Michigan V. Army, Saturday, September 7th, Noon EDT, FOX/Fox Video

[iam416]

But FWIW that USC team beat TRESSELL!!!

Yes, I was there. It was awful.

[Hannibal]

Interesting stat from the Army game -- Army was held to their lowest yards per carry and total yardage number since 2015. It looks like it was a really good performance by the defense. The game should have been 38-14.

[iam416]

Exactly. M handled the "service academy" issues. They failed, miserably, wrt the non-service academy issues, i.e., a defense that a top-shelf offense should massively out-talent and put up lots of yards and points against.

[froot loops]

That defense did very well at bending but not breaking. I think because of the specter of Army's willingness to go for it on 4th down freaked them out a bit. Army scored two touchdowns in regulation, that should be enough to win. Just kick a 36 yard field goal to make it 17-14 and you've probably sealed the game.

[Hannibal]

The strategy appeared to be: "Take away the edge, eliminate the big plays, make it so that if you get a stuff on first down Army is going to punt". It worked pretty well.

[froot loops]

There is a reason teams don't run type of offense, it can be effective but you going 15 plays in a row without making a mistake is hard. But it is tough when you make a stop on 3rd down but know they are going to go for it.

[hack]

They do less stuff, and you're right about the downside, but the upside is that when you do less stuff you have the chance to rep your way into executing at a higher level, which they do.

Which is food for thought for Michigan's offense, which seems to incorporate so much and straddle different eras and involve so many formations, but with none of it executed at the level Army runs their basic package. Harbaugh wants to have a core package of plays run out of many formations, so there's misdirection, and I get the idea. We all however see the results.

[Jeff Buchanan]

The Dace/Spath video was good. You can boil the consternation over the Army game down to two areas:

(1) Patterson not playing well

(2) Harbaugh imposing his view of how to play Army based on what he was seeing unfold.

I think you can make a chicken - egg argument here. Patterson's poor play precipitated what we saw unfold in the second half.

If this happens again in Madison and Michigan loses, the epitaph for M football will have been written there. There will be no getting around that while Harbaugh may be a very good coach for Michigan, his own inability to weather what appears to me to be a struggle with his personal contradictions are going to prevent his football team from moving beyond where it has been during his tenure to date.

[Dr. Strangelove]

2008 USC kicked our ass start to finish. It sucked but there was no denying that was a much better team than us.

The 2009 game was a lot worse because we definitely were the better team (proved it by beating Oregon later on) and we led in that game for the better part of 3 quarters

[Jeff Buchanan]

The UFR Offense is up at mgo and I just spent the last 90 minutes plowing through it.

M started off pretty good and it went down-hill from there with, as Brain put it, they ran out of ideas. I was disappointed in this conclusion and it seems to me, even though it would have been poorly speculative, he doesn't nail the coaching staff.

Lots of dorfs with Patterson getting most of them on both his pre-and post snap reads - pass and run and tendency to unnecessarily bail. He did have some nice plays though and he didn't look to Brian like he was overwhelmed as some have speculated (Speight's deer in the headlights comment comes to mind). He's just inconsistent ... .just like last season. This could be who Patterson is and if that is the case, M is not going to have very good season.

Gattis play-calling or Patterson mis-reads???? M got massively RPS'ed by Army. Some of this had to do with the how M's failure to take advantage of open throws to the flats where Army's CBs were backed way off. This encouraged Army to risk walking the Ss up to nail the run - whihc they did - and all kinds of CB, S and LB blitzes that they would not dared to try against a ZR/RPO heavy offense if the CBs had to play up ..... and they would have if M had made them pay for playing back. Easy pitch and catch balls for 5-10 yards per play. Watching video I actually thought that this was Patterson not making a pre-snap read, recognizing teh soft coverage and getting the offense into those kinds of plays. I don't think he was hamstrung by Gattis but it's possible. Just a guess.

While the fumbles put the offense off schedule Brian's UFR makes a compelling case that they weren't Patterson's fault. Two of his fumbles were a direct cause of Christian Turner's wiffs on blocking assignments.

Why 3.2 ypc in the run game when Charbonett looked like a dude? Ryan Hays at LT missing assignments in Brian's opinion accounted almost solely for that. The rest of the OL played well. There were other missed assignments by OL, WRs and TEs creating unblocked Army guys downfield or showing up unblocked in a gap that made tackles that had they not, Charbonett would have had 250 yards rushing and over 6 ypc. This was bad.

