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That is 2,728 pounds—1.24 metric tons—in the box for those weighing at home.
On 1st and 10. MANBRAAAHHHLLL!!!

Before the Minnesota game I tweeted that I'd be perfectly content if Borges debuted a completely new package and used it to beat up on the Gophers at home a la 2011. So here I am, being content.

The unbalanced stuff I'm sure Brian will picture page and Space Coyote and Burgeoning Wolverine Star will peel it apart as well; since they know more about that stuff I'll leave it to them. What I would like to do is look at the heavy formations in the macro: how Big did Michigan actually go, how effective it was on a yards-per-play basis, and whether it matches the personnel.

By "big" I mean fewer receivers in the formation. The lower that number, the more backs and TEs, and thus the "heavier" the formation. How big?

Average Receivers in Formation:

That is big—like we should all have pronounced brow ridges and live in caves and the equipment sponsor is Mousterian big. I counted Funchess as a WR when he was in a 2-point stance; if you file him as a half tight end (you shouldn't) it gets even heavier. A lot of the three-wide was on the time-sensitive last drive of the 1st half—that you should count.

Did it work? Did it work better than the stuff Michigan has been doing until now? Did they always run to the side they unbalanced? We see after the jump.

Taylor on an island [Upchurch]

Brian forwarded me a mailbag question regarding where Michigan's defense is getting attacked through the air, i.e. are there certain coverage areas that have been particularly weak? It took me most of a day to chart every passing play; the resulting post is rather straightforward. Consider this your bye week from my logorrhea.

Data are here.

What I tracked:

1) Where the ball starts (hash or center). If the tackles lined up inside the hash it was "center"

2) Which zone it was thrown to, on a telephone keypad grid. 1, 4, and 7 are around the numbers to the sideline; 2, 5, and 8 are the area around the opposite hash to the wide side only, and 3, 6, and 9 are down the middle.

If a ball was on the line I always erred to the zone closest to the quarterback. This makes sense if you imagine a player covering Zone 6 will be responsible for carrying a player through that zone, and would be in better position to defend that pass than a guy over him.

3) Which side (strong or weak) of the defense. I noted "Strong" as wherever the SAM lined up in 4-3 sets and where Countess lined up in nickel sets. Once or twice this conflicted with the offense but it's better this way for identifying which players are being targeted.

Weakside/boundary players, usually: R.Taylor, Wilson, Ross/Bolden, Beyer (as WDE) on nickel, Clark on 4-3.

Strongside/field players, usually: Countess, C.Gordon, Beyer (as SAM) on 4-3, Clark on nickel, T.Gordon, Morgan/Bolden, Stribling/Hollowell/Lewis/Avery.

Sacks, throwaways, scrambles, and other such events that took the emphasis on coverage were excised. I couldn't reward those things which occurred because coverage was good enough to make them happen so keep that in mind as you read.

Chart?

Jump.

Awww.

hi bennie! /Upchurch

It's an annual rite of fan dorkiness each year to try to be the first to guess which numbers the incoming freshmen will be given by obsessively google stalking them. Sometimes I have some inside knowledge from a recruit who was promised his digit, or tweeted his preferences or something. Here's how I did last year:

Four out of 22 ain't…well yes it is. It was bad. This article is useless. Let's continue it anyway; I swear to do better.

Getting to know you. Each coach has his own tendencies with this so we'll get better at it in time. With Hoke, he seems to like having consecutive numbers in the same position group, perhaps for mentoring purposes because they sit next to each other in the locker room. It's far from a rule, but it's a trend. Carr rarely let a player share a specialist's digit, but Hoke doesn't seem to have a problem with it, for example Wormley and Hagerup share a number, and walk-on tight end Alex Mitropoulus-Rundus (I'm gonna just start calling him "Alex M-R") has the same digit as backup punter Kenny Allen. Rich Rodriguez was far more apt to share numbers, and the single digits were nearly always doubled up; Hoke has said in the past that he doesn't like doing that, and the practice has been limited—as of spring just 5, 12 and 34 had scholarship recruits in both numbers, adding 54 and 56 to those double-occupied by players on the two-deep.

