4-3 vs 3-4 fight

I put all the UFR charting from this year into a single spreadsheet. Many Pivot Tables later there are things we can see.

4-3 versus 5-2: Fight!

The first thing I looked at was how often Michigan was in each of their usual personnel groups. The exact personnel was subject to change, but generally if they were in a 4-3 it was Michael Barrett playing the SAM, and both Ojabo and Hutchinson were on the field; if they were in a 5-2 they would have Jaylen Harrell out there as a hybrid DE/OLB instead of Ojabo, and one or two of Morris, Jenkins, and Welschof on the field.

As you might expect, defensive personnel was highly reactive to what personnel the offense was using, though not precisely. Michigan treated extra running backs (but not fullbacks) as wide receivers, so that’s how I counted 2RB sets.

Down and distance mattered too; usually if Michigan was in a nickel set versus multiple tight ends it was a passing down. But whether they broke out the 5-1, or if they used a 5-2 versus a 4-3 against multiple TE sets often depended most on what part of the season we’re talking about. Here’s a breakdown by game:

That tells a story: when they faced heavier sets, Michigan was a 5-2 team through MSU, a 4-3 team for two games, then a mix the rest of the way. In the games they used both the only pattern I thought I could see is they seemed to run with whichever was working until it didn’t.

In the Defense vs Georgia UFR I asserted that I liked the 4-3 (with Barrett as a hybrid S/LB) better than the 5-2 as a response to multi-TE personnel. With sampling error warnings abound, that bore out in the statistics:

The 5-1 worked against Wisconsin and emphatically did not against Michigan State. We discussed it at the time, but I thought that too was a tactical blunder. The idea was to clog up zone running lanes at the line of scrimmage at the risk of allowing a few bigger chunks if the runner made it through.

Think of it in battle terms: if you put 5 units at the front with one in reserve, there are fewer places they can break through, but you’re less able to react when they do so. If you put 4 units at the front and hold two in reserve, you’re less likely to stonewall them, but can be more reactive. Terrain or defensive obstacles can make a lot of these decisions for you, especially if stopping the enemy’s momentum for a moment will screw up their whole offensive. The enemy’s deployment matters too; if they’re probing the line for weaknesses you don’t want to give them any, whereas if they’re hitting one spot in force you’d like to have to agility to react to where it hits.

Going heavy at the front is a good tactic you’re facing a good stretch zone (probing for weaknesses, the run play) offense, a 5-man front can frustrate them. Heavy fronts are also effective against a team that’s guaranteed to move the ball on 3rd and 2 but can’t pass out of a 2nd and 8. The tactic worked perfectly for Wisconsin, since passing downs were death. Against MSU it backfired; State got away with an excessive amount of holding, which meant they were winning those battles up front more often than they should have been, and then there was nobody to stop Kenneth Walker III.

Michigan scrapped the five-man lines after the MSU game, in part because they realized they had two 4-3ish DEs they wanted on the field in David Ojabo and Aidan Hutchinson, but also I think because Michael Barrett was available again. Barrett was an every-down hybrid LB for Indiana, and since the rest of the schedule was spread teams Michigan barely touched the 5-2 again until the postseason. It did its job in the Big Ten CG, frustrating the Hawkeyes’ plans to stretch zone Michigan to death. But the 5-2 was beat up pretty badly by Georgia, which was able to take advantage of the Harrell-vs-Brock Bowers and 5-star OTs versus Julius Welschof mismatches.

Formation Notes: Bowl games tend to get a lot of looks because coaches use the extra time to install more of them. Georgia used a lot of multi-TE sets and varied formations with them to hunt good matchups. I stuck with numeric conventions to make it easier to follow, so for example this is Gun 13 Heavy (shotgun, 1 RB, 3 TEs, heavy formation).

And here’s the next play with the same personnel, which we’ll call “Gun 13 Empty 5w.”

I referred to this defensive setup as “4-4 Zero” because there are no safeties.

The offense is a “Gun 12 Str F Flex’ since it’s a normal 3-wide with the extra guy to the strong side (“Str”) with an "F" (not on the line of scrimmage) TE flexed out.

Finally, this is Bone:

Substitution Notes: TrueBlueinTexas provides. As in the second example above, Michigan tried to have a 5-2 unit that replaced Moore, Ojabo, and the starting DTs with Jeter-Speight-Jenkins-Harrell. It immediately got burned in a matchup problem. They also ran a lot of 4-3 with Barrett at SLB and Dax Hill on the bench.

