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

[WM Wolverine]

Hayes UFR confirmed me noticing him getting blown up regularly, liability both in run game and pass protection... He's only a 2nd/3rd year player but he doesn't belong on the field this season. Being down both Runyan & Steuber hopefully is only reason he's playing...

UFR made me feel a tiny bit better about the offense, about a handful of terrible plays in the first half a(3 by Hayes who shouldn't be playing at Wisconsin) killed drives and set Army up for touchdowns...

Still concerning is going ultra conservative offensively. Patterson left a ton of yards if he pulled and receivers were given huge cushions and M never made them pay for that or bringing their safeties up... Patterson should have the option at LOS to read that and change the call.

[iam416]

I agree with this and I think it is Brian's attempt to keep speculation out of his takes on the game.

I actually disagree with this entirely. Invoking "transaction costs" is subjective. The grades are the grades. Those are objective. Explaining them, or rather, in this case, EXCUSING them is subjective. Yeah, objectively M sucked, BUT...TRANSACTION COSTS! I mean, how could we possibly expect a team to switch over to a new offense without lots of bumps in the road?

[Jeff Buchanan]

I didn't phrase my post correctly.

Brian doesn't speculate in his UFR about causation -i.e., why does Patterson get a + 1.5 and a - 8 = - 6.5 as M's QB. He just says he didn't play well because he did this or that on play X or Y He avoids stating that Patterson, and by extension how he is coached to execute the Gattis offense by whomever is doing that, was, in no small part, to blame for M's offensive shit-show v. Army.

He opines he might be injured or this just might be who he is. He doesn't speak of causation, particularly in the case of why Patterson didn't make the right pre and post snap reads, didn't change the play to take advantage of Army's CBs who played soft, didn't test the shuffling DEs and didn't keep the ball on ZR/RPOs when it was blitheringly obvious he should keep it. To me if he looks good in practice running the Gattis offense - the current trope on his performance - then you can assume he knows the playbook. As the game unfolds he appears to go to shit. That's on the coaches who maybe didn't know what Army was going to do defensively (bad enough), didn't fully understand what they were doing in-game and then failed to help Patterson adjust his play to what they were doing (really bad).

I think the evidence is there to convict Patterson, Harbaugh and Gattis. M looked like shit. What are the root causes of that -6.5? I think it is, in large part, coaching because Patterson has talent equal to the guy at LSU and as has shown it. But, Brain won't say that. What are the root causes of Michigan getting - 10 in the RPS metric? Gattis? Maybe Harbaugh got out-coached and that has never happened, has it? This is a trend. Say it. But Brian won't do that.

The comparison of the Gattis offense to the Al Borges offenses and what Borges did to Denard Robinson apples to M's offense. The implications that the Gattis' offense, like Al Borge's offense, possess no coherence, are appropriate. He obliquely suggests Gattis = Borges. He doesn't say that. The Gattis offense was incoherent for the better part of the game once things started to go poorly because of execution problems. That is on him, especially, and anyone else involved in coaching the offense in that game including Harbaugh.

Sorry for the confusion. I hope I made it clear in this post that I think the coaches involved in preparing the offense to face Army's defense FAILED. I'd say they FAILED even worse with their in-game coaching and play calling. Sure, Gattis is new, there are transition costs but he came with huge expectations and a summer and fall full of hype about speed in space and getting the ball in the hands of play-makers. Did we see that? Fuck no. Is it fair to judge him based on two games? Ask me later. But Harbaugh is knee deep in this shit. His default strategery is antiquated - and that is being nice. During his 4 year tenure as M's FB coach, there are ample examples of his turteling and his affect on the players, particularly his QBs, when things go to shit and/or not as planned. Fair to judge him at this point? I think it is. What he appears to be doing is not doing a good job and that seems to be a well established, upward sloping trend. Add one more game to Harbaugh's resume where the offense got challenged and M responded poorly.

[drok]

I've never read "transaction costs" as excusing the players or coaches. His pre season posts stated that he didn't think it should be much of an issue....the changes were not going to be as significant compared to Rich Rod for instance. The fact that we are experiencing issues on offense suggests an indictment of players/coaches. The MGoBlog audio content makes that indictment clearer. But I also think he's waiting to see a few more games to be more definitive about the mix of blame to go around.

[Jeff Buchanan]

That's fair ...... my take on Brian's UFR is that he was soft on the coaches, harder on the players. The players reflect how they are being coached and Shea Patterson, in particular, looked as if he hasn't been well coached. Moreover, the play-calling did not put the offense in a position to do well.

[Hannibal]

Brian is almost always too soft on the coaches.

[WM Wolverine]

Till he reaches a point then he hammers them.

