Michigan Football, the 2020 Abbreviated COVID Season

[Jeff Buchanan]

Why compare him to you when there are hundreds of other football coaches? That's a direct comparison.

Point taken ........

urban meyer at Florida and ohio state. Perhaps the highest profile coach to leave HC gigs due to stress and burnout. Of course everyone will argue that the circumstances of him leaving both those programs had little to do with burn-out, reassessment or the like but rather had to do with the noose tightening around his neck. In both cases, I never fully bought into the arguments that he was getting out to escape scandal.

High profile NFL coaches who left their HC jobs due to burn-out:

John Madden

Dick Vermiel

Tony Dungy

While the Zoloft Theory is sexy and intriguing, it is much more likely that Harbaugh is coping with the pressures of his job with the outward behaviors we're observing. Loosing a game like his team did in Madison has to take a huge toll on a guy that is intense as Harbaugh seems to be. The constant pressure to perform can be enormously destructive if you don't find ways to cope. My guess is that Jim would never turn to medications to do that. Admittedly, that's as speculative as the idea that he would but I'm running with it.

[froot loops]

Harbaugh might still be the best coach going forward for you guys but this year may be a lost year. We'll see how he handles it but reading that article Jeff posted about Don Brown's defense against Wisconsin is more alarming than the author presents it to be. If you are that weak on the defensive line in the 3rd game of the season, you are in trouble for the rest of the year even if you don't face any team as punishing as the Badgers. It seems like some of the other stuff can be fixed but that probably can't be fixed.

A lot of the attention has been devoted to Harbaugh's fire, but this seems like roster management and expectation settings issue first and foremost.

[Jeff Buchanan]

...........A lot of the attention has been devoted to Harbaugh's fire, but this seems like roster management and expectation settings issue first and foremost.

Great point. After any kind of catastrophe - that word used in the widest sense of it - people look for reasons why it occurred. Hot takes are rarely accurate and it takes a good deal of sitting back and winding your wrist watch so to speak to get to the root causes.

Aircraft accident investigations are a good example. Look at the 737Max crashes. Aviation pundits pointed to poor pilot training and pilot error at first when after more data entered the calculations, it turned out that bad Boeing flight control software was the culprit.

Football fans - probably the absolute worst of the uninformed critics - focus in on the more ridiculous theory's while overlooking the more mundane. That is also typical in aviation accident investigations. In the end, it is usually a straight forward chain of events that causes aircraft to crash. I think in the end and as it applies to Michigan football's misadventures the boring yet straight forward facts underlying them will be the kinds of things you point to: Poor roster management, recruiting misses at DT and poor "program" player development.

As in aircraft accident investigations, in the military anyway, supervisory error is almost always present and the supervisors get relieved.

[hack]

Then again Wisconsin has no DTs either, so they're got DEs in there and OLBs as ends. Did fine. I'm not sure how much stock to put in the ``roster mismanagement'' argument. Sometimes you just get unlucky and suffer an injury at a key position in which a recruit flips last minute, or a guy just doesn't develop and you have to cover for that. We heard plenty of bitching about very weak position groups from Talent during Meyer's stay at OSU. Harbaugh is still just two or three counterfactuals away from a very different result, and one that never would have caused him to hire Gattis based on a 20-minute phone call after which he walked away from the majority of his identity as a tactician.

But independent of whether Harbaugh's medicated himself to the point where he can't OCD his way to being properly organized or fire up his players, you do at this point have to question very seriously who he hires, and whether he can make the right offseason adjustments to his staff. The Gattis hire looks right now like more of a blind thrust at a general problem than an intelligent solution to an accurate diagnosis. He just looks like he's lost his way and his identity. If Wisconsin can properly execute the offense Harbaugh loves and believes in, he should be able to as well, and he shouldn't be trying to do anything other than that.

[hack]

Point taken ........

urban meyer at Florida and ohio state. Perhaps the highest profile coach to leave HC gigs due to stress and burnout. Of course everyone will argue that the circumstances of him leaving both those programs had little to do with burn-out, reassessment or the like but rather had to do with the noose tightening around his neck. In both cases, I never fully bought into the arguments that he was getting out to escape scandal.

High profile NFL coaches who left their HC jobs due to burn-out:

John Madden

Dick Vermiel

Tony Dungy

While the Zoloft Theory is sexy and intriguing, it is much more likely that Harbaugh is coping with the pressures of his job with the outward behaviors we're observing. Loosing a game like his team did in Madison has to take a huge toll on a guy that is intense as Harbaugh seems to be. The constant pressure to perform can be enormously destructive if you don't find ways to cope. My guess is that Jim would never turn to medications to do that. Admittedly, that's as speculative as the idea that he would but I'm running with it.

Those are definitely examples of burned out coaches. But that list of four is very short compared with the hundreds of guys who have had 20-30 year runs at this. And you'd have to wonder why he was able to so successfully manage his sideline demeanor but be a complete failure at managing the other emotional aspects of the job. You'd thing success managing emotions in your scenario would be more evenly distributed across the range of outcomes.

[Hannibal]

Roster management is a significant problem on the DL, but not so much anywhere else right now. What's going on with the defense and the inability to manage a lack of elite talent on the DL is secondary compared to the utterly incompetent clown show on the offensive side of the ball. It's hard to think of a talent-laden offense that has tripped over itself as much as this one.

[hack]

It's easy to think about what could be happening if Jim was just willing to use those damn WRs to set up the run. And maybe if he had stuck with Peters and McCaffrey as dropback passers.

[Hannibal]

Jim Harbaugh struck me as a guy who loved coaching and would have done it for free if he had to He's the last guy that I would have expected to get burned out, especially coaching at his alma mater. I thought that he had 20 good years in him when he was hired. If it's true though, then it just means that he was the right coach but no longer is.

[Niffla]

I'm not quite sold yet that he's burned out and lost his fire. Maybe he is, but I'm not sure. Could very well be that things have not gone close to what he had envisioned -- just like us all. 5 years in and not a single conference title, not a single playoff berth, not a single win over the school's top rival. And then this year was supposed to be the year with a realistic path to finally -- a conference title.

Then they open the season and look pedestrian against Middle Tennessee St and for all intents and purposes should've lost to Army at home. And then when this past Saturday began, from the opening kick -- forget winning, they didn't even look like they belonged on the same field or shit even to the same conference for that matter as Wisconsin.

Could be that he's just completely at a loss and that it's starting to sink in that he may never get it figured out here. At least not in the way the entire fan base envisioned it when he signed on.

[lineygoblue]

This is why I am among those that believe something is wrong with Harbaugh.

The guy we all know (knew?) would never tolerate the ineptness that is going on with this team right now.

When Harbaugh was at Stanford, he took his team into the LA Coliseum and beat USC. He went into Autzen and beat Oregon when they were the toast of college football. He beat UCLA at the Rose Bowl. His teams were never intimidated on the road. This is the guy who thumbed his nose at Pete Carroll, when Carroll was hotter than Nick Saban.

After that, he took the middling 49'ers into the Super Bowl against his own brother's team, and nearly delivered the Lombardi Trophy.

And now, his team can't even look respectable against the Wisconsin Badgers? His team got pushed around by Army? He let the biggest rival drop 62 points on him? He couldn't prepare his team to play a consolation bowl in Atlanta?

This is Jim Harbaugh?

Something is not right here. Something else is going on that is not getting out to the public.

If there is something wrong in the areas of mental, emotional, or physical,.. I hope he places his priority on taking care of those issues and taking care of his family. He's still got little ones at home and he needs to give them top priority in his life.

Michigan football will survive, and that should not be a consideration for him.

[hack]

This is why I am among those that believe something is wrong with Harbaugh.

The guy we all know (knew?) would never tolerate the ineptness that is going on with this team right now.

When Harbaugh was at Stanford, he took his team into the LA Coliseum and beat USC. He went into Autzen and beat Oregon when they were the toast of college football. He beat UCLA at the Rose Bowl. His teams were never intimidated on the road. This is the guy who thumbed his nose at Pete Carroll, when Carroll was hotter than Nick Saban.

After that, he took the middling 49'ers into the Super Bowl against his own brother's team, and nearly delivered the Lombardi Trophy.

And now, his team can't even look respectable against the Wisconsin Badgers? His team got pushed around by Army? He let the biggest rival drop 62 points on him? He couldn't prepare his team to play a consolation bowl in Atlanta?

This is Jim Harbaugh?

Something is not right here. Something else is going on that is not getting out to the public.

If there is something wrong in the areas of mental, emotional, or physical,.. I hope he places his priority on taking care of those issues and taking care of his family. He's still got little ones at home and he needs to give them top priority in his life.

Michigan football will survive, and that should not be a consideration for him.

Very defensible. I hate this speculation, because that guy is a person and has that family and was my and many others' first football hero, and it's hard to see it go down like this. But it is what it is.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Then again Wisconsin has no DTs either, so they're got DEs in there and OLBs as ends. Did fine. I'm not sure how much stock to put in the ``roster mismanagement'' argument. Sometimes you just get unlucky and suffer an injury at a key position in which a recruit flips last minute, or a guy just doesn't develop and you have to cover for that. We heard plenty of bitching about very weak position groups from Talent during Meyer's stay at OSU. Harbaugh is still just two or three counterfactuals away from a very different result, and one that never would have caused him to hire Gattis based on a 20-minute phone call after which he walked away from the majority of his identity as a tactician.

