Michigan @ Maryland, Saturday, 11/2, noon, ABC/ESPN 3 Video

[froot loops]

It's still a classic and yes, if you've never heard of it, you were born after 1990........42 years after me. Either that or you have heard of it and are into esoteric novels.

I think I was somewhere around 10 when I got my hands on it from my grandfather's book collection. Porn at it's best.

whoosh

[hack]

[THE_WIZARD_]

...crab cakes and football...it's what Maryland does!

[lineygoblue]

Go to Maryland! Get Crabs!

[Hannibal]

We're favored by 21. That sounds about right. Maryland is really bad. But we still suck ass on the road against anyone not named "Rutgers" and there will probably be a big hangover effect after the ND win.

[THE_WIZARD_]

shaddup

[Jeff Buchanan]

Well, M is a 21 point favorite as a road team v. the Terps. I don't particularly care for Mike Locksley - mainly because he came to prominence at UAT and decided to make an issue of who was actually in charge of Albama's offense last summer. Gattis got pulled into the discussion and a controversy was born. Beat writers are bringing it up for the game between M and Maryland that "pits Gattis v. Locksley." Actually, no it doesn't. That's a non-story. What is a story is this:

Maryland is injury ridden at important positions, including QB. Worse, they have talent deficiencies on the OL and DL along with questionable DBs. There's talent on offense but it is limited and without quality OL play, it's hard to bring that talent to bear in terms of offensive efficiency. Personnel match-ups favor Michigan's front 7 and the back end excpet for Vincent Grey, if he plays in a relief role.

I won't say a win v. Maryland on the road would be a signature win for Harbaugh but in terms of the narrative he suffers from regarding road games, it very well could be. If M struggles, the narrative will continue. If it doesn't and this is a curb stomping, it will silence it ....for the moment. My take is that for M to continue its rehabilitation after Wisconsin, it has to make a statement in this game. Everything points to that it will. But that kind of talk is through my homer lens.

M's reality is that good things just don't happen to this program. It's one step forward, derp, then two steps back. Two scenarios:

Locklsley pantses Brown - it could happen as Brown does not have a history as M's DC that is consistent. Lots of blips. Meanwhile, Patterson succumbs to pressure to keep things going, build on the recent successes M's offense has enjoyed. The coaches will play a major role in designing a game plan v. Maryland that Patterson can do well with. Ask too much of him and he'll turtle. Ask just enough, give him plays where he'll gain confidence, he'll do well. I'm not confident that is going to happen and if it doesn't M could get caught thinking they are better than they actually are and lose a shoot out that they aren't capable of winning something like 35-31. 30%

Brown is Dr. Blitz and blows up Locksley's offense as crippled as it is. Patterson plays nearly mistake free, within a run-centric game plan that gets 300+ yards on the ground while showing off his capacity to make big plays with his feet, execute a passing game that makes sense in a run to pass offense and show cases his ability to improvise. M wins going away, 48-7. 70%

[WM Wolverine]

No reason this should even be close. M will score alot of points, 40+ as long as they don't give away possessions like they did earlier in the season.

At full??? health I liked their offense and Locksley is a really good offensive mind. They might still find some ways to score some points though more likely Brown will out talent the Turtles. JB 48-7 score sounds accurate as they are missing some key players to make this even remotely close.

[Jeff Buchanan]

FFFF Maryland defense is up at mgo. Again, isolated talent poorly supported by no one else. Antoine Brooks is the danger man in Jon Hoke's D (Yep, Brady's brother). He plays this sort-of Peppers role (and is just as disruptive) in a 2-4-5 defense. I've talked about this before - not in the Maryland context - but rather trying to explain how different terminology in defensive formations makes things confusing. Anyway, in Maryland's 2-4-5, the 2 designates DTs that line up in the A-Gaps. The remaining gaps are covered by an array of 4 LBs and Ss one of which is Antoine Brooks and he is a bad-ass. But that's about it.

Seth makes a point - because it's about the only film he has a lot of - about how effective Brooks is. He's a physical guy that is good at making reads. He's going to match up with Mayfield, you can almost be sure of, until Warinner makes it hard for him to get through 3 TEs and Mason on that side to do his disrupting of the backfield thing.

Maryland seems to give up a lot of big plays and here's why:

Maryland.jpg

This 2-4-5 thing just doesn't work against power teams running inside (See the Goopher stat line v. Maryland).

