Excellent post Brian, great to read your column after all of us, both fans and Blog staff, have waited for so long. I was in your boat at the beginning of the season, had them at 7 or 8 wins at most and would have considered that a success. By the sparty game, I finally took the time to think about things and looked ahead on the schedule and thought to myself, 'we're 7-1, who else will beat us before OSU? THIS IS GREAT!'
Now, of course, I'm giddy like I was after losing my virginity. The difference is that only lasted a few seconds, this is still going!!
Up against Iowa, I was not expecting this staff to dial up another stomp to the throat right after a touchdown. Just goes to show I still have something to learn about this year's Team *returns to watching highlights of the last 13 games*
I couldn't agree more about the clock management. The thing that really burns me is that there has literally been one coaching staff in the last 20 years that's gotten their players to run a legitimate 2 minute drill and that coaching staff had the worst combined record of any 3 year period in the Team's history.
While it looks like they're close, I'm still skeptically wondering how much longer we'll have to wait before thinking to ourselves "Hey, they've got three minutes with the ball on their own 20, we've got a shot to score here."
Just a quick comment on the smoke color from my job as an accessibility project manager at the Library: The smoke color cannot be blue or yellow because it has to have enough contrast against either the sky or the ground for any of the jumpers in the air or spotters on the ground to see it.
I have my own feelings about their choice outside of those colors though, but I'm not sure what their other choices were...
I'm excited for any help we're getting on defense, excited about this guy's scouting sheet too. Hopefully we get to see some of that development Nua was known for before he came to us, as quick hands was sort of his thing IIRC.
Yeah I think it was really the latter rather than the former. This parent post was so accurate in assessment, and it's not really all about weight, it's about how that weight was used. Just look at the interior of that line, one two-deep of 300 pounders who were space and double-team eaters, and the other a two-deep of fast first-steppers who got into the offensive lines and screwed stuff up before it could develop. The key here is that this assessment was stuff that was happening to everyone Including OSU that year. One of the reasons Harbaugh was so intent on the 4th and 1 getting overturned was because Glasgow got his hand on the QB after submarining the front two O-line on that play.
I agree that comparing with past coaches is not a valid argument on this one, but comparing to current coaches is definitely valid and sound in my opinion. If we want to move our program up into the "1a" tier again (1 tier being Bama, Clemson, OSU; 1a being LSU, Georgia, Oklahoma, etc) we need to be identifying how they are keeping their talented 4 and 5 stars who are behind someone or injured happy enough to stay and provide that insane depth of talent they have. I mean, Olave says he's coming back to OSU, we just lost Charbonnet... do the math, we can't lose this much talent and stay competitive at the level we've been accustomed to over the last 5 years, let alone move up to winning 11 games every year.
Unfortunately, I think the issue is simultaneously more complex and exactly what you're saying. I think it's a combination of all of these things, plus injury (in Luiji's case at least, and a few others). He was on track coming in to be an excellent SDE or smaller 3 tech here. Man I miss Greg Mattison...
I was too, I remember watching his film from the UA game before he came in and I was just so excited to see him go up against similarly rated talent on an o-line and just obliterate double teams for sacks, it was just magnificent.
Always sorry to see someone want to make this move after getting injured multiple times like this. I remember an o-lineman from the Rich Rod era, Chris Bryant who looked so good coming in and had a catastrophic injury just before coming off his red-shirt. I used to run into him at Blimpy all the time and wanted to buy him his burger, but alas, we follow the rules here.
Well, I'm not trusting the coaches on this one. I just wont subscribe to trashing Gattis on this. He is not the first OC we've seen come on to this staff or the last staff who is a departure from the normal old-school pro style offenses and then they come in and it's the exact same offense. We see the speed in space concepts on roughly 20% of plays. The rest is clustered up offensive lineman that sees the defense already close to the positions they need to be in to make plays instead of spreading them out to give players a chance in case there's a bust somewhere on the line (which this year, there almost always was).
Keep in mind we have an offensive line coach with a track record of excellent lines everywhere he has been, literally everywhere, not a single o-line that performed below its expectations, and this was a significant weak point this year. There is something broken here that many of us are missing, including me. I don't claim to know what it is, but I can logically look at some of the worst plays and at least point out what is not the problem in some cases.
This problem pre-dates both of the last OCs, and has been an obvious problem basically since Jedd Fisch left. Since then we've seen 3 coordinators be "the problem" to the fans instead of being like: well, they were all successful in greater measure at their previous destinations,... hmmm.... what else is wrong?
It's like a perfectly fine part being replaced three times in a car within a year. Sooner or later you look somewhere further down or up the line from that part to find the real actual problem.
