armageddon

Ohio State defense
Yes, in the face. [Bryan Fuller]

Previously: The Offense

Resources: My charting, OSU game notes, OSU roster, Bill C profile, CFBstats, 11W Snap Tracker

To be a college football fan in the Midwest in 2018 means moonlighting as Urban Meyer's sideline psychologist. The cameras are all too happy to oblige us, helpfully cutting to our patient's emotive state after every important event, capturing our client exhibiting all manner of worrying behaviors. He squats. He runs his hands through his hair. He paces. Squats again. Squeezes his face. Buries it in his hands. You have to wonder.

Since I happen to be married to an actual Psychologist I showed her the tape I've been analyzing for weeks, and asked the thing we've all been thinking since Brett McMurphy slimed through a noxious fissure named Zach Smith and revealed what's beneath the program that has owned our league since 2012: Does Urban Meyer look like he's losing it?

I'll spare you the professional details but the gist of her diagnosis was 1) Except in literally the most extreme case of megalomania with narcissistic personality disorder ever recorded, it's impossible to make a clinical diagnosis by watching a person on television, and 2) That's exactly what I look like when I watch Michigan.

Man Watches Sports is a controlled mental disorder. Our fake association with the outcome of a meaningless competitive event decided by randomness and an unequal system of advantages does in fact serve a few purposes. It's a way to belong, and a way to feel unmitigated success in a complex world where the payoffs of victory are abstract and delayed. The losing is good for a different reason: It is a way to break from the constraints of our rational lives and practice being in a state of distress. Your human brain is not wired to believe, on any given Friday, that today is the day you'll lose your livelihood, lose your dog, lose your dad, or find out your best friend at work has to retire at 30 from a disease that the social net doesn't even believe is real. The preparation you put in in practice will show on the field when it's your turn.

That wiring is also the reason that extremely lucky humans tend to mistake felicity for the natural way of things, and pout like spoiled children when they get a small taste of life for everyone else. Ohio State in the Age of Meyer has had it too good. The first time Urban coached The Game the elite athletes he inherited carried pharisaical Tressel off the field. He won a national championship two years later with the all-NFL defense Tressel left him, and a third string quarterback who meritocratically ought to have been starting over the other two. USC got caught lying about the same emolument schemes at the same time, and they're still in Clay Helton Hell to this day.

Urban's record in The Game is both a perfect 6-0, and extremely lucky not to be 2-4, despite a vastly superior team in all but one contest. Last year he again got ham blasted in every aspect of coaching except the recruitment of third string quarterbacks. It's no wonder that a man so favored by fortune should think he could tell bald-faced lies about the garbage assistant he covered for for years, then squeal at the unfairness of it all when the failed institution he so thoroughly corrupted could only get his fireable offense reduced to a week's vacation and three days off from televised therapy.

It's also the reason that Ohio State fans—including Meyer—are doing so much Man Watches Sports this year. Their offense, though schematically closer to the modern NFL than the college game Urban helped shape, is just as lethal as ever. This bad new feeling that's got Buckeyes pacing their living rooms and sidelines is all about having to work through what the common man's defense feels like. It's not a disaster like, say, Michigan's offense last year. Ohio State is 52nd in scoring defense, and 38th in S&P+, in a word: average. They've got a hole at boundary safety, and not quite enough first-class mercenaries trained up to cover for it.

But they're also already a lock to finish at least a game-and-a-half over their expected win total by coming out ahead in two coinflip games and two more dice rolls where they had to get a three or higher. One more catchable throw by a backup QB last week and Michigan's already the Champions of the East while Ohio State fans are left to grumble that the receiver was only open because an offensive lineman blatantly blocked his coverage. Every other sports fan outside of Alabama knows exactly what that's like; an Ohio State student today believes misfortune is having to spend a year with Luke Fickell in charge. Roll a five or a six tomorrow and the super-privileged will get to parade around in their gold pants yet again.

Probabilities, however, cannot account for individual mental states, nor the result of long-developing processes when the payoff has been artificially delayed. Judging by the last three years, Harbaugh's best offensive gameplan in 2018 will be tomorrow's, and the entire arc of his program has been toward preparing this year's charges to play the best game of their careers. That's no guarantee of a win—Michigan remains one snap away from another third-string quarterback, Runyan and JBB/Stueber get another elite edge test, and the interior of Warinner's reclamation project hasn't faced a pair of DTs of this caliber since their 2017 Orange Bowl practices.

I'm terrified, as any sane Michigan fan ought to be given the circumstances. But given what I've seen of Ohio State's defense on film, rationally, I think it's time that the Buckeyes to get some practice for life's real disasters.

The Film: Indiana because I wasn't going to waste last week actually watching Indiana, and Maryland because it's the most recent game against the most recent personnel, and because Maryland's offense is built around a running quarterback in an advanced, condensed, whipsaw scheme that mercilessly tests your assignments, and has to live with an offensive line of basically five guards. I also watched the rest of their games this year in the course of being a Big Ten football person.

The diagram:

image

PDF Version, full-size version (or click on the image).

The Charting:

image

[the breakdown after THE JUMP]

tv

The Question:

Brian: How will you sign off when the world ends (Deadspin for the idea)? You get one Michigan thing and one off-topic thing. Go.

The Answers:

Ace: For Michigan, it can only be this...

...because we must be reminded that at its finest, mankind could do the seemingly impossible, like jumping 15 feet in the air, spearing a ball with one hand, and stabbing a foot inside the playing area said ball was specifically intended to exit.

