Rutgers @ Michigan, Saturday, September 28th, Noon EDT, BTN/Fox Video

[THE_WIZARD_]

heh

[iam416]

FWIW, the line was Ohio State -2' in the summer.

[Hannibal]

Brian Cook must have been betting huge amounts of money.

What's the UM-OSU line now? LOL

[maxreturn]

It's going to take a monumental turn-around to fix what "ails" team 140. Players may have checked out and it's not that these kids are a bunch of entitled pussies. I have no doubt they have worked hard. They are being poorly coached in what appears to be two poorly conceived schemes - on both sides of the ball - and who can blame them.

Rutgers may help but I'm skeptical. The problems run deep and start right at the top.

On the bright side, I breezed through an article this morning that listed five teams that looked like shit in thier first 3 games and went on to NCs or CFP playoff slots. Alabama, Clemson and osu were among them. Lost the link and, TBH, I'm not terribly interested in being bright and sunny right now when involves blowing rainbows out my ass.

Michigan football is in trouble.

Yep, and it takes forever for those in charge to figure it out. Harbaugh wouldn't have lasted nearly this long at Ohio State.

[THE_WIZARD_]

I would need to have UNL +35.5 at a MINIMUM.

[iam416]

Ohio State was -2' at Nebraska.

Ohio State was +6 at Michigan.

Preseason lines.

[froot loops]

If people listened to my pronouncements on the Ryan Day hire those preseason lines wouldn't be so out of whack.

[hack]

Well if only people had listened to ME...

(don't answer that cause the answer is we'd have already fired Harbaugh, probably)

[Jeff Buchanan]

As an aside, Brian just posted (my first time saying this about him) an asinine, wandering piece on the Wisconsin game. talent will be pleased that in it, he still has not let go of his criticism of osu and the day hire.

After this irrelevant and long analogy he draws between the Wisconsin Game and the obscure movie that most people have not seen and probably won't understand the analogy because of it (including me) he says this:

Michigan's SP+ rankings under Harbaugh: 10, 6, 13, 10. Michigan's currently 26 and sinking like a brick. Prior to this year that's remarkably consistent in the face of some difficulties like not having any quarterbacks. It's not what it needs to be for Michigan to be a consistent challenger to Ohio State. It's good enough to make the idea of trying to hire someone else absurd. OSU just hired a short-term coordinator with no head coaching experience; all coach hires except Urban Meyer are crapshoots.

I think this is sad. I respect Brian both as a gifted writer and as an analyst of M football but this is total crap and fails to face up to where Harbaguh is in his coaching history and trajectory right now; 3-13.

Shall I say, it's John Cooper time at Michigan.

[Hannibal]

You can wipe your ass with those S&P numbers. There's no way that 2017 team was one of the Top 20 teams in the country. They sucked ass.

[hack]

FWIW, that's not the way I read it. If I understand Brian correctly, which I may not, what he's saying is that Harbaugh has enough statistical credibility to keep his job even though he doesn't deserve to. But we'll see where the guy is in the coming weeks, when he calms down. He's one voice worth listening to, but not the only one. Right now Spath seems pretty clear-headed, even though at other times he seems like a bit of a clickbaity sort of guy.

[iam416]

The SECFootball podcast guys, now "CollegeFootballNerds" make a pretty good point about S&P -- it's entirely predicated on how you do against an average team. It tends to overvalue, e.g., spready type offenses that can totally abuse "average" teams but that run into real problems against bad ass defenses. Ohio State under JTB had good S&P numbers (#3 in 2017!), but their offense was fatally flawed thanks to JTB's arm. So, when they battled really good or better defenses they were considerably under predicted outcome.

Don Brown's defense makes a living mashing the fuck out of average or offenses. But against good offenses his scheme fails. So, the S&P is great for predicting that Don Brown will throttle the fuck out of an average B10 team, but it comes up woefully short when it comes to an elite offense.

[Hannibal]

They didn't throttle anyone in 2017 though. They didn't game the numbers with big point totals over shitty teams ala the 2016 team. They needed OT to beat Indiana and they only beat Rutgers by 21. They only beat Cincy and Air Force by 22 and 16, respectively. I don't see how a computer could rank that team in the top 25 by any algorithm.

[Hannibal]

As an aside, Brian just posted (my first time saying this about him) an asinine, wandering piece on the Wisconsin game....

His game columns have increasingly been more like that lately.

[iam416]

Fair enough. I'm not sure how they finished #13 in 2017.