Agreed. I was talking about this with someone yesterday. They are not concerned about the sheer amount of good players we've had transfer this past year. I don't know another program that believes itself to be consistently in the top 25, let alone the top 10, that had this much unnatural attrition over that same time frame. There is definitely something wrong, there has been something wrong for a while, but it's definitely getting worse. Why is no one able to get information out of these players to find out what's going on so it can get fixed? This is why in today's college football the Schembechler submarine stuff doesn't work, because if there's a problem it doesn't get found and fixed.
That's because the only game on Alabama's schedule they care about anymore, the NC game, they are now running into a team with the same talent level in Clemson who outschemed them multiple times in a row until it resulted in a loss. This created a hilarious revolving door in Tuscaloosa for OCs who are incredibly talented but butt heads with Saban because he's megalomaniacal, but because there are few glaring errors in the way he approaches training and games that they still make it to the NC game and nearly always have a shot at winning. Must be nice to cheat and have ESPN defend you the whole way.
The last thing we need is the heir apparent to Devin Gardner be cursed with the predecessor's criminal under-utilization (the worst since, well, er... Denard...). The result of that being that DG's poor rib cage was basically being held together by the laughter of little children after each run-in with MSU.
This is the most true thing with the exceptions being anytime crossing routes are successfully used against him (read: OSU games and bowl games against the cream of another conference where the talent of the WRs is good enough that his lack of spy/zone coverage in the middle of the field after the linebackers have activated leaves gaping holes for untouched QBs to hit streaking wideouts with nothing but green space available after the man coverage has been pulled away from those exact spaces)
Thanks for this Seth, despite how stressful this week has been for any number of #2020 reasons, this was a really great look and peace of instruction on exactly why so much of what was attempted on Saturday failed. As always, you provide an awesome mid-week lesson in football strategy and why so many games where this coaching staff has gone back to being illogically conservative in their playcalling hurts both the execution of the players and the inevitable outcome of the drives/games.
So much of this reminded me of the 2016 Iowa game, not from a schematic perspective of what they left off the playsheet, but from the seemingly total departure from what they'd established they could do (even if it was just against the now exposed Minnesota defense).
I think the thing that got me, and this is just from the BTN camera view and I'm just a fan (caveats that always apply) but the offense did not look like they were playing with energy at all. This is the first time I can honestly say it looks that way for at least stretches every game in a season.
Even in the 2017 season, when it appeared that the offense, which was constantly alternating between John O'Korn and Wilton Speight's fourth spine and was barely held together by the laughter of little children, the offense looked like they were working their ass off on every play. I wont pretend to know what the mind set is, but it just seems like some part buried deep in the engine is broken and needs to be swapped out.
Yep, JFW, and in 2005 everyone thought 2006 was going to show a torpedoed UM team that had nothing left with our old ways of doing things with what at least one pundit literally referred to as a "midget" at running back and a statue for a quarterback and we had 11 wins and nearly took down OSU in the horseshoe with a Heisman quarterback.
Let's everyone calm down. I hate to use that team in Lansing as an example but how many times have we thought they've been done with all the problems they have? Somehow that curmudgeon has brought a team of dysfunctional rapists back from the brink every time. Harbaugh has 3 ten win seasons and a BCS (scrimmage) bowl win in 4 years and we're already talking about spiking his morning coffee with terpentine.
Can anyone honestly tell me after they saw (and felt) what happened with Rich Rod and then Hoke that we would be, without taking a huge chance, better off with rolling the dice on anyone but Saban (not available) than sticking with Harbaugh and just letting him run his ship without pissing him off so bad he'll leave?
Because everyone's all talking about firing him, but he's never been fired. This isn't a guy who sticks around to the bitter end without making any changes. Look at his history, he'll try to do what he thinks is best to win, and if the fans and/or leadership start to even remotely turn on him, he's got another option in the wings.
And ESPN is still trying to desperately #stretcharmstrong hold that door open for him.
I'm honestly in neither camp. I'm in the camp of "We tried all these other things, let's admit that Michigan is Michigan and we've had some bad luck with a couple good coaches, one coach who probably shouldn't have had the job, and we're actually in a good place right now, just not where we all nostalgically (but inaccurately) remember us being. Let us not forget that Bo never won a national title and we (this guy included) consider him one of the greatest football coaches to have ever lived and only 75% or so of it has to do with football.
Unfortunately, the work you're pointing to is not in the public domain. The uploader to the Internet Archive merely didn't input metadata in the "copyright" field and the IA is not inclined to check this information.
In the U.K., a member of the Berne Convention and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), copyright lasts the life of the author plus 70 years. Liddell died in 1970, which means that book is in copyright until 2040, though no one seems to care.