The roster lies. The official MGoBlue.com roster still doesn't have DeAnthony Hardison, that nifty RB you saw in the Spring Game. He's #18. Also a practice insider told me Anthony Capatina is playing slot receiver, not "DB" as he's listed on the depth chart. Also weirdly missing from that roster is #79 right tackle Dan Gibbs (a Seaholm Mape!!!), a 2012 preferred walk-on whose twitter profile pic is him riding an oliphant:

@DJBunyan

Legends/Special #s: 1 because Braylon's scholarship killed the fun, unless Gallon gets it. It won't come as much of a surprise to you that 2 will probably be entering the Legends program this season. There will also be some push for 16, and I doubt it'll be assigned to an offensive player immediately. 11 for the Wisterts, 21 for Desmond, and 87 for Ron Kramer are currently open; it is likely they'll be assigned to veterans whose digits might then be made available if it happens before the season. Bennie's 47 and Jerry's 48 remain occupied by current players and there's no way a second guy will get them. And I've been told they're still working on the Harmon family with 98. Anyway they won't go to freshmen.

Already worn on both sides: 5 (Courtney Avery and Justice Hayes), 6 (Raymon Taylor and Brian Cleary), 12 (Gardner and Allen Gant), 13 (Terry Richardson and Alex Swieca), 15 (James Ross and Shaun Austin), 34 (Jeremy Clark and Brendan Gibbons), 43 (Chris Wormley and Will Hagerup), 54 (Richard Ash and Jareth Glanda), 56 (Ondre Pipkins and Joey Burzynski), 69 (Willie Henry and Erik Gunderson), and 95 (Anthony Capatina and Michael Jocz).

Available on offense only: 4, 7, 14, 18, 22, 24, 25, 30, 33, 35, 40, 50, 52, 53, 55, 57, 59, 66, 76, 92, 96, 97, 99

Available on defense only: 3, 8, 9, 10, 17, 19, 26, 27, 28, 29, 38, 39, 42, 45, 46, 49, 51, 58, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 70, 71, 72, 75, 77, 78, 82, 84, 85, 86, 88, 94

Walk-ons with soft claims: Every year there's a Jon Keizer on the roster who thinks his number is safe, then some top running back recruit in the country (right: from Scout) runs him over with star power (dadada, didda-da diddadidda…). Scout teamers without scholarships often have their numbers taken, for example Charlie Zeller was 19 on the 2012 spring roster and Paul Gyarmati was sitting on 99, but Devin Funchess and Matt Godin nabbed those digits last fall. This year they are 15 (Shaun Austin—note that Ross has it on D), 18 (DeAnthony Hardison—note that Countess has it on D), 27 (Jon Keizer), 36 (AJ Pearson—note that Kerridge has it on O), 42 (Dylan Esterline), 46 (Clark Grace), 49 (Brad Anlauf), 51 (Bobby Henderson), 59 (Mark Lawson), 63 (Ben Pliska), 66 (Dan Liesman), 70 (Kris Mateus), 79 (Dan Gibbs), (91 (Alex M-R, though Kenny Allen wears it too), and 95 (Anthony Capatina and Mike Jocz). The other walk-ons I didn't mention (Dever, Cleary, Glanda, Burzynski, Reynolds, Allen, Gunderson, Jocz and the Glasgows) are either on the two-deep already or in the mix.

Currently unused: 20, 23, 31, 32, 37, 41, 44, 64, 68, 73, 74, 80, 81, 83, 89, 90, 93, π

You just said Pi. We're Michigan fergodsakes. All the constants—φ, ζ(3), α and δ, Euler's e, γ, λ, K, r, and Ω—ought to be fair game, and if someone takes √-1 and uses the nickname "Impossible" he will be my favorite for ever and ever.

EVERYBODY LET'S ALL BE #7!!!

Go ahead and make your guesses. We'll have our answers in a few weeks.

* UPDATE: After I posted this Magnus alerted me to his post of numbers that have already been revealed. I had some good guesses. I crossed out my comments if the guess was wrong.

Yay recruits! I have no idea who these people are! /Upchurch

It's ours again, the title they don't give you for having the best recruiting class three months before the previous season begins. Yes, other classes are going to finish strong once a lot of five-stars make their decisions, you know, eight months from now. But like Notre Dame's September Heismans and OSU's November national champs, being in the top spot is better than not being there.

You know those Big Ten recruiting roundups Ace does? EGD did the same for our non-conference opponents in the years to come. Hello again Notre Dame…

He's keeping it updated. Make it a weekly, guy with the Hail to the Thief logo. No Virginia Tech because even if the 2014 guys redshirt they won't be around for 2020. Good to see Bielema is still recruiting the Wisconsin way despite the move to the SEC.