Previously in 2021: The Story. Podcast 13.0A. Podcast 13.0B. Podcast 13.0C. 5Q5A Offense: 2021. Last year: 5Q5A Defense: 2020. Defensive End. Defensive Tackle. Linebacker. Cornerback. Safety. Special Teams.

As with the offense, we are going from saddest question towards hope.

1. Do they give up 100 to Ohio State?

Not a great matchup [Bryan Fuller]

The standard has been set: If Ryan Day’s offense can’t score 100 on Michigan’s defense this year with the kind of talent they’ve acquired, he is a failure and Ohio State must jettison all of their coaches and start over. Can the Wolverines do anything to make sure that happens?

We had an entire article in HTTV about the ways Ohio State, Alabama, and Clemson have broken the game. I could show you all the data to demonstrate that those schools’ advantages are well beyond anything even in the top-heavy history of college football. It’s certainly not fun. And the people in charge aren’t even smart enough to understand it’s a problem. Michigan could “sell its soul” to be like Ohio State and it wouldn’t change the math. Kirby Smart’s Georgia is in the running for the scuzziest program in the history of the game, recruits like bonkers in the best place to do it, and even they haven’t broken through.

But we don’t really need to overcome the systemic rot of a thoroughly broken institution. We need to win a college football game. Which is way, way more doable. Last year’s Buckeyes beat IU by a touchdown, and they were in a dogfight with Northwestern until turnover luck turned both games. Penn State played them close in 2019. The year before that Ohio State got boat-raced by Purdue, barely beat Penn State and Nebraska, and needed a guy named Piggy to miss an open receiver in the endzone to not surrender the Big Ten East title to Michigan a week before The Game. The last time they visited Ann Arbor, Michigan had the ball down 2 scores with 12 minutes to go and the blocking to make it 1 score. Also JK Dobbins dribbled the ball. College football games are dumb, and Ohio State has been riding a wave of good fortune as effectual as the bad luck that’s plagued Harbaugh. We reject this because human brains would rather shape information into nonsense than accept the existence of no sense. But luck is just luck.

And here comes my one crazy statement: I think Mike Macdonald probably gives Michigan a better chance of winning a dumb football game against Ohio State than Don Brown, or at least Macdonald’s philosophy does, because it ratchets up the degree to which the result is determined by luck. I don’t believe Michigan upgraded DCs—Brown deserved his fate but he’s still a coaching legend while Macdonald is a first-time coordinator. Don Brown’s system made the ultimate sense: I dare you to beat my players at something hard. Most college teams didn’t have the talent to do that to Michigan’s talent and that led to elite performances. But even at BC, when the talent ledger angled enough the other way, Brown’s defenses got rolled.

Offenses are at such an advantage these days (for regulatory as well as schematic reasons) that anybody’s defense can get shredded no matter the talent. The smart coaches long ago learned to shift their understanding of the game from a military perspective of winning field position to the basketball paradigm of winning possessions.

Macdonald’s philosophy—or at least the Grantham/Ravens ideas he comes from—is more of a gamble. I dare you to find where I left the weak spot…NOPE NOT THERE!

Ohio State with Justin Fields could break those traps on the regular, but Ohio State with CJ Stroud? It could work. A lot of young NFL quarterbacks threw mistakes into the amorphous fronts that the Ravens showed. And this has nothing to do with the front; the way they play zone is to risk having guys out of position by having fast defensive backs get to places they weren’t supposed to threaten by alignment.

They can probably get away with that with Dax Hill.

Chris Olave and Garrett Wilson and the other mercenaries who can’t name a non-athlete graduate of the university they’re loosely affiliated with will get theirs. They're extremely talented, well-coached, hyper-football-focused players who are better than our players. In 2019 Ohio State scored a TD on 8/11 non-garbage drives against Michigan. If you can get that down to 5/11 by putting more of the game the outcome of dice rolls, do you care that those five came on coverage busts instead of a dusted cornerback? This is how Indiana approached it as well, and with even luck they win a title. If you want a nonsensical result, ratchet up the nonsense. The worst that can happen is you still lose 98-39, which isn’t going to cut it for Ryan Day.

That’s all I’ve got.

[After THE JUMP: More dumb football.]