights of that game. Yes, the offense did improve with Warren in there over Cade (which makes me wonder once again what the hell happened to Cade before he transferred).
However, Warren's QBR is inflated there because Bredeson turned what was admittedly a nice completion from a roughly 20 yard gain into 56 yards after Hawaii couldn't tackle him. It's such a small sample size, though, that that one play is longer than all of his other career completions put together.
I do have to look at the fact that Warren couldn't complete a pass last year against East Carolina, UNLV or Nebraska.
I'm wondering if you're thinking of Alan Bowman. Warren was 5 of 9 in 2022 and 0 for 5 last year for a career completion percentage of 35.7%, which does indeed suggest he might have trouble hitting the broad side of anything.
Bowman on the other hand hit 6 of his 7 attempts in 2022, finishing at 72.7% for his career at Michigan and 64.5% for his entire career.
That was a weird game, too. Thanks to that fluky pick six and Penn State's defense holding Michigan to three field goals in the first half, Penn State led briefly in the third. At that point it was the kind of game that always makes me nervous, where Michigan was clearly the better team but couldn't get the scoreboard to reflect that.
On the next two drives, though, Donovan Edwards and Blake Corum had long touchdowns and Penn State would never seriously threaten again.
Some of my favorite airport memories are doing an OJ through O'Hare only to discover that they'd just closed the gate our connection was supposed to be at.
The hello post was April 1st; the spring game that year was April 4, at which point spring practice was over or mostly over. I don't think Rudock took part in spring training at all.
Rudock was also kind of average for the first half or two thirds of the season. His play didn't really pick up until the Rutgers game.
Most Subarus are ugly, and I have a 2015 CrossTrek and I like it. I don't care for that station wagon/SUV form factor, though, no matter who makes it.
We have been pretty happy with the Subaru, though. The one thing I have to say is that even though I'm in Toronto I haven't had to drive in the snow all that much since we bought it.
I did absolutely no research, let ESPN auto-pick based on the favorites and then picked a few upsets, This means my bracket doesn't look that bad at the moment, but it'll get worse. I expect to end with an amount of success commensurate with the effort I put into this.
Oakland over Kentucky was absolutely not one of the upsets I picked.
I'd argue Faust was worse. Weis could at least win when he had somebody else's players. In his first two seasons Notre Dame went 9-3 and 10-3, improving over Tyrone Willingham's last two seasons (5-7 and 6-6). It wasn't until the players he'd recruited started taking over that the bottom fell out.
Gerry Faust never finished better than 7-5 after inheriting a 9-2-1 team from Dan Devine. To be fair to Faust, he never did worse than 5-6, either, and Weiss went 3-9 in 2007.
Former MSU coach Muddy Waters was worse than both of them. He had coached for a long time at Hillsdale and then at Saginaw Valley before taking over after Daryl Rogers left for Arizona State. His lack of big time experience showed--he went 10-23 at Michigan State and (more importantly for Spartan fans) never beat Michigan.
You realize finding and developing talent other schools pass over is a competitive advantage, right? I don’t know if Medved really is the best guy for the job, but if a coach can do that at Michigan I am all for it.
The best three year run anyone alive can remember? At this point the odds that any Michigan fan is old enough to remember any of those teams is exceedingly low. My grandfather, who would be roughly 110 if he were still around, wasn't alive for any of Fielding Yost's Point-A-Minute teams.
1946-1948 is the only other candidate. 19-2-1, three straight wins over Ohio State, 25 consecutive wins (going into 1949), a Rose Bowl win, two straight undefeated seasons and (depending on how you count) two national championships.
Looking at the box score, JJ threw more than he did against Iowa than he did in all but two other games (30 against Iowa and ECU, 37 against Purdue).
They just didn't have him throw anything remotely dangerous. He didn't have a completion over 14 yards, although he might have tried one or two longer-passes, and he ended up with his lowest yards per pass of the season.
(You should get combat pay for watching all those Iowa games.)