In any case, it's a great find, and will be available on IA until someone flags it. (Sorry to be the negative nancy here, but it's literally my job (pun fully intended)).
Okay, so the research hospital needs to speed up the work on those anagathic drugs so we can keep Don Brown healthy enough so that he can retire the same year his first fully functional clone is ready.
That's the main thing I like about him. A close second is the fact that he has no room in his orbit for nonsense, and he's not bombastic at all. Having said that, he's also so engaging and quietly energetic that it's impossible not to be captivated by the way he walks the reporters through the process of approaching an issue.
The slants question to start off with is a really good example. You can't really argue with anything he says during that answer, then he even acknowledges the fact that he's pretty defensive (pun most certainly intended) about those slants.
Indeed. I think this might be the "BPONE" speaking but it never seems like we can have something even remotely close to a facsimile of this person on both sides of the ball. I know they're hard to come by, and even that's an understatement, but I do feel like the offense took a giant step backward in the passing game when Jedd Fisch left. I couldn't come close to imagining his passing routes with this running game and defense, especially by the end of this year when it seems like there is improvement across the board through the season so far, and through each game as we watch them.
This is exactly what happened last year when I made AIH's dunkelweizen. I'd added additional malt extract, and too much priming sugar, but didn't find out the latter until I opened a room temperature bottle and it immediately foamed over.
They were delicious. I wound up making them with some leftover homemade BBQ sauce we had laying around and I added a can of green chiles to it. Didn't have any hogie rolls though, to toast and serve,... but... didn't really seem to matter to anyone who ate them, they were gone in minutes. Should have bought more.
Making the Country Style Ribs for state. Hopefully the good vibes from the smoke and cider barbecue sauce will waft over to Stadium and Main.
So Brady Hoke was the Head Coach of that Ball State team which was running that 'newfangled' spread offense. Oh, and by the way, was wearing a headset for the duration of the game...
Recent Comments
Excellent post Brian, great to read your column after all of us, both fans and Blog staff, have waited for so long. I was in your boat at the beginning of the season, had them at 7 or 8 wins at most and would have considered that a success. By the sparty game, I finally took the time to think about things and looked ahead on the schedule and thought to myself, 'we're 7-1, who else will beat us before OSU? THIS IS GREAT!'
Now, of course, I'm giddy like I was after losing my virginity. The difference is that only lasted a few seconds, this is still going!!
Up…
Agreed on all points!
Up against Iowa, I was not expecting this staff to dial up another stomp to the throat right after a touchdown. Just goes to show I still have something to learn about this year's Team *returns to watching highlights of the last 13 games*
I couldn't agree more about the clock management. The thing that really burns me is that there has literally been one coaching staff in the last 20 years that's gotten their players to run a legitimate 2 minute drill and that coaching staff had the worst combined record of any 3 year period in the Team's history.
While it looks like they're close, I'm still skeptically wondering how much longer we'll have to wait before thinking to ourselves "Hey, they've got three minutes with the ball on their own 20, we've got a shot to score here."
I second that Brian's writeups continue to be a source of joy for me, haters can go hate someplace else...
Just a quick…
Hey Brian,
Just a quick comment on the smoke color from my job as an accessibility project manager at the Library: The smoke color cannot be blue or yellow because it has to have enough contrast against either the sky or the ground for any of the jumpers in the air or spotters on the ground to see it.
I have my own feelings about their choice outside of those colors though, but I'm not sure what their other choices were...
I'm excited for any help we're getting on defense, excited about this guy's scouting sheet too. Hopefully we get to see some of that development Nua was known for before he came to us, as quick hands was sort of his thing IIRC.
Yeah I think it was really the latter rather than the former. This parent post was so accurate in assessment, and it's not really all about weight, it's about how that weight was used. Just look at the interior of that line, one two-deep of 300 pounders who were space and double-team eaters, and the other a two-deep of fast first-steppers who got into the offensive lines and screwed stuff up before it could develop. The key here is that this assessment was stuff that was happening to everyone Including OSU that year. One of the reasons Harbaugh was so intent on the 4th and 1 getting overturned was because Glasgow got his hand on the QB after submarining the front two O-line on that play.
via GIPHY
Woo
via GIPHY
I agree that comparing with past coaches is not a valid argument on this one, but comparing to current coaches is definitely valid and sound in my opinion. If we want to move our program up into the "1a" tier again (1 tier being Bama, Clemson, OSU; 1a being LSU, Georgia, Oklahoma, etc) we need to be identifying how they are keeping their talented 4 and 5 stars who are behind someone or injured happy enough to stay and provide that insane depth of talent they have. I mean, Olave says he's coming back to OSU, we just lost Charbonnet... do the math, we can't lose this much talent and stay competitive at the level we've been accustomed to over the last 5 years, let alone move up to winning 11 games every year.
