Michigan Football, Team 138, 2017 Season.

[Hannibal]

Hannibal offered in the Orange Bowl thread that the problem with M's run game is that it is limited by it's "anachronistic" style. I'm not sure what that means and if Hannibal is implying it looks like Bo's play book of the 70s and 80s, I don't think that is accurate.

Neither of us have the play book so that limits the quality of our opinions and observations. Having said that, here's where I think the problems are and it has nothing to do with poor run game production due to an anachronistic or stale running game approach.

The approach frequently requires six, seven, or eight guys to perfectly execute blocks to gain five yards. In general, our offense is built on 1980s philosophies of smashmouth football and play action passing and the idea that you can win a game by scoring 17 points. Defensive coordinators solved this offense over 20 years ago -- you crowd the box and pressure the fuck out of the QB to neturalize the play action passing. The QB operating under the center means that he turns his back to the line of scrimmage when we run play action, which means that he can't see the pressure coming and react to it. Offenses countered the Miami/Texas A&M defenses of the 80s and 90s by thinning out the box, bringing dual threat QBs back into the game, and operating out of the shotgun. It keeps defenses much more honest and it makes the lives of linebackers and safeties miserable. For the most part, defenses have yet to solve it. We sure haven't. We couldn't hold OSU to under 200 rushing yards if our fucking lives depended on it.

Our absolutely God awful run game against OSU the past two years is a big problem that transcends talent, development, and experience. If you can't get a functional running game out of a senior-laden offense that is loaded with 4* recruits on the offensive line, then your approach has to be reexamined.

It's not just Harbaugh. Carr's run game was always shit in big games too.

[Jeff Buchanan]

So you want a spread attack with a jtb type QB then?

The best NFL teams rarely crack 200y rushing per game. talent has already explained why. I'm not ready to abandon what JH is doing to go try and find M's next spread guru.

No need to reexamine anything except maybe get Speight to be more efficient passer. I think that's possible and I think that's the plan.

[froot loops]

There is a flipside to running the offense that Urban Meyer runs. To me it seems like he somewhat runs into trouble whe he faces a manball team like MSU or now Michigan. Talent pulls his hair out because they don't run the ball when it is obvious they should be running the ball straight ahead because they have a great matchup. The problem is if you run spread type offense, it is very hard to run a game plan that requires a disciplined 10 play drives in bad weather.

Just remember most offensive coordinators are old quarterbacks or have a QB mentality, even if they are getting 5 yards a pop it is killing them not to go for the big pass.

[iam416]

WRT Ohio State, they're recruiting away from JTB and 20 QB runs per game. The guys they have in the wings aren't runners; they're passing QBs.

I disagree re bad weather. The game at EL in 2014 wasn't great weather and the game at Minnesota that year was awful weather. OSU's offense was devastating in thsoe games. However, in 2015 they didn't trust Elliot b/c he spent the week in the hospital and they REALLY didn't trust Baldwin at RT.

For me, it's more that UFM loses faith his "weak spots" rapidly and doesn't trust players. Right now his default is that JTB can run QB leads well and the OL can block them well. He mostly trusts Weber and completely trusts Samuel. He has no faith the OL to pass protect JTB and probably little faith in his WRs to make big plays. And he's probably right.

As I said, they're transitioning away from the JTB model. Haskins/Burrow are 5-carry per game backs. Same with Martel and then Emory Jones. All of them can really throw it. But until then he's going to lean on what he has the most confidence in.

[*JD*]

Mo Hurst is coming back for next season.

[WM Wolverine]

Hurst hinted he was and his teammates hinted even more.

[iam416]

A deep dive into the OSU-M officiating crew. http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports...22-column.html

The Big Ten has no residency rule, and here's why: Crews, especially the best ones, work together all season. (A crew consists of eight on-field officials, an alternate, two replay officials and an independent timer.)

The one sent to Ohio Stadium on Nov. 26 was Carollo's highest-rated crew, and it contained this geographic makeup: four from Indiana, three from Ohio, three from Michigan, one from Illinois, one from Pennsylvania.

If the conference had a residency rule, that crew would be all over the Maryland-Rutgers and Minnesota-Wisconsin games but not much else. (Incidentally, Carollo once jokingly asked Harbaugh if his team's drubbing of Penn State should have been invalidated by the presence of four officials from Michigan.)

[THE_WIZARD_]

OHIO STATE FOOTBALL
Investigation concludes no, the officials did not collude to help Ohio State beat Michigan
1
The spot is still good.
by Matt Brown@MattSBN Dec 22, 2016,
After Ohio State’s dramatic come-from-behind win over Michigan to end the regular season, many Michigan fans, and one Michigan coach in particular, were mad online about the officiating. Soon, online conspiracy theories started to fly around. Did you know that all the officials were secret Ohio State fans? And that they had been fired for being bad at officiating? THAT THE FIX WAS IN?!