I think that's unfair to Belichick. It's not a coincidence that you usually see a great coach paired up with a great quarterback. Belichick provided an environment where Tom Brady could and did develop, and had the sense to stick with him when Bledsoe was healthy again. Imagine if Tom had wound up on one of those Lions teams Millen had hollowed out.
Belichick's decline has been obvious the last few years, though; the man kept hiring Matt Patricia, and he had two of his sons on staff last year, for crying out loud.
Look at New England's last Super Bowl win; that was all on the defense (and the most boring Super Bowl in years). Despite the Super Bowl win Tom's performance had fallen off a bit in playoffs in his last two years in New England, although I think his supporting cast had also fallen off.
It is pretty clear to me, though, that Belichick's biggest mistake was wanting to get rid of Tom Brady. First when Jimmy Garoppolo was a Patriot, and then when Tom actually left for Tampa.
Did the COVID year have an effect? The uptick in the Michigan running game began in 2021 immediately after the COVID year, picked up in 2022 and actually fell back a bit in 2023.
Looking very loosely at the 2021 and 2022 previews on this site, most of the OL was pretty young. The obvious exception was Olu Oluwatimi, who had been at Air Force in 2017 and Virginia from 2018-2021. He'd presumably had a redshirt and a COVID year.
So I'm going to say Harbaugh and staff were more of a factor, but the COVID year did have some effect.
(Also, in retrospect it's really funny to see how depressed the Mgoblog staff was for those 2021 previews. Not that I can blame them after, oh, 2008-2020.)
I assume Graig Ross is related to Craig. Whoever he is, he's right; this is the worst basketball team since Bill Frieder's second season (7-20) when I was in high school.
(Odds that BlueBarron fixes the typo before I finish this and I look like a bigger idiot than I actually am: 50%.)
I'd argue that Haskins started to emerge in 2019 (i.e., look at the Notre Dame game and a couple others) but agree that Gattis didn't have much to do with that.
I was watching his 2023 highlight reel and I think I see where they're coming from. The 2023 Blake Corum was caught from behind a few times where the 2021 Blake Corum would not have been.
At the same time (and I admit I may be wearing my homer glasses here), I think he has the skills to have a decent career in the NFL.
Harbaugh also inherited a program that was in decline, having gone 7-6 in 2013 and 5-7 in 2014. He immediately turned it around in 2015 and came within a decent spot on that goddamn fourth down in overtime to getting into the playoffs in 2016.
Juwan Howard, on the other hand, inherited a program that had been in three straight Sweet 16s and in the title game two years before. While he was able to do well when he had the talent, he's done a poor job of bringing it in and developing it.
I have to agree with this. I'm willing to forgive an occasional bad season; Beilein had a few. Yet other than his first (10-22), Beilein's worst seasons were at .500 or just below (15-17 and 16-16).
There's also been a clear downward trend as Beilein's players have moved on and the team has become Juwan's.
Which isn't a bad comparison. Jobs, however, was better at sticking to his strengths; Musk is all over the place with companies in completely unrelated industries.
Saban had a brief moment when it looked like he might work out in the NFL. The Dolphins had been 4-12 under Dave Wannstedt without a real quarterback; Saban took them to 9-7 with journeyman (and former Lion) Gus Frerotte.
Frerotte went to the Rams, and the Dolphins decided on Daunte Culpepper over Drew Brees. Which was all she wrote for Saban in the NFL; Culpepper--who never played at a high level again--only played in a handful of games, and Joey Harrington played most of the season (eventually benched for Cleo Lemon).
They finished 6-10. Afterwards Saban said that the Dolphins' decision not to sign Drew Brees was a big part of the reason why he went to Alabama.
My dad went to law school at the U of M and had season tickets since I think Bump Elliott's last year--I grew up going to most home games. I was born in Ann Arbor and was a townie on and off until middle school, and my mother lived in Ann Arbor when I was in high school.
I wound up going to school out of state, which was good for me for a variety of reasons, but I remained a fan.