The 2 minute drill at the end of the first half was chaos. Brian doesn't point a finger but I will, this is on the play-calling from the coaches. Same thing goes for whatever M was trying to do offensively in the 4th quarter. Overall, the plays made no sense. Again, I'll speculate where Brian won't: There were two guys with play sheets and head sets - Harbaugh on the sideline and Gattis in the booth. The way the offense looked - confused and chaotic - could be a result of the two of them fighting over who's in charge.

Anyway, it's over. I'm done rehashing it. According to Brian:

I don't want to overstate things. This is one game, a nine-possession one in which Michigan gained 315 yards. Their QB was clearly gimpy and they fumbled three times. This wasn't at the level of some other debacles in the recent past. It was very bad.

.................... What does it mean for Wisconsin and beyond?

Welp.If you're going to run arc you should run a bunch of split zone. Just saying.

Fix perimeter issues. Just steal the MTSU playbook and stick a dozen of their plays in. Allowing DBs to play way off has a cascade effect on everything else and cannot be tolerated. Also: hey, free yards!

OL is tracking well. Mayfield had some issues in game one but performed very well here, and replacing Hayes with Runyan should be a big help on the ground.

Either Patterson's injury is hampering him or this is just who he is. If it's the latter I don't think Michigan's going to have a great season. Just too many plays that get killed by his happy feet and lack of YOLO.

Ronnie Bell: ah, so that's why. He did look pretty good, with an athletic leaping catch behind him. Needs the DON'T GIVE YARDS BACK yelling-at. In other WR news, for the love of god can we get one punt to Collins per quarter?

Charbonnet: real deal. Did as well as he could in trying circumstances and added another half-dozen thunderous blitz pickups to his sample size. Michigan will welcome Tru Wilson back for his pass protection but I think his shot at starting has been Wally Pipped.

Bring back Ben Mason plz. If Onwenu's going to do this, just run behind him to freedom and first downs.

[iam416]

Transaction costs is such a weird argument in view of, say, LSU (or others). Transaction costs=inefficiencies somewhere.

[Hannibal]

Transaction costs is such a weird argument in view of, say, LSU (or others). Transaction costs=inefficiencies somewhere.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Transaction costs is such a weird argument in view of, say, LSU (or others). Transaction costs=inefficiencies somewhere.

I agree with this and I think it is Brian's attempt to keep speculation out of his takes on the game. He looks at the plays, classifies them, sees what parts of them should have worked and didn't work and then levies a number grade. It tends to objectify the subjective. So, I get this. I would have preferred him to render an opinion based on the aggregate failure on the field. Patterson running the Gattis offense poorly, Gattis getting an F as M's new OC, Harbaugh being involved in play calling.

Opining on that would put some meat on your equation that transition costs = inefficiencies somewhere. We have a couple of trends here: (1) Patterson is trending toward a somewhat better version of JOK, (2) Harbaugh is still heavily involved in pregame planning and in game play-calling. There's a distinct look and feel to the Gattis offense that is classic Harbaugh. (3) When things aren't going well, JH turteles on offense and plays to Don Brown's D.

We will probably know which of the trends develop and are reinforced in 8 days at Madison.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Yeah, the fumbles but if you watch M in the early going, and there were glimpses even late, M's offense is distinctly ZR/RPO heavy. The power flavor is what bothers me. You saw that flavor more distinctly in the second half.

Late in the game, UFR, you can sense the tension on the OL between trying to get the zone blocking concepts down as well as the power concepts needed for the play-calls coming in. The take on several of M's late drives where power failed because (1) the OL either dorfed the power blocking schemes or (2) the failure by the offense to challenge what Army's D was doing with it's CBs encouraged Army to focus on the run game with the blitz was correct. Under those circumstances, the choice to not use, e.g., Mason on a FB dive to get short yardage on 3rd or 4th downs (classic power that M ran effectively in 2018, why not use it?) was baffling.

[Hannibal]

I didn't see much that we didn't do last year. We had an occasional read option or RPO, so none of that stuff is new.

We probably can't use Mason because we've got to save him for the defensive side of the ball, at least until all of our DTs are healthy.