Well, upon further review ... that wasn’t exactly the case. The Chicago Tribune’s Teddy Greenstein chatted with the Big Ten’s head of officiating to get a little more clarity on what went down in the game.

First, let’s address the elephant in the room here. Was the spot, in fact, good? From the article:

And on the game's most controversial play — The Spot — Barrett was ruled on the field to have broken the plane of the 15-yard line when a Michigan defender contacted him. The ruling was close enough, Carollo said, that whatever was called on the field would not have been overturned by replay
Despite all the doctored photographs and screenshots you saw on Twitter for a good week after the game, the Big Ten reached the same conclusion basically everybody else outside of Michigan did ... it was really close, and not something that should have been overturned.

But what about the fact that this game included multiple officials from Ohio? Surely refs that reside in the Buckeye state could not possibly be impartial. #WellActually, not only is there no residency requirement for Big Ten refs, but the exact same number of refs from Michigan officiated the game as Ohio. Again, from the article:

The Big Ten has no residency rule, and here's why: Crews, especially the best ones, work together all season. (A crew consists of eight on-field officials, an alternate, two replay officials and an independent timer.)

The one sent to Ohio Stadium on Nov. 26 was Carollo's highest-rated crew, and it contained this geographic makeup: four from Indiana, three from Ohio, three from Michigan, one from Illinois, one from Pennsylvania.
And that picture of the ref that looks like he’s patting Mike Weber on the butt? That ref is from Indiana, not Ohio. While it wasn’t a great look for him to do so, he evidently was patting him as encouragement after he didn’t retaliate following a contentious event.

Of course, those conspiracy theories didn’t stop one Michigan radio station from broadcasting the officiating crew’s contact info while calling for their jobs. According to the article, a security company is reviewing the threatening phone calls the officials got, so great job, everybody.

Was every call in this game perfect? No. Did some of those calls go against Michigan, like a missed PI penalty? Seems like it. But this is a football game, and football games are officiated by humans, who make mistakes. Was there a concentrated effort to screw Michigan out of this game, or should Michigan blame the officiating as the reason they lost? Definitely not.

Big Ten officiating isn’t perfect, but compared to the Pac-12 or Big 12, us Big Ten fans probably have it pretty good. And if you want to get a better idea about what goes into selecting, training, and holding the refs accountable, it’s a good idea to give the Tribune a click.

[UMStan White]

Grant Perry arriagned on sexual assault and resisting arrest charges

[hack]

So they addressed a fraction of it as if it was the whole problem. I think most of us here were, of all the problems inherent, the least hung up on the spot.

Glad somebody actually found out at least something about whether there are any standards. Will read.

[hack]

WOW -- that's a one-source story. That's not a deep dive; that's a cardinal rule of journalism violated! My bet is that the conference decided to make Carollo available with conditions attached, and the Trib agreed, and that's why this looks as it does.

The wording of the Capron thing exposes it: "The Big Lead, a website with more than 27,000 Twitter followers, was among many to assert that Daniel Capron, who worked the Michigan-Ohio State game, had been fired in 2002." But nobody asserted anything: it was a direct quote from Delaney saying Capron's crew would ``forfeit future assignments''. The media just dutifully published Delaney's words, as they are supposed to. The Trib chose to write this with an artificial degree of separation between what the conference did and said, and without giving readers any indication of whether they sought clarification or asked about the discrepancy. No matter that the Trib's budget has collapsed -- people there still know how to write in plain English and know very well when they are doing something different. The story surely went through at least three editors in the process, too. This, frankly, leaves me more convinced than before that Michigan got hosed.

Despite doing its best not to, the article ultimate corroborates what I was saying: it wasn't the spot, and it wasn't that some refs are from Ohio. It was that every single 50/50 call went against them, and there was sufficient volume of them to make you wonder why When you can't get one of five, oh well -- you're on the road. When you can't get one ten, you got hosed. The refs decided the game and not the players, and that's your baseline fact. The league knows this, and the story verifies three unarguably bad calls amongst those ten tossups. At this point, I suspect the conference knows the refs handed the game to OSU and is now playing defense.

To be charitable, it is at least good to know that the idea of refs being disqualified from games due to being from a particular state is not a rule. That's progress in terms of knowing what the rules are. It would have been nice to know for sure that it was never a rule, and just a mistake in that newspaper, but with the way the Trib lets Carollo say whatever he wants without questioning it, despite obvious questions, I do wonder. But at least we know for the future.

[Kstat]

The TD vulture is back for 2017.

[Wellington_beefhouser]

The TD vulture is back for 2017.

Terrific news. Hammering pandaness in full effect.

[iam416]

The Year of HARBAUGH!!!! continues.

[AlabamAlum]

FACK.