Blueheron took a look at recruiting over the back end, in how many NFL draft picks Michigan contributed over X period. This was always going to be the case once we went to a spread offense but yeah 2009-'13 wasn't our best period. Relatedly Chris Brown of Smart Football asked for crowd-sourced data on conference contribution to NFL rosters and whether there's a difference for guys in the league less than 5 years. I responded with a chart (click it for full size)…

…and put the Excel doc in the public realm for anyone whose idea of a relaxing Memorial Day weekend is pivot tables. Meantime I saved the Big Ten comparison just for you:

So we've got more old dudes (even with Hutchinson and Backus retiring) left from the middle Carr years, but since Rich Rod we've had a Sparty-like contribution. I expect this will change with the NFL types now working their way up the roster, and in five years you'll look at this chart and see Michigan next to OSU (with maybe a residually small yellow portion). Really, Michigan is the difference between the B1G being just as much an NFL factory as the SEC, and being something between that and the Pac12.

In other people who probably love Pivot Tables, The Mathlete looked into the recruiting of Maryland and Rutgers to see where they get their players and if getting into those markets might help Michigan and co., kinda like how we went into Pennsylvania in the '90s and snatched up Rob Swett, Damon Denson, Will Peterson, Dave Armstrong, Marlin Jackson*, Scott McClintock, Tim Massaqoui, Steve Breaston, Ryan Mundy, Chad Henne, Marques Slocum, and Marques Slocum's pet Fuck Lion.

*[Marlin could count for Ohio, since Sharon is just the Pennsylvania suburb of Youngstown, but then PSU still felt that one sharply. Speaking of PSU fans, if you know any tell them to get the Penn State version of HTTV (3 days left on the kickstarter).]

Getting Nebraska didn't come with the same windfall, rather the Huskers and their Ohioan of a coach are probably damaging Michigan State and Iowa and Illinois rather than opening up new territory. On the other hand D.C. and environs have a lot of talent which, unlike Nebraska, concentrates in a certain geographic area. Nudging Virginia Tech out of there would be nice. As a follow-up maizeonblueaction looked at how the SEC has fared in the Midlands since adding Texas and Missouri. Answer: very small uptick, but I disagree that you can tell from 2012 numbers since those kids were mostly at the "down to five schools" phase when A&M was announced. If there's an effect, it's probably the opportunity to play close to home sometimes, and to be on TV at home, which means kids in the Dallas region aren't going to go to Mississippi now because they'll get to travel to A&M, but Houston kids might.

And finally LSAClassof2000 downloaded the Rivals database and WENT. TO. TOWN. on charts of average star rating for B1G teams and comparisons to Michigan. I take two:

Arrested development. Speaking of recruits who didn't necessary pan out as well as we thought, hey did you see this year's hockey team? MGoBlueline did a comparison of the stats between the beloved 2011-'12 squad and the begrudged 2012-'13 guys. There's a mass exodus of defensemen from here and, guh, the streak. By the way his inspiration was Ron Utah's thing back in January that I know you didn't click on in January because I track those links – his does the same thing with the last two football teams.

Etc. There's a tier-based schedule for basketball the Big Ten will never adopt. Expansion probably stops here for the time being. Wallpaper by jonvalk.

And since the board's been pretty calm in these OT days, a quick…

Best of the Board

COMPANY CHEATS, GOOD GUY CHICKENS OUT, MUST BE TRESSEL-RELATED

yUP. mGrowOld had that dinner with Tressel he won for his company winning an award and him being a good employee who never posts pictures of his hot wife on the internet or spends time during the work day on message boards. But they pulled the bait 'n switch at the last minute and stuck the big sponsors instead of the promised winners at the keynote's table. GrowOld also chickened out about asking Tressel whether he was embarrassed, like at all, AND chickened out about the tie. Still a good read.

LIKE LITTLE YOU PEOPLE

MGoParents saw an opening when we didn't moderate an "OT: I Just had TWINS!" post and made an MGobaby thread, which became an all your kids thread. All the Aunt points in the world to julesh for crocheting a winged helmet for her brother's kid—you can tell your brother his laziness in not instantly getting a photo of the kid in the hat when duty called has cost his son a chance to be seen by thousands of strangers on the internet. Victor of the thread would still have gone to ems78, who produced* this:

Three weeks old and already has the song down.

* [Double entendre!]

ETC. Urban's secret: telling recruits he likes big butts, and he cannot lie—okay the other brothers are calling on the lying thing and say they deny—completely and utterly deny. And in the thread about the Penn State thing that SI was trying to make a thing but really wasn't a thing at all, this appeared and I wow'ed:

Origin? Previous thread? Did I miss a photoshop thread somewhere of Branch going on a destructive rampage of all sorts of famous photography? SIAP, but can we have one?

Your Moment of Zen:

Don't. Step. On. Our. Banner.