I'd like to see Harbaugh and other coaches of interest (e.g., Day and Meyer) in a different color--although I'm not sure how easy/possible that is to do.
Every now and them I stick my head in because I missed something; why do we have the ball suddenly? What happened to this or that player? I thought that was an incompletion/sack/whatever?
It sounds like more like a bad buddy movie. "Two football coaches, one a defensive mastermind and the other an offensive genius, go on the run from fans and boosters after disastrous losses to conference rivals. Hilarity and hijinks ensue."
I'd also love to see a post-season Hail to the Victors (which Seth and/or Brian may have discussed/dismissed already, but if they did I missed it in my championship hangover).
My advice is to detach yourself from the sports media. Watch the games, yes, but why are you watching the talking heads anyway? Most of them aren't that interesting and many of them are downright awful.
I'd add that many people--particularly in the media, but you find them everywhere--like to jump on a bandwagon. There was definitely an anti-Michigan Signgate bandwagon, and nobody who jumped on really thought about the issue.
I'd add that the media thrives on engagement, and all the nonsense about sign stealing definitely drove engagement. Nonetheless, anybody who thinks that sign stealing played a role in any of Michigan's victories after the initial report came out is an idiot.
FYI: if the Lions beat the Rams, they're going to the Super Bowl. I know it.
See, my wife bought plane tickets to Portugal and I agreed without looking at the calendar. Odds are good that I am not going to be able to see any hypothetical Lions playoff games after this weekend. And if the Lions are going to go the Super Bowl, it will absolutely be in a season in which I have trouble watching the playoff games.
Will the Lions beat the Rams? Hell if I know. I like Campbell's aggressiveness--even if he should have kicked the extra point against Dallas after the first penalty--and it is a home game. I don't think the Lions have played a playoff game at home since Erik Kramer, and their one (1) playoff win of my lifetime came at home.
(I'm just grateful that the plane tickets weren't for last week. We could have changed them, it would have cost money and been a pain in the ass.)
I personally was disappointed that they didn't include both the three hours of talking and the full hour of weeping in the podcast yesterday. This makes up for that.
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All this is true, but I'm going to enjoy these stupid puff pieces while they last.
Prior to taking on OC duties, Brian Ferentz was supposed to be a decent offensive line coach. Iowa did win the Joe Moore award in 2016 when he was the OL coach and running game coordinator.
I realize there are any number of ways this might have been a mirage (and that OC was way too much for him), but it could also indicate that he'd be a good position coach.
I don't know about steroids--entirely possible--but Emtmann had bad luck with injuries. Blew out his left knee as a rookie, tore up his right the next year and had a neck injury the year after that.
I think the only bright spot in that particular Rose Bowl was Ty Wheatley's long TD run after the game was out of reach. Signs of what we'd see the next year.
There's clearly at least some regional bias in recruiting rankings; the question is how much it affects them. To give a trivial example, recruits in SEC territory are far more likely to be scouted than recruits in the northeast. Kwity Paye, for instance, coming out of Rhode Island was mostly a low three star--except for ESPN, which at the time Ace suspected was the only one of them that had done any in-depth scouting.
This may hold true for other areas, but it may also be negligible (depending on the area in question). Is there any other bias? I'm inclined to doubt it, but it's also possible that scouts in one area tend to over- or under-rank recruits enough to affect rankings.
Recruits that commit early often don't seem to get scouted as thoroughly as other players. Which will tend to affect rankings. I think that tends to be a small minority of players these days (although that's just my impression).
We did beat Tebow after he won the Heisman in 2007, but he played for two more years after that.
I personally think of it as payback for his victory over Michigan in 1999 right before he headed off for LSU.
In the era of the portal we're going to see this sort of thing on a regular basis. Just hopefully at other schools.
Cone was more of a Lloyd Carr holdover than anything; according to his stats he threw a pass in 2007 as a sophmore. He was also a pro-style QB who Rodriguez almost certainly never would have recruited.
Gotta agree with this. It's not necessarily a bad idea, but it's poorly implemented.
