penn state

What the hell?

I don't know, man. Yeah, Penn State's second half point explosion was heavily aided by Michigan screwups on special teams and offense, but it's not like this is an aberration. Illinois put up 45, after all, and did that by running it all over the place; in this game Royster averaged nearly ten yards a carry. Whatever hopes you have for this defense should now be dead.

Chart?

Sigh. Chart.

Before we get to it, a caveat: I didn't expect the numbers to be this ugly, and at this point in the season I may be excessively harsh due to general malaise and anger. By the last drive I was obviously not objective. But, yeah, they did put up 46 points and largely stopped themselves in the first half.

On with the show.

Let me just tackle some of the guys you're probably going "urk" about:

Obi Ezeh. Hey, when you're the middle linebacker and the opponent rushes for 6.3 YPC you probably get a massive negative in UFR. I don't really blame him; if Michigan had recruited more than one high-profile linebacker since Crable and Burgess Ezeh would probably be waiting his chance on the bench.

Isn't it time to start getting Fitzgerald some time? A drive here and there; he's basically got to play next year.

Donovan Warren. I really, really hope he's had one of those injuries that's just not quite bad enough to knock you out of the game, and I hope he's had that most of the year. Because he hasn't made a single play, and a lot of Penn State's success was going right at him.

That coverage number. What can I say? Michigan let guys run all over the field. When they were in zone, Penn State found holes. When they were in man, Penn State ran drags.

It appears your goodwill towards the coaching staff is beginning to ebb.

Defensively, yes. I'm willing to put the crappy linebacker corps on Carr's extremely poor recruiting at the position, but the secondary has been a disaster zone with a bunch of highly-rated recruits. While the offense has tried a bunch of different things in an attempt to escape the basement, the defense has rolled out a 4-3 all year unless they're going to the 3-3-5. Said 3-3-5 has not been effective at rushing the passer and has been a complete disaster against the run, but it got rolled out on third and one last week and second and six this week, with predictable results.

I just don't get it, man. You cannot put five guys in the box on a potential running down, especially when two of them are defensive ends, two of them poor linebackers, and the other a freshman NT. And yet.

Fire somebody?

No. There's an obvious deficiency in talent on the D and whenever you switch regimes you can expect some issues. Any discussion about booting guys is Auburn-level premature.

But, yeah, my confidence level in Shafer is dipping.

Heroes?

Brandon Graham was consistently good, and Mouton's developing into a pretty decent player.

Goats?

Ezeh pulled that big negative for a reason, and pick someone in the secondary. Also, Shafer's inexplicable deployment of that 3-3-5 on Penn State's final drive of the half greatly aided that game-turning touchdown.

What does it mean for the future?

Well… I think we're going to be okay against Michigan State. Brian Hoyer is really bad and a little dinged up and their offense is a lot like Wisconsin's, against whom Michigan actually did pretty well. This is a game in which the DL will be very relevant. We'll have problems and give up points; I'm not expecting State to go nuts or anything.

As for the future: any team that can take the DL out of the game is going to put up a lot of points if they're any good. Purdue probably isn't; Northwestern and Minnesota might be, and who knows about Ohio State?

On Saturday, Michigan faced third and three and, for probably the first time in 20 or so years, called a designed quarterback run. Here it is:

Okay, empty backfield and wide splits on the defensive line. Seems like a pretty good setup, but there is one issue: this play is designed to go between the DT to the right of your screen and the DE to the same side. Without a lead blocker one of those linebackers will nail the slow-ish Threet before the marker.

To allay this, Michigan is going to try a reach block by Molk on the DT, which will allow Moosman to head downfield on the linebacker.

What's a reach block? Uh… well…

Using the left guard again, to “reach” would be to get around the defensive tackle, and use his right shoulder to pin him to the inside, so that a ball carrier can go around you to the left. Again, it is about getting the face mask in “front” or beyond the defender to get the shoulder pad in position. Seriously, line up with a friend sometime and try to reach block to your outside, you will appreciate linemen athleticism much more.

The idea is to get Molk around the defensive tackle so he can seal him, creasing the two defenders, as Moosman heads downfield to take out a linebacker. If this sounds hard, it is. I lost this in the ether, but at one point during my research for Hail To The Victors 2007 I came across one coach's description of a bunch of different blocks, ordered by difficulty. "Reach block by the center" was #1.

Real UFR diehards may remember a common bitch from the last couple years that usually went something like "Kraus attempts to block a DT lined up playside of him, but he shoots into the backfield/flows down the line to tackle/eats a baby." These were all attempted reach blocks gone bad.

(A "scoop" block, as I understand it, is basically an assisted reach block. Moosman banged the DT back and helped Molk get over, that would be a scoop.)

And all this stuff is supposed to be hard when the DT is lined up to your outside shoulder. Here the DT is lined up slightly outside of the guard(!). How is this going to work?

The snap:

You can see the line shifting to the left here, and you can see that the DT is now between the two OL. The wide splits were a pass rush gambit—tougher to block outside that way—and the first step of the DT is upfield, not down the line.

Molk makes contact and he's in decent position here given the relative momentum here, but he's still got to get his helmet across the player, then anchor as well as he can to preserve the crease between the two OL. Chris Spielman, by the way, is currently doodling on the DE, who is still in pass rush mode.