Site Notice: This Thursday we're planning a basketballgasm liveblog, culminating in the Michigan-South Dakota State game. Probably getting started with the afternoon games, so you've got from now until then to get your brackets filled out and get your work done before productivity goes to Bolivia. Viva March!

My new tradition. I'm not really the basketball guy around here, however I do seem to perform really well when it comes to March Madness brackets, getting back more than my pay-in every year since 2000 (won twice). The first six years of that was luck—since then I've just been working really hard at it so I don't lose the streak.

For those filling out their brackets today here's some helpful stuff. My favorite tool for clearing the biases is the Wall Street Journal's blind comparison. Also never miss the annual GARGANTUBRACKET by Czabe.com, the blog Bracket Science and the gloriously cheap calculator at Poologic, which lets you program how many upsets you want and find inefficiencies to exploit. Use SCIENCE! to take money from your friends and co-workers!

The last tool is my own (<<<<<grab it here>>>>>). It turns KenPom's ratings into a confidence %, and then automatically pulls up which venue the game will be at and whether there's any injuries you need to know about for either team. Who likes drop-down menus?

What I do is normalize the closest 16-1 matchup (Kansas vs. WKU at 22.6% difference in KenPom's "Pyth") as 100% for the 1 seed to win, and use the KenPom ratings to percentile everyone else's games into a confidence number. Then I roll through anything under 70% and decide if my knowledge of those teams might justify taking the under.

Here's the first round, where "Confidence" is a measure of how likely the top seed might be to win. The venue is listed so you can identify things like don't take Boise over K-State in KC, or how 12-seed Cal (a team worse than Virginia, Iowa, Denver, Baylor, Kentucky, Stanford, UConn, Maryland, and Sothern Miss according to Kenpom) is basically playing at home in San Jose.

[UPDATE: I had some errors in the below chart. Now fixed. The tool was fine but I've added an option to set your own chaos factor.]

General tips:

If you're in a big pool, run multiple brackets, each with carefully selected upsets. There's no such thing as an NCAA tournament without lots of big upsets and at least one surprising run. The 1 seeds all made it to the Final Four just once. If you submit one milksop bracket you're up against every other milksop bracket and will get beat by the one crazy guy who had LSU going to the Elite 8 or something. Hitting on a carefully selected upset that rearranges a bracket and lets you ride a different high seed to the Final Four is the most typical route to a win.

If you're in a small pool, play conservative. One or two points won't usually make a difference in a small pool, but the likelihood of something crazy like that one guy's wife who picks based on the cuteness factor of mascots winning is cut down so you don't need to take risks to get ahead.

Pick the upsets the most carefully. I love picking 6-11 upsets because if you get it wrong they're bound to get wiped out by the 3 anyway. If you roll the dice on a 3-seed or lower losing early though, you'll feel like an idiot as the rest of your pool collects the easy points. A tournament without upsets never happens, but neither does a tournament with all the upsets. You can totally undo a great pick with a terrible one elsewhere.

Get value for your upsets. Know who's in your pool and the inefficiencies. Fans will generally take their favorite team to go two rounds later than they really belong and conference teams to go a round further. This is an inefficiency.

Be really really lucky. This is really the only rule.

Nice try, Jean de Valk, making the blue of your background a greenish gray, as if we wouldn't recognize le drapeau tricolore as anything but a call to arms against the Bourbons of college football.

Didn't realize the French national anthem was a bloody minded board rant did you?

This plus a wallpaper about the cheat-sheet gloves are available in the thread. Allons enfants de la Michigan, le jour de gloire est arrivé!

Every Time Michigan Loses, George Lucas Writes a Love Scene. The annual if:then prediction thread by L'oeil du tigre gives six different scenarios for the 2012 season rated from Empire to Jar Jar. I'm in agreement on the order of quality, but not that an 8-4 season, even with a fifth loss to MSU, could be as painful as Attack of the Clones. Go with me here. I could see 700, maybe even 800 more Michigan games in my lifetime, yet in all of human history we've had six Star Wars movies. And to wait for two decades of hype to get that… Argh. Honestly, if I was told I had a chance to go back and fix Star Wars Episode I or change the outcome of Football Armageddon '06, I don't know man…

…but I co-sign SO HARD on this, especially Anakin being a teen and a Vader-Padme-Obi Wan love triangle. And Mace Windu…I digress.