I looked quickly through the highlights of that game. Yes, the offense did improve with Warren in there over Cade (which makes me wonder once again what the hell happened to Cade before he transferred).
However, Warren's QBR is inflated there because Bredeson turned what was admittedly a nice completion from a roughly 20 yard gain into 56 yards after Hawaii couldn't tackle him. It's such a small sample size, though, that that one play is longer than all of his other career completions put together.
I do have to look at the fact that Warren couldn't complete a pass last year against East Carolina, UNLV or Nebraska.
I'm wondering if you're thinking of Alan Bowman. Warren was 5 of 9 in 2022 and 0 for 5 last year for a career completion percentage of 35.7%, which does indeed suggest he might have trouble hitting the broad side of anything.
Bowman on the other hand hit 6 of his 7 attempts in 2022, finishing at 72.7% for his career at Michigan and 64.5% for his entire career.
That was a weird game, too. Thanks to that fluky pick six and Penn State's defense holding Michigan to three field goals in the first half, Penn State led briefly in the third. At that point it was the kind of game that always makes me nervous, where Michigan was clearly the better team but couldn't get the scoreboard to reflect that.
On the next two drives, though, Donovan Edwards and Blake Corum had long touchdowns and Penn State would never seriously threaten again.
Some of my favorite airport memories are doing an OJ through O'Hare only to discover that they'd just closed the gate our connection was supposed to be at.
The hello post was April 1st; the spring game that year was April 4, at which point spring practice was over or mostly over. I don't think Rudock took part in spring training at all.
Rudock was also kind of average for the first half or two thirds of the season. His play didn't really pick up until the Rutgers game.
Most Subarus are ugly, and I have a 2015 CrossTrek and I like it. I don't care for that station wagon/SUV form factor, though, no matter who makes it.
We have been pretty happy with the Subaru, though. The one thing I have to say is that even though I'm in Toronto I haven't had to drive in the snow all that much since we bought it.
I have to say that I think the "Midwest guy" thing is overblown here. Louisville is less than two hours both from Cincinnati and Indianapolis.
If I were May, I'd have been concerned about the status of the ACC and Louisville's culture.
I did absolutely no research, let ESPN auto-pick based on the favorites and then picked a few upsets, This means my bracket doesn't look that bad at the moment, but it'll get worse. I expect to end with an amount of success commensurate with the effort I put into this.
Oakland over Kentucky was absolutely not one of the upsets I picked.
My hat is off to that guy.
I'd argue Faust was worse. Weis could at least win when he had somebody else's players. In his first two seasons Notre Dame went 9-3 and 10-3, improving over Tyrone Willingham's last two seasons (5-7 and 6-6). It wasn't until the players he'd recruited started taking over that the bottom fell out.
Gerry Faust never finished better than 7-5 after inheriting a 9-2-1 team from Dan Devine. To be fair to Faust, he never did worse than 5-6, either, and Weiss went 3-9 in 2007.
Former MSU coach Muddy Waters was worse than both of them. He had coached for a long time at Hillsdale and then at Saginaw Valley before taking over after Daryl Rogers left for Arizona State. His lack of big time experience showed--he went 10-23 at Michigan State and (more importantly for Spartan fans) never beat Michigan.
You realize finding and developing talent other schools pass over is a competitive advantage, right? I don’t know if Medved really is the best guy for the job, but if a coach can do that at Michigan I am all for it.
I am literally cleaning out my filing cabinet now and I want to know when they broke into my house.
The best three year run anyone alive can remember? At this point the odds that any Michigan fan is old enough to remember any of those teams is exceedingly low. My grandfather, who would be roughly 110 if he were still around, wasn't alive for any of Fielding Yost's Point-A-Minute teams.
1946-1948 is the only other candidate. 19-2-1, three straight wins over Ohio State, 25 consecutive wins (going into 1949), a Rose Bowl win, two straight undefeated seasons and (depending on how you count) two national championships.
Looking at the box score, JJ threw more than he did against Iowa than he did in all but two other games (30 against Iowa and ECU, 37 against Purdue).
They just didn't have him throw anything remotely dangerous. He didn't have a completion over 14 yards, although he might have tried one or two longer-passes, and he ended up with his lowest yards per pass of the season.
(You should get combat pay for watching all those Iowa games.)
He's Peyton Manning, but he beat his team's college rival.
Seriously, look at Manning's college career. Tennessee was 39-3 against everybody but Florida, but 0-3 against Florida.
Manning couldn't manage a win against Spurrier when Steve was coaching Washingon, either.
I think that's unfair to Belichick. It's not a coincidence that you usually see a great coach paired up with a great quarterback. Belichick provided an environment where Tom Brady could and did develop, and had the sense to stick with him when Bledsoe was healthy again. Imagine if Tom had wound up on one of those Lions teams Millen had hollowed out.
Belichick's decline has been obvious the last few years, though; the man kept hiring Matt Patricia, and he had two of his sons on staff last year, for crying out loud.
Look at New England's last Super Bowl win; that was all on the defense (and the most boring Super Bowl in years). Despite the Super Bowl win Tom's performance had fallen off a bit in playoffs in his last two years in New England, although I think his supporting cast had also fallen off.
It is pretty clear to me, though, that Belichick's biggest mistake was wanting to get rid of Tom Brady. First when Jimmy Garoppolo was a Patriot, and then when Tom actually left for Tampa.
Did the COVID year have an effect? The uptick in the Michigan running game began in 2021 immediately after the COVID year, picked up in 2022 and actually fell back a bit in 2023.
Looking very loosely at the 2021 and 2022 previews on this site, most of the OL was pretty young. The obvious exception was Olu Oluwatimi, who had been at Air Force in 2017 and Virginia from 2018-2021. He'd presumably had a redshirt and a COVID year.
So I'm going to say Harbaugh and staff were more of a factor, but the COVID year did have some effect.
(Also, in retrospect it's really funny to see how depressed the Mgoblog staff was for those 2021 previews. Not that I can blame them after, oh, 2008-2020.)
I assume Graig Ross is related to Craig. Whoever he is, he's right; this is the worst basketball team since Bill Frieder's second season (7-20) when I was in high school.
(Odds that BlueBarron fixes the typo before I finish this and I look like a bigger idiot than I actually am: 50%.)
I'd argue that Haskins started to emerge in 2019 (i.e., look at the Notre Dame game and a couple others) but agree that Gattis didn't have much to do with that.
I was watching his 2023 highlight reel and I think I see where they're coming from. The 2023 Blake Corum was caught from behind a few times where the 2021 Blake Corum would not have been.
At the same time (and I admit I may be wearing my homer glasses here), I think he has the skills to have a decent career in the NFL.
Harbaugh also inherited a program that was in decline, having gone 7-6 in 2013 and 5-7 in 2014. He immediately turned it around in 2015 and came within a decent spot on that goddamn fourth down in overtime to getting into the playoffs in 2016.
Juwan Howard, on the other hand, inherited a program that had been in three straight Sweet 16s and in the title game two years before. While he was able to do well when he had the talent, he's done a poor job of bringing it in and developing it.
I have to agree with this. I'm willing to forgive an occasional bad season; Beilein had a few. Yet other than his first (10-22), Beilein's worst seasons were at .500 or just below (15-17 and 16-16).
There's also been a clear downward trend as Beilein's players have moved on and the team has become Juwan's.
Looks like he had 35 yards on 4 carries. On the one hand that's not bad; on the other, it's a small sample and it came in garbage time.
Which isn't a bad comparison. Jobs, however, was better at sticking to his strengths; Musk is all over the place with companies in completely unrelated industries.
Saban had a brief moment when it looked like he might work out in the NFL. The Dolphins had been 4-12 under Dave Wannstedt without a real quarterback; Saban took them to 9-7 with journeyman (and former Lion) Gus Frerotte.
