Team 137 by Jim Harbaugh. Football talk and Predictions.

[lineygoblue]

That's the name that is being bandied about. Fangio.

I'm a bit surprised that Durkin left this quickly. I guess he really wants to be a HC pretty bad. He probably could have gotten a better HC job if he would have waited another year.

[Prime2]

That's the name that is being bandied about. Fangio.

I'm a bit surprised that Durkin left this quickly. I guess he really wants to be a HC pretty bad. He probably could have gotten a better HC job if he would have waited another year.

Excellent. Fresh off a National Title, P5 program with a future. Maryland is a bottom-feeder program in B1G.

[iam416]

Does Fangio get to bring Patrick Wills, Navarro Bowman and an ass-kicking DL with him?

[SeattleLionsFan]

I hope so. Those dudes would be sweet in college.

[Prime2]

Does Fangio get to bring Patrick Wills, Navarro Bowman and an ass-kicking DL with him?

Don't be ridiculous, but Vic does bring that Vince Lombardi Trophy that most say Vic & Jim won. Ravens, holding, safety? Incompetence/Corruption was staggering.


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[froot loops]

Jim has terrible luck with the referees.

[iam416]

Urbs did him a solid by removing the referees from the outcome.

Dantonio, however, twisted the dagger with one outrageous call after another culminating in a soul-crushing loss.

I can't believe that play is keeping OSU from the CFP. Hindsight being what it is, I would have been more crushed than my wife if I had known. Well, that play and, you know, a donkey poop offensive performance.

[Jeff Buchanan]

There are a couple of great pieces at mgoblog that, if you plow through them, give some excellent insight into what went into the osu debacle on defense.

First off, you can forget about most of the crap you were hearing immediately following the game that somehow DJD or the LBs or whatever were singlehandedly responsible for that crapfest. As in most terrible airplane crashes, subsequent investigation reveals multiple causes that include both system and human error.

There’s some debate about naming DJD’s scheme that he rolled out v. osu. I’m not going to get into that because the debate is legit and of little importance to the central point: It didn’t work.

Durkin did go away from what M had been doing all season on defense. In the final analysis, the defense he used got figured out right away by ufm and his staff - by late 2nd quarter and certainly after osu’s opening TD drive of the 3rd. Damningly, there was no adjustment so, ufm, correctly, just kept hammering away at it. Expert observers think there were some legit reasons for that: Injuries to Galscow and probably Morgan, basic skill sets of the front 7 both limited what DJD could do. Read the articles if you want to know more detail. Interesting.

D Personnel: anyone watching M football this season knows LB play was not great. The general consensus is that Durkin had to accommodate this and did so well until Glascow went out. Fundamentally, if the DL is playing poorly, like it did v. osu, the LBs who already aren’t great are going to look terrible.

D Scheme: Not a factor in the loss generally. What was a factor by most accounts is how the personnel played that scheme, i.e., player skill sets and how players appeared to react to what osu was doing/how they were coached. There are nits to be found in both coaching and in assessing the baseline skills of the front 7. Not surprising. It is never just one thing.

Things I read that I liked:

ufm and osu are good. They slept walked through most of the season until awoken by the MSU loss. M got osu at the worst possible time. An extremely talented group pissed off and hungry.

M’s LBs are OK, not great. The DL made them look worse by letting osu’s OLmen get to the second level. There are a lot of “devil in the detail” reasons for that. If you want to understand them, read the articles.

The expert consensus fix for that particular game and how it developed was NOT to bring a Safety up as the peanut gallery almost uniform suggested but rather, and from the defense that DJD chose to deploy, to (1) blitz the A gaps more frequently, (2) bring more pressure from the outside with blitzes. If you want to know why that probably would have worked better and the risks that strategy would have taken, read the articles.

The best indicator of how good Harbaugh’s staff is will be how well they adjust in the off season and through spring ball to better defend B10 spread teams that run both IZ/OZ Power combined with Read Option.

[froot loops]

In my opinion it was an effort issue in the second half as much as scheme or personnel. They just didn't look all that engaged when the Buckeyes got a score early in the third. I expected them to come out like gangbusters in the second half after closing the gap and having a roaring Harbaugh halftime speech.

[Jeff Buchanan]

In my opinion it was an effort issue in the second half as much as scheme or personnel. They just didn't look all that engaged when the Buckeyes got a score early in the third. I expected them to come out like gangbusters in the second half after closing the gap and having a roaring Harbaugh halftime speech.

Feelingsball ....... I can partake in that adventure too: there wasn't a lack of effort.

There was a definite problem with how the LBs played both the IZ and the Read Option plays. Some of the nits I mentioned in my original post had to do with how they APPEARED (and I stress that because it is really hard to judge) to be positioned and coached to read and then react to the plays osu was running.

[iam416]

They were overmatched, Froot. I take nothing away from their effort. They just ran into the an uber-talented team that played really, really well.

I also agree with the post-mortem analysis. Suggesting M do things it doesn't do is just silly -- most notably, "do what MSU does!" That's not M's defense. They definitely should have blitzed way more once it became apparent that it was going to be death by a thousand pin pricks. Get OSU behind the chains and THEN try to get your stop out of your base. That strategy was tried by Indiana -- they did force OSU into 3 and outs -- they got stops. They also gave up 3 huge runs by Elliot. But I think you'd almost prefer a 2 play 80 yard drive to the 12 play 80 yard inevitability if for no other reason than to spare your defense.

M couldn't stop OSU doing what they wanted to do -- and they were, IMO, too risk averse to take necessary further steps to slow down the train. UFM generally knows what he's doing when it comes to the running game and offense -- with the exception of the VT loss in 2014 and the MSU debacle in 2015 -- both of which were as much or more on the coaches than players.

[hack]

It was pretty clear to everyone midway through the third that it wasn't going to be a close game. This was hardly the first example of a defense tackling worse than normal in that situation. The halftime score somewhat reduced that feeling of impending disaster, and the first OSU TD of the half was not a surprise but a confirmation of what everyone sensed was possible and perhaps even likely.

I personally am not minded to say it was one thing or another. There's a way to defend this type of attack and Michigan didn't try it. There are linebackers who aren't as good as we want them to be. The DL was depleted. Etc., etc. Multiple things go into it, and I think you spread blame around.

[Rocky Bleier]

Need to recruit some athletes if we want to defend teams that will continue to spread us out. That's job #1 right now.

[hack]

Need to recruit some athletes if we want to defend teams that will continue to spread us out. That's job #1 right now.

I think that's a good debate. Brian argues quite convincingly that speed is not a top-ten thing you look for in a linebacker. Other things more important. Bolden kinda is a good example. Not fast, but gets to the right place and then fails at the brute-force part of the job. I myself am not fully convinced. But, overall, Michigan shouldn't have to choose. Michigan can go out and recruit some top prospects with all desirables, and that process is underway.

[Rocky Bleier]

I suppose then that I'm more on board with Marcus Ray than Brian Cook.