But independent of whether Harbaugh's medicated himself to the point where he can't OCD his way to being properly organized or fire up his players, you do at this point have to question very seriously who he hires, and whether he can make the right offseason adjustments to his staff. The Gattis hire looks right now like more of a blind thrust at a general problem than an intelligent solution to an accurate diagnosis. He just looks like he's lost his way and his identity. If Wisconsin can properly execute the offense Harbaugh loves and believes in, he should be able to as well, and he shouldn't be trying to do anything other than that.

I don't mean this to sound disrespectful but this post takes things all over the place.

The issue of roster management and unreasonably high fan expectations as I understood Froot's post pertained narrowly to DTs and Don Brown's defenses. Froot's comments related to the post I made linking mgo's Neck Sharpies post asking, "Did Brown Get Exposed?"

To reiterate,Brown is dealing with trying to replace what Hurst, Winovich, Gary and Bush collectively delivered from 2016 to 2018 - pressure, run stopping power. The current crop of players he has at his disposal at similar positions aren't nearly as good in delivering what his previous players in those roles delivered. Brown's defenses rely on those two things. Hence, he is trying to use scheme to compensate (The 2-4-5 thing). That he has to do this is, IMO, a roster management issue. It can also be argued that as far as "program players" go they haven't been developed or coached sufficiently to allow Brown to not have to use scheme and even in using scheme to perform within it. Fan expectations for Don Brown's defenses? Off the scale high given the realities of the current roster compared to what Brown had prior to 2019.

Further, and involving roster management, how would Brown explain Solomon bolting? Not entirely sure that is on him - players of his caliber can do weird shit - but his loss is a roster management issue that he has to cope with and could be of his won making.

The rest of your post questions the Gattis hire and what that implies about JH's state of mind ("looks like he's lost his way and identity"). I think we are right to examine the factual aspects of JH's strategic decision making, to wit, the Gattis hire. But I can't buy the connection you are making between that hire and a conclusion that he's lost his way or his identity. The Gattis hire was one that others seem to think he made under pressure, too quickly and without proper vetting, i.e., and in comparison, before ufm hired day, he had him come in and talk the play-book and after he was satisfied that day knew what he was talking about and it fit with ufm's football philosophy, he hired him.

Now Harbaugh has what he has on his hands on offense, a fucking mess. He hasn't lost his way or his identity. At first appearance, he made a hasty and retrospectively a bad hire. Then, it looks like he ceded control of the offense to Gattis alone. I'm more comfortable at this point to see how he un-fucks this than I am trying to figure out if he is medicated or burned out. If he is either, that is immaterial to a forward looking view that evaluates what he does in the next game and the two after that. If the offense improves, M wins those games convincingly, that's a very good sign that Harbaugh is as good as he has ever been. It's unfortunate that he has to dig himself out of the situation he created and that circumstance is worthy of those hard off season decisions that other's have said will have to be made about him and he will have to make about his staff.

[WM Wolverine]

M has glaring weaknesses at 3 positions; RB, DT and OT as the result of injuries, attrition, and inability to land blue chip recruits. All three were very evident vs Wisconsin and won't go away when facing teams with good to very good offensive/defensive lines.

[hack]

If you don't want to be disrespectful then just don't. Most of the rest of us here seem to be handling that impulse just fine. And be clear on these terminologies, too. You read mgoblog close enough that you ought to know that the 2-4-5 was what they say Wisconsin is doing because they have the same roster issues at DT that Michigan has. The post you're referring to, https://mgoblog.com/content/neck-sha...-gap-it-anyway, makes clear Michigan's in a 3-3-5 or a 4-2-5.

Anyhow, that all to me is relevant in a discussion on whether roster management is a serious problem or just a reality that teams sometimes have to cope with, because both teams on the field had the same problem.

I have also argued in the past -- just as you just suggested -- that position coaching on the DT is an issue. I'd hoped Shaun Nua would be better there than Mattison, but it's clear that M's DL has dominated the LOS less and less every year since '16, and Gary left here basically the same as when he arrive. This connects directly to my suggestion in that post you found to be "all over the place" that Harbaugh's ability to hire the right staff is an issue.

[THE_WIZARD_]

You guys lost one friggin' game...hell tOSU was pounded by Purdue last year...at Iowa the year before...it happens...it's a long season...the sky isn't falling...