Unfortunately, I think the issue is simultaneously more complex and exactly what you're saying. I think it's a combination of all of these things, plus injury (in Luiji's case at least, and a few others). He was on track coming in to be an excellent SDE or smaller 3 tech here. Man I miss Greg Mattison...
I was too, I remember watching his film from the UA game before he came in and I was just so excited to see him go up against similarly rated talent on an o-line and just obliterate double teams for sacks, it was just magnificent.
Always sorry to see someone want to make this move after getting injured multiple times like this. I remember an o-lineman from the Rich Rod era, Chris Bryant who looked so good coming in and had a catastrophic injury just before coming off his red-shirt. I used to run into him at Blimpy all the time and wanted to buy him his burger, but alas, we follow the rules here.
Well, I'm not trusting the coaches on this one. I just wont subscribe to trashing Gattis on this. He is not the first OC we've seen come on to this staff or the last staff who is a departure from the normal old-school pro style offenses and then they come in and it's the exact same offense. We see the speed in space concepts on roughly 20% of plays. The rest is clustered up offensive lineman that sees the defense already close to the positions they need to be in to make plays instead of spreading them out to give players a chance in case there's a bust somewhere on the line (which this year, there almost always was).
Keep in mind we have an offensive line coach with a track record of excellent lines everywhere he has been, literally everywhere, not a single o-line that performed below its expectations, and this was a significant weak point this year. There is something broken here that many of us are missing, including me. I don't claim to know what it is, but I can logically look at some of the worst plays and at least point out what is not the problem in some cases.
This…
Thank you, and yes.
This problem pre-dates both of the last OCs, and has been an obvious problem basically since Jedd Fisch left. Since then we've seen 3 coordinators be "the problem" to the fans instead of being like: well, they were all successful in greater measure at their previous destinations,... hmmm.... what else is wrong?
It's like a perfectly fine part being replaced three times in a car within a year. Sooner or later you look somewhere further down or up the line from that part to find the real actual problem.
Agreed. I was talking about this with someone yesterday. They are not concerned about the sheer amount of good players we've had transfer this past year. I don't know another program that believes itself to be consistently in the top 25, let alone the top 10, that had this much unnatural attrition over that same time frame. There is definitely something wrong, there has been something wrong for a while, but it's definitely getting worse. Why is no one able to get information out of these players to find out what's going on so it can get fixed? This is why in today's college football the Schembechler submarine stuff doesn't work, because if there's a problem it doesn't get found and fixed.
That's because the only game on Alabama's schedule they care about anymore, the NC game, they are now running into a team with the same talent level in Clemson who outschemed them multiple times in a row until it resulted in a loss. This created a hilarious revolving door in Tuscaloosa for OCs who are incredibly talented but butt heads with Saban because he's megalomaniacal, but because there are few glaring errors in the way he approaches training and games that they still make it to the NC game and nearly always have a shot at winning. Must be nice to cheat and have ESPN defend you the whole way.
This was my thought exactly.
The last thing we need is the heir apparent to Devin Gardner be cursed with the predecessor's criminal under-utilization (the worst since, well, er... Denard...). The result of that being that DG's poor rib cage was basically being held together by the laughter of little children after each run-in with MSU.
This is the most true thing with the exceptions being anytime crossing routes are successfully used against him (read: OSU games and bowl games against the cream of another conference where the talent of the WRs is good enough that his lack of spy/zone coverage in the middle of the field after the linebackers have activated leaves gaping holes for untouched QBs to hit streaking wideouts with nothing but green space available after the man coverage has been pulled away from those exact spaces)
Thanks for this Seth, despite how stressful this week has been for any number of #2020 reasons, this was a really great look and peace of instruction on exactly why so much of what was attempted on Saturday failed. As always, you provide an awesome mid-week lesson in football strategy and why so many games where this coaching staff has gone back to being illogically conservative in their playcalling hurts both the execution of the players and the inevitable outcome of the drives/games.
So much of this reminded me of the 2016 Iowa game, not from a schematic perspective of what they left off the playsheet, but from the seemingly total departure from what they'd established they could do (even if it was just against the now exposed Minnesota defense).
I think the thing that got me, and this is just from the BTN camera view and I'm just a fan (caveats that always apply) but the offense did not look like they were playing with energy at all. This is the first time I can honestly say it looks that way for at least stretches every game in a season.