Molk is now full of win, playside of a guy who lined up a yard outside of him at the snap. Moosman is in great position to block the MLB, but doesn't have to because he's getting cut to the ground. Minor is about to block the safety-type object.

Woop! Open spaces, first and goal, and a one-yard Minor touchdown follow.

Object lessons. I picked this play out of all the various things for a variety of reasons. To wit:

I think Molk might be pretty good once he is enormous-er. I brought this up earlier in the year, but Molk was a fringe top-100 guy who was the only real OL recruit brought in after the shift to zone blocking. He got dinged later in the year for being small, but in a system like this where he's reach-blocking all day his agility is an asset. Time and again against Penn State he successful executed these blocks, springing people into the secondary. Against Notre Dame he did the same thing.

The issues are obvious, though: too many missed blocks, and too many blocks where he's just not strong enough to deal with his man. But he's a redshirt freshman; strength should come.

(This is the long way of saying I think GS was unduly harsh on Molk this week in the Run Chart; he should get more credit for these reach blocks.)

You can only make a reach block if the defense lets you. I'm not a coach or an expert or anything but over the last three years I've watched a ton of stretch plays and have come to the conclusion that if the DL steps the right way and you have been tasked with a reach block, you lose.

And the thing is, either way can be the right way. Last year Penn State's Ollie Ogbu had three TFLs and a half-dozen more plays he forced into unblocked defenders because he was shooting behind the attempted reach block. Penn State slanted their DL all day, and if they got a zone left they strung it out and if they got a zone right they came under it and did even more damage.

Diversity. The reason Michigan's run game was so successful against Penn State was because of its diversity. For much of the first half, Michigan had Penn State defenders expecting stretch and getting something else.

The results are, for the first time, encouraging. The rushing game against Penn State this year and last, sacks excised:

Some of that improvement is the decline in Penn State's defense, but raise your hand if you think the Penn State defense declined more than the Michigan offense.

Right, no takers.

How? Well, I found a three-play sequence on Michigan's first touchdown drive interesting. Michigan had been moving the ball and found itself in fourth and one. Penn State slanted into the backfield and should have had Minor(+2!) dead; Minor squirmed out and got the first. On the next two plays, Penn State went back to the slant—back to the successful gameplan from a year ago—and got cut for a total of 14 yards and a first down because Michigan ran the same play you see above and that backside veer play. Michigan had Penn State guessing in a way that Carr never did, IMO, and that's a large reason why WVU's ground game was near the national  best in YPC.

Of course, all that died in the second half, but there's only so much diversity Michigan has at this point. If they had a reliable passing game (read: Threet with elbows) or a better offensive line or some rocket quarterback they'd be able to punish Penn State's adjustments to their run game; as it was they just ran out of things to do.

10/18/2008 – Michigan 17, Penn State 46 – 2-5, 1-2 Big Ten

The reader may have noted a certain fevered quality to Friday's posting, and for good reason: I was sort of fevered. Bestruck by a head cold that wanted to kill my brain, I was in something of a fever dream until Zoltan punted it away with about two minutes left in the first half and Andre Criswell decided that it would be a good idea to pop Derrick Williams.

From there, reality reasserted itself with a thud.

This is not a "well coached team," I guess. It's hard to pick through all the detritus associated with that term—usually it means "loses too much for the accuser's taste"—and pick out a real definition, but suffice it to say well coached teams can return kickoffs past the twenty and don't pick up stupid personal fouls on downed punts. They don't they lead the country in fumbles. By a lot of metrics this not only a talent-deficient team but a discipline-deficient team as well.

And, okay, if you are concerned about that I get it. I think the longer view suggests Rodriguez can assemble a successful football team that does indeed seem "well coached," and by "suggests" I mean "makes it obvious".

There's not a whole lot more to say about unsurprising 30-point losses. We're going to see what the future holds one way or the other. I advocate patience, etc., you know the drill.

BULLETS

• No offense to a fine young man, but NICK SHERIDAN=DEATH. The decision to start him over Threet, or play him ever while Threet is physically capable of throwing the ball, will go down as the most inexplicable one of the Rodriguez era.
• Both of Threet's elbows are torn up? WTF? This is like a single player version of the broken thumb plague of 2005.
• Obviously Brandon Minor was the major buzz coming out of the game, as he ran with power two Sam McGuffie's couldn't muster. And he didn't fumble the ball. The fumbling and the offensive line and the Notre Dame game and Minor's run of just-nagging-enough injuries makes McGuffie's insertion understandable; I think he lost his job, though.
• When Threet was on the field he was impressive, and you could see that QB off-tackle/sweep thing was something they'd worked on significantly in practice but couldn't use the week before because Threet was busted up.
• In the first half when Minor was gashing them up the middle I thought to myself "we need to have something that plays off this or they're going to adapt and shut it down"; this happened. I think the difference in future years will be the ability to go to something else when (or, preferably, just before) the opposing defense catches on to the stuff you're running. You can see there's a certain monotony in the offense.
• Commenter ShockFX is going to find his annoyance at the "Minor should play more" threads be replaced by an an entirely different one genre: "why didn't Minor play more?" Projected rage level: steady.