Halloween Frights and a Plea for Sanity (For a Little While Anyway)

To say I was livid Saturday night would be accurate, grasping at straws mad really. But the simple fact is this: when Lloyd retired in 2008 and we hired Rich Rodriguez, we set about an abrupt reset in this program and started on the long and arduous road of rebuilding. Things haven’t gone smoothly, but what we hired Rodriguez for among other things was his innovation on offense, and that has already started to bear fruit. This team is blowing the conference away in total offense, without a consistent running back and with a QB making his first starts of his career, the growth from ‘08 to ’09 to this year has been clear and consistent. The offense is working, not always, and not always smoothly, but it’s working. Meanwhile on the defensive side of the football, let us all recall that at one point in the offseason it was conceivable that the secondary could’ve consisted of Donovan Warren, Demar Dorsey, Troy Woolfolk, Vlad Emelien, and Justin Turner… all of whom are gone. I didn’t want to hear about the defensive attrition Saturday night, but we cannot ignore the impact that the personnel losses on defense have had, we’re starting a bunch of true freshmen and upper classmen who wouldn’t see the field in any normal circumstance.

What I don’t understand, and perhaps why I’m not a coach is, we seem to constantly cross ourselves up on defense by trying all of these different approaches and variations on the 3-3-5. Occam’s razor please, pick a formation (ahem 4-3) and run it, and run it exclusively. The defense doesn’t need to be good, it needs to be something resembling competent, it needs to get the ball back to the offense either by punt or turnover, and I don’t care one bit how it looks doing so. Take the decisions out of the mix, play a completely vanilla base D and focus on fundamentals like, oh I don’t know, tackling. The offense is good enough to win us games that remain on the schedule if they don’t have to play perfect football.

In short, I don’t think you fix things at this point by blowing it all up at this point. You give Rodriguez his four years to bring in four recruiting classes, you give him the opportunity to bring back nearly everyone again next year. You give him the opportunity to evaluate his defensive needs (staff wise, ahem) and to address them (perhaps with the not-so-gentle-prodding of Dave Brandon) and you see this thing through. When I look back at our previews leading up to the season, we all thought the D would be a major liability, and that was before we essentially lost half of the unit….

None of this changes the fact that the team should’ve played better on Saturday, they should’ve been more than prepared for a, quite frankly, poor Penn State squad, and they weren’t. That’s an indictment on coaching as much as anything. But going bezerk about it now doesn’t accomplish anything, you stay the course at this point, you see how the team responds and you re-evaluate at the end of the year just like Travis said. Me? I see an offense that’s only going to get better as it is still incomplete, I see a defense that cannot possibly play worse or be in a worse situation in terms of experience, injuries, or depth, and a special teams unit that just simply lacks a field-goal kicker. There are not overnight fixes to all of those problems, so why are people clamoring for an overnight firing? Address what we can, and keep the big picture in mind.

There are 4 games to be played. Two of the at home. Two of them against the worst offenses in the league. As young, inexperienced and beat up this UM defense is, just like last year these two games against Illinois and Purdue are going to probably be the turning point for Michigan.

Nobody likes what they see. It’s been a train wreck. Yet, we can’t quite look away either. Denard Robinson, Darryl Stonum, JR Hemingway, Roy Roundtree, Stephan Hopkins, RVB, Mike Martin, Kenny Demens and this OL – they are all still playing hard, fighting, working out, practicing, studying film and clawing away to win all that they can.

Most will return in 2011 to fight another day for Michigan. I’m still proud of them. The least we can do for the players this year is provide them our support, win or lose.

On offense or defense.
USC blasted people off the ball with a pro-set offense and a mix of 5-2 and 4-3 fronts all day.
Florida ran a spread option offense and then mainly a 4-3 defense by Charlie Strong.
Alabama ran a pro style offense with pistol and spread variants and a multiple defense.
Oregon is flaunting a spread option offense identical to what Rodriguez ran at WVU, and multiple defensive packages from 3-4 to six man fronts at times. They’re blowing people off the field and are ranked No.1.

What matters are coaches who understand the objective, and know the strategy and tactics to apply in order to win games. Rodriguez and Magee are nailing the offensive objective this year. Michigan is lighting it up on offense this fall without a premier and reliable package at tailback (basically Oregon sans LaMichael James). Wait until Dee Hart shows up. Defensively, Michigan has never looked worse. GERG has been told to implement and coach a 3-3-5 set that his underlings are familiar with, but with which he himself has zero knowledge.

You can win college football games in the Big Ten with 4-3, 4-4, 5-2, and 4-2-5 defenses. OSU, PSU, Iowa and MSU – the better defensive squads of the Big Ten in recent years all run mainly a 4-3 set for it’s versatility and 4 defensive backs.

The spread offense has it’s place in the Big Ten also, as OSU and PSU have proven over and over in recent years.

It’s not so much scheme as it is talent and experience, which leads to faster play and higher confidence.

I must admit that the previous comments reflect quite adequately my own feelings, and I am sure the feelings of most of us Wolverine fans. We understand that youth is an issue, but the correct focus, as written above, isn’t to condemn the young players but the coaching. Put another way: the error Rodriguez made in the beginning of his tenure was to try to force a scheme on a group of youngsters unprepared and incapable of managing the complexities. The same is true of the defense now. Rather than take the talent one has and coach that talent within its capabilities to learn and improve, Robinson has tried to force the talent level beyond reach. At one point in the game I thought the best solution for Michigan was not to send the defense on the field. That way Penn would score with less time taken off the clock and the offense would have the chance to keep us back in the game. More realisitically Robinson needs to focus on stopping the run. Fill the line with at least four down rushing men, and the box with the other three, close in because once the blockers get through the line, as they do consistently with only three in front, the O-line was pushing the linebackers into the deep second level giving their running backs room. We could protect against neither the pass nor the run when we tried to do both. Focus instead on stopping the run, and if the opposition beats you with the pass, so be it. At least the pain is over sooner.

When I watched the team 10th in the conference in third down conversions get nearly 80% of them, some at 3rd and 15 or more, it was downright heartbreaking. As one commenter said, Livid! and angry for hours afterward.

Why the emotion? Because we do care deeply about the program and the history of Michigan football. We are FANS, devoted for some odd reason to seeing the classy act of Big Ten Football, as opposed to the thuggery we have seen elsewhere to the far south. We love the competitiveness of the conference, to the ascension even of Ohio State as long as they aren’t playing us, of Michigan State, Northwestern, Wisconsin, and all the rest, as long as they aren’t playing us, and to have the Wolverines plummet so precipitously is agonizing.

I agree we should, and will, stick with Michigan even as we trash some of the coaches. Perhaps the only players we were glad to see go were those who were too self-absorbed to truly appreciate the legacy they carry every time they are seen on or off the field. But watching Michigan football flounder repeatedly is almost too much for my coronaries to stand.

With four games left, if they go 1-3 or (jeez) 0-4 does Rich Rod get flushed? Or does he get one more year? I can’t imagine the AD keeping him and the staff if they don’t get to six wins but who know? Is there a magic number here he has to hit?