2009

[edit: the video doesn't seem embedded, so here's a link to the 2009 post-game wrap-up of that 74-64 victory:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiyRjuphMBM&feature=related  ]

The 2009 run is something to build on for this program.

The movie clip (@1:20 of 1:54) [edit: also a link] that follows I think puts it well: "It's team, team, team: 5 players on the floor functioning as one single unit. OK? No one more important than the other."

Also, Michigan only got the chance to face Illinois last season once--at Crisler Arena--and lost. We only get one crack at the Illini this year too; let's get some payback.

Michigan seemed to wake up this 2011 season after the MN loss at home that followed two terrible road performances (NW and IU) and only one good half of play at Wisconsin.

Since then: road WIN at the Breslin Center, a good showing (LOSS) at then No. 1 tOSU and a road WIN at Penn St. The guys played Syracuse well in N.J. and won at Clemson too.

I say this team has the ability to pull off an upset on the road in Champaign. What say you of Michigan's chances?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGL0uuCxXyQ&feature=fvsr

Last week I looked at UM's 2009 vs 2010 numbers and came up with some numbers that point to a Michigan loss, but I held out hope that the Michigan offense wouldn't suck like they did against Sparty last year - yeah...  So this week I'm just sticking to the numbers in hopes of reverse jinxing us into a win :)

This week I took it one step further and looked at all of Iowa's 2010 results, comparing them to their 2009 common opponent results (as best as you can -- PSU is nothing like the PSU from 2009 but it's the best you can do).

UM's numbers took a bit of a dip both offensively and defensively after the MSU debacle and we now have this for the D:

And this for the O:

Now for some scary numbers: Lets look at Iowa thus far. Their D:

And their O:

Ok so we already knew that Iowa has an absurd D but what about comparing both UM and IA to this point last year...

And for D-I Opps only:

So, compared to last year at this point our D is much worse, our O is a bit better and Iowa has made huge strides on both sides of the ball (pick-6's and special teams points aren't counted in this). With that in mind what happened last year against Iowa?

* means that I used the D-I only numbers

Well, pretty much only the Iowa O met their numbers for the season average while our D, O and Iowa's D took a big hit.

If we only look at UM 2010 vs 2009 we get a predicted score as such:

Then if we look at only Iowa 2010 vs 2009 we get this:

Basically everything spells doom.  Even if you put in a full 6-pt swing from the change of home venues, we're at best looking at 31-24 Iowa. Sadly, I'm going to go with the average of all four numbers and throw in a 3-point swing for home field advantage (not 6 as we're treating 2010 as a seperate entity) and I end up with UM 19 - IA 32. I'll do a bit of DO NOT PUNT rounding and IA's penchant for FGs for an official prediction of UM 21 - IA 30.

I'd do a full review of the MSU numbers but it's painful so the quick and dirty is the O took a 56% decrease in PPP (3.5 season avg vs 1.55 actual) and the D took a 69% decrease (1.84 season average vs 3.10 actual).

P.S. Dear Denard - please just run once your internal timer has gone off and prove the numbers horribly wrong!! :)

Last week we saw Points Per Posession for the offense as a tempo free metric to see how good our O is. With that in mind I wanted to look at PPP for our defense. This is a little tough as the NCAA doesn't put it all together so you have to go back to each drive and pull in the drive numbers. So I went ahead and did that for 2010 so far and got this...

Note that the items in italics were not counted as I decided they shouldn't be counted - a couple other EOH drives were counted because, at least to me, it seemed obvious the other team was definitely trying to score.

All that data chrunched in this:

Ok, so thus far our D is giving up just over 2 points/posession - hmm (and OMG, Thank God IU wasn't as efficient as UMass). That doesn't sound that good - rather than compare it to tOSU or MSU I thought I'd compare it to our 2009, since most of us have a pretty firm grasp on what we thought of that D (I'll update with the rest of the Big Ten next week but I don't have the time just yet). Also, for 2009 I used our first 4 and Delaware State.  Chart...

Again the italized EOH drives were not counted in the following:

Ok, great, so now we know exactly much worse our D is this year than last year but we also played Sparty last year so let's see how that turned out...

And...

So using that same Sparty 137% over achieving you end up with the D doing this...