What Shall We Do With Fullbacks? A short but potent message by Renault en Ben: We should all start thinking about Hopkins and Houma and future fullbacks recruited by this staff as less like Kevin Dudley and more like Aaron Shea because Al Borges is a West Coast guy and West Coast offenses use their fullbacks as passing options in the flat. Sometimes they can run block too. Short-term I think Hopkins doesn't have the hands or the hop to be a scary passing threat like some TE-ish fullbacks, however he does have a running back's rushing skillz, so they'll use those. As for the future: eventually we'll have a U-Back to be that. Borges and Hoke say they like a low-altitude kind of player who can pop a guy low and get North-South quickly on the FB dive. Watch Houma's highlights—the second half is almost entirely dive runs. That's not necessarily a Dudley, but it's more LeRoy Hoard than Aaron Shea. Hoard was 5'11, built like a tank, and accelerated like a 1970 Boss 302 Mustang V8.

The Defenses are Back. The series that won Monsieur Couer-Vingt a DotW (plus the inaugural "hero" points) continued this week with the Returning Defense of 2012 Opponents part the first and second. He used blanket stats, which I think makes bad defenses look like they're returning more (Purdue & Minnesota) because it doesn't check for how many plays faced. Helpful user euh-tay-ah mille-vingt-deux notes Phil Steele does a similar analysis.

There was also a nice little diary by the same on Bama, ND, and Ohio State, and recent updates on those teams. I'd like something like this—better formatted—to continue throughout the season. You know, like a weekly around the opponents news thing to round up what their blogs are saying about them. Again, monsiuer couerVingt is your Diarist of the Week.

Elsewheres in analysis  LSA class de deux-mille is goofing around with a spreadsheet of Big Ten player weights and heights. Part two is by position and I'm just linking to that one because the first doesn't break it up by contributors and thus will just call whichever team with the most lineman walk-ons the biggest.

Where Legends' Jockstraps Lie.

Thanks to phjhu89 (I can't translate that!). That's locker #21 in wood panels and there's a close-up of it and more in the diary (bumped from a thread). The special locker makes it all but certain they're not giving Legends jerseys to young players but using them to reward old ones. I'm with the people against this, but I'm sure it will look less weird when 11 and 48 etc. are all teaked out as well and if it's good for recruiting…

Preseason Polls Have Been Meaningless Since the Time of Louis VII. In 1149, the Associated Scribes submitted a poll claiming the Glorious Franks* would sweep the next season's European battles. Then a coalition of kings released their own poll claiming that no, it was the Holy Notre Dame Empire that would prevail by winterfell. So began pre-season polls. Actually they go back to 1950 and usually rate Michigan too high. Thou hast perform'd well in gathering us this parchment good Sir Dévot du Loup Glouton.

Etc. The Twin City socks mentioned in Three &Out are comfy, but to be honest they're less comfortable than my ski socks. Anyway I don't think the socks in the Northwestern photo are the TCs, but horray to Section Une for finding M's on socks of M history. And in things less important than socks: two meta articles on an MGOpoints system that isn't used anymore, because there is no such thing as data that our readers won't put in a spreadsheet.

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* Yes "Franks." Louis's son Phil was the one who started calling it France.

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Best of the Board

AARON SHEA PLUS ALL THE POINTS. UMdad wanted to find video of this one play where Aaron Shea blocked three guys at once…you know, that one:

"… But that's my job, to go out there and block a linebacker, or, you know, all of them."

The hero of the day is helpful reader Carcajous, who found not just the Daily excerpt above but the video too. I highly recommend poking around in the video to relive the setup before the triple-block run and Clarence Williams at his Clarence Williamsiest. I don't recommend poking around in that issue of the Daily because I was 18 and had only recently discovered the long dash.

BETTER NOT TO SHOW THE OPPONENTS

That day once a year when your season tickets come, and you get really excited and put them out on the kitchen table to stare at them until you realize the last four are the only ones you really give a damn about. Sigh, even years.

UNOFFICIAL OFFICIAL TAILGATE MIX. Mine has a lot of the band plus the UM Hospital's cool version and Across 110th street (the Michigan Replay song). I say mix more of those in.

HELLO: MICHAEL FERNS!! HELLO: MICHAEL FERNS!! HELLO: MICHAEL FERNS!! HELLO! Before he (I'm guessing accidentally) somehow turned his account into a function that auto-posted Hello: Michael Ferns posts to the board every few minutes, user kaykay put together a "Projected Depth Chart for 2015" thing every fan base puts together in the depths of the offseason when every incoming freshman and recruit is going to reach all of their potential. I rescued the thread from that smoldering account to save my response, a Projected Depth Chart for 2012, as we thought it would be in 2009.

ETC. Lacrosse rules seem to favor more offense and less standing around, which as a casual fan who knows nothing about the sport I say thee yea.

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Your Moment of Zen: