Michigan Football, the 2020 Abbreviated COVID Season

[froot loops]

Karan Higdon over his career averaged 5.6 YPA, nobody on your current roster is close to that. He was just a more reliable, better running back than what they are running out there right now. In time Charbonnet may do that but he's not there now.

[WingsFan]

HARBAUGH!!! 25 PEDOS 17

Sandusky's shower team 36 - michigan 7

[hack]

McCaffrey's concussion is huge here. The great counterfactual for this season could very well end up being if he didn't get concussed in the Wisconsin game and was available to take over from Rutgers on. I still think that's probably the best decision from here on. Risk the loss at Illinois, accept the loss at PSU. Back home to take your best shot at ND and then hopefully another manageable road game at Maryland (I will not spend more than $50 on a ticket for this bullshit).

By then you'd have a pretty seasoned McCaffrey in time for Sparty.

[WingsFan]

McCaffrey has to stop being so reckless, is part why he's getting hurt IMO. He wont have much of a future if he has one more big injury.

[iam416]

M has scored 140 points in its 5 games this season. In its last 5 games, Ohio State has scored 134 points.......in the 2nd quarter. So, that's something!

[lineygoblue]

Fox gave the Penn St game to ABC. White out night game now, its going to be a bloodbath

Yes it will.

Franklin absolutely loathes Michigan and Harbaugh, and if they give him a chance, he'll do worse to them than 62-39.

They won't get anywhere near the 39.

I need to contact my bookie to place some bets. If Michigan is going to get their ass handed to them 4-5 more times this year, I may as well make a little cash off of it.

[Jeff Buchanan]

There is a shit-ton of stuff out there trying to mitigate Michigan's pathetic offensive performance v. Iowa. Brian didn't buy it - good for him - in his post where he assigns the blame for M's chronically shitty or inconsistent offenses to a decade of "whip lash" created by mismanagement from the AD down to Harbaugh (note my WTF with the bolded stuff):

By contrast (to osu), Michigan has had no set offensive identity for longer than a few years. The tail end of the Carr era was almost nothing but outside zone from under center because the Broncos made it cool. Michigan imported Rich Rodriguez, then fired him after two years of Denard Robinson. Brady Hoke put Robinson under center a lot, because he is a neanderthal, and then recruited nothing but battleship pocket passers (and air). Michigan imported an Alabama OC who was no better than the guy putting Robinson under center; Hoke got fired.

In comes Jim Harbaugh, who had a fascinating period manballing it up from every formation that had ever been invented, lost Jedd Fisch, hired Pep Hamilton, threw Tim Drevno overboard two years too late, hired Ed Warinner, turned to Warinner after the Notre Dame debacle, developed a nice arc read package, ditched Hamilton, and hired Josh Gattis.

In the opener Gattis showed an arc read with an option attached that looked like the natural evolution of what Michigan had been running last year, and then for whatever reason all of that got stuffed in a garbage disposal. Michigan cited an oblique injury to the quarterback. Since then they've done various things, with nothing that you can actually call a base offense. Giving total control to Josh Gattis appears to have resulted in Michigan tossing some adequate babies out with the bathwater, and now the babies are not very adequate.

The number of whiplash moments here is approaching double digits, all while Ohio State calmly whittles a stick into a cruise missile. Michigan has repeatedly thrown over their offensive approach midseason.

There's more out there on the web. Most of it is BS and a waste of keyboard strokes.

I'm just ignoring it. I gave it three games - Rutgers, Iowa, Illinois - to determine if was going to make the games I have both tickets and air arrangements for: ND, MSU and osu. I tried to take something from the Rutgers game and talent laughed - he was right. What followed v. Iowa was proof positive that Rutgers had no meaning whatsoever in telling us if M was a good football team. It is if you think M can win the rest of it's games on Don Brown's back. Hello ....... not unless all the teams M has remaining on it's schedule abandon their current game strategies and engage M in a turtle version of a rock fight ala the 70s.