Even in the 2017 season, when it appeared that the offense, which was constantly alternating between John O'Korn and Wilton Speight's fourth spine and was barely held together by the laughter of little children, the offense looked like they were working their ass off on every play. I wont pretend to know what the mind set is, but it just seems like some part buried deep in the engine is broken and needs to be swapped out.
brilliant
Yep, JFW, and in 2005 everyone thought 2006 was going to show a torpedoed UM team that had nothing left with our old ways of doing things with what at least one pundit literally referred to as a "midget" at running back and a statue for a quarterback and we had 11 wins and nearly took down OSU in the horseshoe with a Heisman quarterback.
Let's everyone calm down. I hate to use that team in Lansing as an example but how many times have we thought they've been done with all the problems they have? Somehow that curmudgeon has brought a team of dysfunctional rapists back from the brink every time. Harbaugh has 3 ten win seasons and a BCS (scrimmage) bowl win in 4 years and we're already talking about spiking his morning coffee with terpentine.
Let's calm down everyone.
Can anyone honestly…
Agreed,
Can anyone honestly tell me after they saw (and felt) what happened with Rich Rod and then Hoke that we would be, without taking a huge chance, better off with rolling the dice on anyone but Saban (not available) than sticking with Harbaugh and just letting him run his ship without pissing him off so bad he'll leave?
Because everyone's all talking about firing him, but he's never been fired. This isn't a guy who sticks around to the bitter end without making any changes. Look at his history, he'll try to do what he thinks is best to win, and if the fans and/or leadership start to even remotely turn on him, he's got another option in the wings.
And ESPN is still trying to desperately #stretcharmstrong hold that door open for him.
Yes, this thing you just wrote... Yes.
I'm honestly in neither camp. I'm in the camp of "We tried all these other things, let's admit that Michigan is Michigan and we've had some bad luck with a couple good coaches, one coach who probably shouldn't have had the job, and we're actually in a good place right now, just not where we all nostalgically (but inaccurately) remember us being. Let us not forget that Bo never won a national title and we (this guy included) consider him one of the greatest football coaches to have ever lived and only 75% or so of it has to do with football.
Unfortunately, the work you're pointing to is not in the public domain. The uploader to the Internet Archive merely didn't input metadata in the "copyright" field and the IA is not inclined to check this information.
In the U.K., a member of the Berne Convention and the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs (GATT), copyright lasts the life of the author plus 70 years. Liddell died in 1970, which means that book is in copyright until 2040, though no one seems to care.
In any case, it's a great find, and will be available on IA until someone flags it. (Sorry to be the negative nancy here, but it's literally my job (pun fully intended)).
Okay, so the research hospital needs to speed up the work on those anagathic drugs so we can keep Don Brown healthy enough so that he can retire the same year his first fully functional clone is ready.
Those must be the people living under rocks with no television or internet that haven't seen a Maryland defense from the last two and a half seasons.
That's the main thing I like about him. A close second is the fact that he has no room in his orbit for nonsense, and he's not bombastic at all. Having said that, he's also so engaging and quietly energetic that it's impossible not to be captivated by the way he walks the reporters through the process of approaching an issue.
The slants question to start off with is a really good example. You can't really argue with anything he says during that answer, then he even acknowledges the fact that he's pretty defensive (pun most certainly intended) about those slants.
Indeed. I think this might be the "BPONE" speaking but it never seems like we can have something even remotely close to a facsimile of this person on both sides of the ball. I know they're hard to come by, and even that's an understatement, but I do feel like the offense took a giant step backward in the passing game when Jedd Fisch left. I couldn't come close to imagining his passing routes with this running game and defense, especially by the end of this year when it seems like there is improvement across the board through the season so far, and through each game as we watch them.
Peace, love, blue.
Is there a way to upvote? I'm gonna upvote, yeah... upvote.
This is exactly what happened last year when I made AIH's dunkelweizen. I'd added additional malt extract, and too much priming sugar, but didn't find out the latter until I opened a room temperature bottle and it immediately foamed over.
They were delicious. I wound up making them with some leftover homemade BBQ sauce we had laying around and I added a can of green chiles to it. Didn't have any hogie rolls though, to toast and serve,... but... didn't really seem to matter to anyone who ate them, they were gone in minutes. Should have bought more.
Making the Country Style Ribs for state. Hopefully the good vibes from the smoke and cider barbecue sauce will waft over to Stadium and Main.
After reading BLL, this isn't just beleivable, it's likely...
So Brady Hoke was the Head Coach of that Ball State team which was running that 'newfangled' spread offense. Oh, and by the way, was wearing a headset for the duration of the game...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iJdqY_--Lf8