Oh, wait, this is what M's offense is doing rather well at right now too. Watch what kind of D front Hoke starts off with v. M on Saturday. I'll bet its not a 2-4-5. I also don't think that Hoke will have his LBs on edge alert like ND did assuming he watched M annihilate ND running basic power shit..... and if they aren't, watch how Gattis will abuse that with jet sweeps and such to the edge. Match-up alert in that circumstance: TEs getting their blocking right v. Brooks.

Having read FFFF I feel a bit more confident that scenario #2 in my prediction will come to pass and I'll now go for 80% Scenario 2 and and 20% Scenario 1. I'll also agree with WM, "this game shouldn't be close." That voice inside my brain is still telling me M won't get out of it's own way and it will be.

There's some good video and a picture of Maryland lining up in this 2-4-5 thing worth looking at:

https://mgoblog.com/content/fee-fi-f...ense#read-more

[maxreturn]

Blue will win but it will be closer than many think. The mindset will be "gee, we totally outplayed PSU in the 2nd half and we mopped the floor against ND. Now we take on the hapless Terps with a record of 3-5." Prove me wrong big Jim!

[Jeff Buchanan]

Blue will win but it will be closer than many think. The mindset will be "gee, we totally outplayed PSU in the 2nd half and we mopped the floor against ND. Now we take on the hapless Terps with a record of 3-5." Prove me wrong big Jim!

I'd like to think that sort-of lack of preparation and focus stuff is not a player in this game...... but we have osu last season, the care about absolutely nothing game M played in the 2018 post season v. UF and got blown out, we have Wisconsin and to a certain extent Illinois where M beat them up early only to watch a more determined, focused and scrappy Illinois team come back to within 3 before the team got it's collective heads out of their asses.

I think this is a bit different. There's few people that can explain what happened in Madison. However, the team got better slowly, stumbling on offense v. Iowa then looking like a recovery was underway v. PSU late. Finally the curb stomping of ND. You could say, lessons were learned ..... which probably should be taken with a grain of salt for a lot of reasons covered in post game analysis that if you are paying attention make a lot of sense.

• Kelly did not have ND prepared for the weather
• Book played terribly and got confused by M's heavy zone looks
• ND's interior OL is exactly as bad as was forecast and a really bad match-up for the way Brown deployed the Michigan Defense
• Who ever designed M's run game/made in-game play calls spanked ND's defense. The LBs heads were spinning - most of the time as long as M was not running zone stretch.

So, yeah. Be cautious about extrapolating what Brain called a mostly + set of grades for M's defense to an ass kicking of Maryland's O - as banged up as it is. In mgo's (Brain's) preview of Maryland he stated Maryland is a big play offense and not much else. Guess what? Brown's defense can be, at times, susceptible to big plays. I'd say that a lack of focus in a road game coupled with Maryland's big play capabilities could result in a closer game than expected if, say, Patterson or RBs revert to the early season turn-over machine they were, giving teh Terps short fields or receivers drop the ball too often ending promising drives.

I don't believe that is going to happen but, man, if I were an M coach, I'd be concerned about it and working damn hard to make sure it doesn't with whatever tools I had at my disposal to keep player's heads in the game.

[Jeff Buchanan]

If you have the time today, before the Maryland game, read the weekly column at mgo called Punt/Counterpunt.

Punt raised an interesting thought about harnessing the John O'Neil refereeing idiocy to spark the drubbing that M handed out to ND. That thought may be on-point.

What I liked about it is that it talked about the kind of intensity in the ND game that used to characterize the best M football teams. It also notes that as fans we probably shouldn't expect to see that kind of intensity v. Maryland. I think that's sad. I'd like to see it as an extension of what this team could become.

This is one of those intangibles - player and coach intensity - that, IMO, has been missing for most of JH's tenure as HC. It would be nice to see it continue v. Maryland indicating this is the guy M needs to have in the job he's currently in; he's not the guy that put the 2019 team on the field for the OOC games that looked lost and presaged what was coming. He's not the guy that put a team on the field that got blown out at Wisconsin, had an offense that looked like shit v. Iowa and played with an edge for only the first half at Illinois.

https://mgoblog.com/content/puntcounterpunt-maryland-2019#read-more

[WingsFan]

TD on kickoff - Jackson! - stupid camera angle

[klondike]

That has to be the most pathetic attempt at defending a kick off I've ever seen.

[iam416]

This will be the easiest cover of the week in CFB.