Anyway, I'm rather resigned to what Michigan football has become and will likely remain for the foreseeable future.

[Whitley]

I am shocked to see that I was right about this team. I thought 9-3 was the best this team could do and thought they were a couple injuries away from 7-5/6-6 season. And I might have been too optimistic.

It just astounds me. Anything that can go wrong (outside of the defense) has gone wrong this year.

[Jeff Buchanan]

..................Anything that can go wrong (outside of the defense) has gone wrong this year.

I know you don't mean this but just to make sure, nothing we are seeing from the offense is a result of fate or the football Gods or bad karma. It is a result of exactly what Brian at mgo suggests: ineptitude and bad decision making from the AD on down to Harbaugh. There is no other reasonable way to slice this.

[WM Wolverine]

Offense needs a handful of bread and butter plays it can do extremely well whenever it needs to plus have counters for those from the same set when the defense thinks you're doing the former. M doesn't have a single play it can turn to when they need yardage let alone counters to those.

[froot loops]

That post was a pretty good overview, I think it was a little too focused on the play calling in my opinion. There is lot to it, but for any program in the Big Ten to compete with OSU at the moment it is going to take a total program effort. That speaks to recruiting, how you manage grad transfers, using the 4 game redshirt rule to develop players, not losing players to attrition. Competing for a Big Ten title is a different animal now with how good the OSU program has become. It's a hard slog for the forseeable future for any of the programs in the Big Ten East.

[iam416]

Obligatory -- "but, Ryan Day is unproven...." comment.

Buchanan omitted the opening portion of Brian's post, but it pretty well documented Ohio State's evolution since hiring Tressel. As the first quoted sentence suggests, it serves as a foil to M's bumblefuckery.

But, Froot, it's hardly an insightful observation as you and I were both prattling on about the programmic differences that significantly affect both the hiring process and outcome of that process.

[hack]

I don't recall much hiring-process prattle, but the post-hiring process/program-management prattle has definitely been quality content. But, pre-process, just consider timing -- OSU was very fortunate that Tressell's time ended when Meyer was available. Maybe I'm missing something on the timeline there and Meyer made himself available knowing that would happen? Anyhow, either way, OSU's gone on to make many decisions since then that have led to wins. It wasn't just dumb luck.

As for OSU's just-completed transition, well, I would assume that they knew it was coming for most of last fall and did their due diligence. There was time to observe Day and to get a clear understanding of other alternatives. That was the real lost opportunity at Michigan -- back in 06 Martin could have embarked on a long learning process. He proved he could do it by hiring John Beilein. It's not clear to me whether all the other powers that be around Michigan's AD would allow for a functional process when the football job is open though. And basketball may have garnered enough interest to prevent another kind of hiring process like the one that brought Beilein. If Howard turns out, that may be best attributed to dumb luck.

[froot loops]

That's true, I'm breaking nothing new, but I always sense that people don't understand how tall the task is. Maybe that's not true here, but listen to a day of WTKA and I don't think the general fanbase quite gets it. As an MSU fan, I totally see it, we're not even trying to compete and Saturday's debacle was exhibit A. Michigan is actually trying to compete and it is scattershot at best.

The next hire for Michigan coach is always viewed as the big red easy button. That also goes for the next great assistant coach they hire or the next big recruit or QB transfer. A lot of that aimlessness that Cook talked about was caused by short term thinking, half-hearted chasing of the next fad or "Michigan tradition" fan service.

Harbaugh still may be the best man for the job, but the word may is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. His whole tenure in Ann Arbor is a microcosm of the short term thinking. But if you get rid of him you may be prolonging the problem.

[hack]

It's incredibly difficult. It's not hard to know what to do, but execution is just incredibly difficult. That's why the thing I really want to know the most about here is whether Gattis was forced on Harbaugh, or whether Harbaugh was told to go find somebody and picked Gattis, or whether Harbaugh himself decided it was time to junk his approach and hand over the keys.