Eeek!  So how many point are we looking at? Well, the average number of drives faced thus far in 2010 per game is 12 and the average number in 2009 was 13. Last year Sparty had 11 countable drives so I'll call that a wash compared to this year.  With that in mind where does that leave this years D vs Sparty?

Well - 2.91*11 = 32 points and if we give them another posession they get 35 points.

Summary - well, it looks like comparing this years data to last years data our D might be giving up another 14 points in this game but our O is also much better. The next natural step is to look at how MSU is performing this year compared to last and merge the two sets of data but, as I said, that's for another week as it's already Thursday and I've got work to do!

My prediction (knocking on wood, throwing salt over shoulder, every other non-jinxing thing you can think of) UM 38-MSU 35  (I think we'll get a 27 yard FG at some point along the way).

I welcome any suggestions/additions and I'll try to update this weekly and expand it to all of the Big Ten and just have summary data in the future so as not to make it too long.

Update: I've updated with the fixed numbers for the IU EOH TD and pushed the prediction to 38-35 - maybe that 27 yard FG will come at the end of the game?

Update 2:  For Mat - I've run the Offensive numbers comparing ourselves to last year and, in a word, NNNOOOO!!!!

Keeping UMass and DSU in the calc I ended up with our O only getting 57% of it's expected output (OUCH!) with about 1 posession more per game.  Even if we throw in that extra posession our expected offensive output is only 2.058 pts/posession leaving us at 25 points.  Of course 09 was bouyed by the DSU game pulling in over 5pts/possession so if we take that out that game you end up with an expected offensive output of 26 for 11 drives or 28 for 12 drives.

Basically, our O is going to have to do MUCH better against their D than they did last year if this is going to be a win because last years O didn't do squat (60% <= squat).

Also, something of note to give hope for this years O vs last years (even after accounting for drive efficiency) is the massive decrease in number of negative yardage drives (not just plays but entire drives!).

2009 negative yardage drives through 4 OOC + IU = 9

2010 negative yardage drives through 4 OOC + IU = 2.

I'm still sticking to my prediction but, hopefully, the UM O will do better against MSU than it did last year otherwise we're going to be hurting. 

In case you're curious our O, as mentioned in another diary, is at 3.614 PPP.  If Sparty is going to get the 35 points predicted above and we get 12 posessions we'll need 3.166PPP to get to 38 or 3.5PPP to get to 42 - both below our season average.

Again - knocks on wood, throws salt over shoulder, yada yada yada...

This tremendous article before the 2009 season was probably a little premature in its hope, not that hope wasn't welcome. But the conclusions he made then apply much more now, and the role players required seem to line up with our expectations:

http://whencarcajousattack.blogspot.com/2009/06/rodriguez-spread-offense-at-full.html

In short he says you need a blistering QB, two dangerous runningbacks, quick, dependable slots and the ability for the QB to get the ball to those slots properly and on time. Plus it goes without saying but it's all about the O-line.

So:

Fast Denard runs fast and can manage to get the ball to the slot receivers on time like Pat White.

Odoms and Rountree are proven slot machines (even if Odoms is outside for now), Kelvin and Stonum will at worst fill out the productive, high yards per catch but fewer catches WRs on the chart.

Shaw plays the speedy slaton, Vincent plays the productive, receiving second back. We know they're capable of that even if Vincent can be caught from behind by DSU.

And while the article said we had the depth and returning O-line last year, we found out quickly we didn't. It's much easier to claim we do (Though Molk going down would still be devastating) this year and hopefully they make the skill players look like WVU players of old.

It's not news that the factors are there, but the article is probably still a much more concrete  read for people thinking that Michigan won't show any progress this year, especially since the young but talented players that are supposed to fulfill these roles have actually played a little.

http://www.maizenbrew.com/2010/5/18/1476932/fun-with-numbers-michigans-2...

Interesting write up analyzing Red Zone Touchdowns.  Its crazy how Michigan was 41st overall in scoring offense but 116th in red zone offense.  Between Denard's quicks and Hopkins power hopefully this number can improve dramaticallly in 2010.  Go Blue!

I haven't heard much about this kid and was really hoping that he'd turn into something special? Any news on how he is coming along and if he'll see significant playing time this year?