[paul daugherity]

[Jeff Buchanan]

..... and that is probably fair and the best approach for him. I'm not ready to judge Gattis and he may pull M's offense out of the shitter yet. But he's got to mobilize the talent he has - I don't think we know if that's Harbaugh getting too involved or if Gattis on his own is the issue. There are so many identifiable things that didn't get done v. Army: testing the flats in the passing game, and the shuffling DE in the RPO/RO game, throwing more to Collins, giving up on or not going back to plays that had potential or didn't work first time, e.g., screens.

Harbaugh, OTH, and IMO, deserves some heat - not that that is likely to change anything - but it would make me feel better. There are clear trends in his conservatism over the course of his 4 year tenure that I'm pretty sure is having a heavy influence on everything that Gattis and his offense does or tries to do. The cloud he casts hangs over Shea Patterson too. Looks a lot like he plays in fear of making a mistake - he has to have had that beaten into him and he has an appearance that he plays a bit scared and wilts pretty quickly when he knows he missed a read or makes a mistake.

[hack]

Oh I think he's been plenty hard on the coaches this week. In the roundtable it was Sam Webb going easier on them. Brian's very close to that tipping point. Inarguable points about Niko Collins and a refusal on 4th and 2 to throw wide when CBs are ten yards off the line.

[hack]

One thing he has yet to do though, which would be interesting to do, is to reconcile his feeling that Patterson just isn't a good decision maker with Harbaugh's reputation for working with QBs. He's perhaps getting there, with all that talk of how most QBs under him have regressed, but that that may be a case-by-case thing without enough data to go on yet. Seems like he's watching Brandon Peters with interest though.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Continuing to beat the proverbial dead horse but this is good:

Summary:

Patterson dorfed half his reads in the first half by this analysis. 2 of them were glaringly obvious keeps where he gave. The other bltheringly unexplainable mistake was on the grounding call in M's last possession of the half - in this play Patterson failed to read a blitzing CB on the boundary side (also the play side) and kept right into that blitz. Pretty hard to argue with it.

When the read was correct, the play went well. Most of these were IZ runs off the ZR, not RPOs. He did make one nice RPO read that a slanting Black caught but was tackled almost right away. If that field S is accounted for (he wasn't by play design???) that play goes for a chunk. Still a nice gain off a good read.

Couple of bad OL blocks (Hays getting the holding call on missed OLB blitz, some confused doubling and blocking assignment hand-offs, among others)

Questionable play design - its an RPO stretch that puts the entire offense at a disadvantage by design. The second time it was run, RVS fumbled running into the teeth of the defense.

Yes, Army did some delayed scrape exchanges with a shuffling DE but the reads and M blockers for the keep were often in Patterson's favor yet he gave. These were chalked up 50/50 reads that failed to test the shuffling DEs when M had a keep lane, albeit with a shuffling DE, and down field blocking advantage.

Collins dorfed his blocking assignment on an otherwise well executed RPO where the conflict player - Army's boundary S - crashed inside with the play call an off-tackle run off the RPO. If Collins ties up the one CB in the run lane this is a chunk play. Instead it was just a nice play with the CB making contact with ZS and Army's FS cleaning up to prevent a big gain.

Overall, plenty of blame to go around in the fiasco that was the Army game, at least as far as the first half goes. But Patterson's were key. Seems to me, all of this is fixable. Army's defense was nothing unusual except maybe selling out to disrupt the offense with the blitz, maybe not having Patterson prepared for the delayed scrape exchange or shuffling DE. Would expect Wisconsin to do the same. If Patterson improves his ball security and learns form the mistakes he made v. Army on his reads, cleans that up, there's a chance.

https://mgoblog.com/diaries/film-ana...ffensive-reads

[Jeff Buchanan]

Brian actually did a UFR for the Army game and it was up today.

Don't bother. I skimmed through it. It is irrelevant to M's D going forward. You simply cannot take much from the how individual players played (graded) because the way those players matched up with Army's Triple option and jumbo alignments won't be repeated in conference play nor against ND.

Brown deployed a 3-3-5 defense to which Army countered with heavy formations putting guys that were TEs but actually just extra OL M countered by bringing a stand-up LB up to the LoS. That was mostly Uche and he did a very good job grading out the highest of all defensive players. For the most part that worked for M given that M's offense put the D in a bad spot three times in the game. Two of those times resulted in TDs, one in a missed FG.

Hill made a couple of mistakes where he had responsibility for a zone that were costly in defending the Triple Option. At the same time, he'd shine on another play where he was called upon to defend it. Metellus played well. Hudson did not. Thomas got had a couple of times on the few times he was challenged but then he rarely was called upon to defend anything.

Bottom line: ignore everything the D did v. Army as a measure of whether it is good or not good.