Frerotte went to the Rams, and the Dolphins decided on Daunte Culpepper over Drew Brees. Which was all she wrote for Saban in the NFL; Culpepper--who never played at a high level again--only played in a handful of games, and Joey Harrington played most of the season (eventually benched for Cleo Lemon).
They finished 6-10. Afterwards Saban said that the Dolphins' decision not to sign Drew Brees was a big part of the reason why he went to Alabama.
Spurrier? Never finished better than 7-9.
MS Word doesn’t know shit. I’m waiting to hear from WordPerfect.
My dad went to law school at the U of M and had season tickets since I think Bump Elliott's last year--I grew up going to most home games. I was born in Ann Arbor and was a townie on and off until middle school, and my mother lived in Ann Arbor when I was in high school.
I wound up going to school out of state, which was good for me for a variety of reasons, but I remained a fan.
Maybe 3-4 times a month; generally when I've cough had a few cough. Usually the highlights from a particular game, but sometimes the full game.
Not just the last three years, either. The 2019 Notre Dame game is a favorite of mine in recent years, but others as well.
I'd like to…
I love this.
I'd like to see Harbaugh and other coaches of interest (e.g., Day and Meyer) in a different color--although I'm not sure how easy/possible that is to do.
Every now and them I stick my head in because I missed something; why do we have the ball suddenly? What happened to this or that player? I thought that was an incompletion/sack/whatever?
Every time, I regret it.
Absolutely. He also came from baseball, where the Astros had a sign-stealing controversy that mattered.
I’m personally hoping more Nussmeier than Gattis; say what you will about the man, but he didn’t screw up 2021.
I also wouldn’t mind Ohio State falling into a pit for a decade or two, but that’s just me.
Washington did make it to the finals. Sure, Alabama was probably the tougher team but they did beat Texas to get in.
Oregon also beat OSU in 2021; they’ve had their moments over the lasr twenty or so years.
Oregon? The team whose only two losses were to Washington and both by less than a touchdown? That Oregon? Pac-12 may be overrated but come on.
Good to see you back, Ace!
It sounds like more like a bad buddy movie. "Two football coaches, one a defensive mastermind and the other an offensive genius, go on the run from fans and boosters after disastrous losses to conference rivals. Hilarity and hijinks ensue."
I'd love something like this.
I'd also love to see a post-season Hail to the Victors (which Seth and/or Brian may have discussed/dismissed already, but if they did I missed it in my championship hangover).
My advice is to detach yourself from the sports media. Watch the games, yes, but why are you watching the talking heads anyway? Most of them aren't that interesting and many of them are downright awful.
I'd add that many people--particularly in the media, but you find them everywhere--like to jump on a bandwagon. There was definitely an anti-Michigan Signgate bandwagon, and nobody who jumped on really thought about the issue.
I'd add that the media thrives on engagement, and all the nonsense about sign stealing definitely drove engagement. Nonetheless, anybody who thinks that sign stealing played a role in any of Michigan's victories after the initial report came out is an idiot.
FYI: if the Lions beat the Rams, they're going to the Super Bowl. I know it.
See, my wife bought plane tickets to Portugal and I agreed without looking at the calendar. Odds are good that I am not going to be able to see any hypothetical Lions playoff games after this weekend. And if the Lions are going to go the Super Bowl, it will absolutely be in a season in which I have trouble watching the playoff games.
Will the Lions beat the Rams? Hell if I know. I like Campbell's aggressiveness--even if he should have kicked the extra point against Dallas after the first penalty--and it is a home game. I don't think the Lions have played a playoff game at home since Erik Kramer, and their one (1) playoff win of my lifetime came at home.
(I'm just grateful that the plane tickets weren't for last week. We could have changed them, it would have cost money and been a pain in the ass.)
Picture this scenario: Lloyd Carr retires after the 2006 season like he wanted. Rich Rodriguez takes the Alabama job.
And Nick Saban takes the Michigan job.
I honestly do not know how I would feel about that.
I knew I hated that guy for a reason!
I personally was disappointed that they didn't include both the three hours of talking and the full hour of weeping in the podcast yesterday. This makes up for that.