For off-topic, it can only be this...

...because we must also be reminded that mankind was a hilariously failed experiment. We stuck a real, almost certainly woefully underpaid human being into inflatable dinosaur costume with a comically oversized head on rollerblades and expected it to turn out not like that, and for that we probably deserve whatever horrible fate awaits us. Until then, let's laugh uproariously at that tail.

[After the jump: various responses to the apocalypse.]

10/11/2008 – Michigan 10, Toledo 13 – 2-4, 1-1 Big Ten

Civil War Battle

Not to turn this column into a running diary about Douchebags of Michigan Stadium, but after Kicking Competency Lopata went a long way towards being just KC again I attempted to bolt from the stadium as fast as possible. I got caught in the inevitable traffic jam a dozen or so rows up from my seats. A couple rows above me, a middle-aged man stood on a bench and booed and booed.

He was angry. I was angry.

I stooped to pick up whatever flingable bit of detritus I could find, seized upon an empty water bottle, and chucked it at the booer. I missed,* lightly damaging an older man a row behind him. But I did get his attention. And the old guy looked like he was on The Other Side, so eff him.

At this point a shouting match ensued. Shouting matches are never like they are on TV—laced with penetrating logical deductions that leave the yelled-at victim incapable of response—so I mostly just told him to shut up like 10 times consecutively.

At some point he actually said "if this bothers you that much there must be something wrong with you," at which point my irony sensors exploded. It was sort of like this minus the laughter:

He did shut up, though, or at least direct his anger somewhere other than the field.

------------------

Anywhere large groups of Michigan fans interact has fallen into civil war, with people like this on one side…

Listen, I just wanted to vent.  I have supported this team this year. 

I supported them when Utah won, I supported them when Illinois blew us out of the frickin stadium.

This, I cannot support.  I am absolutely disgusted with this.

In my opinion, Calvin Mcgee, Rich Rodriguez, and even Mike Barwis, yup, that's right, Mike Barwis, can go back to West Virginia where they came from.

…and bottle-chucking hippies on the other. That email hit my inbox yesterday around noon; I got a few others like that. You can check the increasingly annoying comments here, where virtually every thread descends into a flamewar within five posts.

And I don't get it. If you read this blog and think I will be at all sympathetic to the idea we should get rid of our extremely successful coach after one year (and hire who? and recruit who?) you have reading comprehension issues. If you use the words "unacceptable"—not actually in this email but man have I see that particular word everywhere in the past few days—and "disgusted" because Michigan's confused, young, and physically inadequate offense can't cobble together drives no matter who they go up against, do you realize that the core community of this blog, including the author, kind of loathes you? I am not on your side.

Sports suck sometimes, especially when you care so much about something you control not at all. I assure you that every Michigan fan was angry on Saturday, and every one had second thoughts about this New Era thing. Some of them chose to swallow that anger, and some chose to give it to someone else. What's the adult thing to do? What would those people in hats have done in 1935?

They would have sucked it up. So suck it up, you pansies. It hurts. Act like a man about it.**

Go do something else. This makes you mad. People say Hinterland is pretty good and it's only twenty bucks. Go play that. Go ride a bike. Or hike into the woods and look at the chipmunk-bears. Build 60-foot sculptures out of balsa wood and your shattered hopes. Just get off the goddamn internet.

Come back in fits and spurts and keep whatever connection you want to have with the program but don't hit that post button when the vein on your forehead is sticking out. It's not that important.

And what does "unacceptable" even mean, anyway? Okay, you do not accept the Toledo loss. And now…? You will inform the internet of this? I see. Congratulations. Go away.

*(Yes, I threw the bottle at Tacopants. If I was one of those guys calling for Threet's execution this would be the height of irony.)

**(Women, in my experience, do not have these issues.)

BULLETS:

  • There are also two camps about the defense: 1) they only gave up 6 points (really nine if you count the chip-shot FG Toledo missed) and that should obviously be good enough to beat Toledo. 2) That one guy caught 20 balls and they had something like 350 yards of offense. I lean towards two; the only reason Toledo didn't score more was Zoltan's munificence and some of their own incompetence. Though they figured out how to defend some of the play action rollout stuff late, it shouldn't take 5.5 games to come up with a response to the quarterback exiting the pocket. Too many opposing teams have been able to remove Michigan's defensive line from the game by leaving in blockers or hitting short passes or rolling the pocket, and Michigan's insistence on leaving in a thousand crappy linebackers against spread formations is maddening.

    Scott Shafer was supposed to be an aggressive man-to-man guy, but Michigan this year has seen a ton of zone and a ton of three-man rushes. WTF?
  • Also, on a late third and one Michigan had a three-man line in the game. Toledo ran and made it easily. WTF?
  • The playcalling made a lot more sense once Threet's injury was revealed. Also Threet's horrible first few passes, though the endzone pick six wasn't inaccurate. If Nick Sheridan was in for reasons other than "starter incapacitated" even my enforced patience was going to be tried.
  • No, this offense would not be any better if it was lining up under center every play and running isos. Banish this from your mind. When you have freshmen at quarterback and most of the skill positions and a line with something like 6 even quasi-reasonable options and the lone senior on the two-deep is the third-string tight end, you are going to be awful no matter what offensive philosophy you adopt. There are like two and a half good players on offense.

    And what would that buy Michigan? A Motor City Bowl invite? I'd like to keep the bowl streak—not going to happen—but if the choice is between a crappy December bowl and some increased chance Michigan is great in 2010, I'll take the latter.
  • I think that "pre-hab" stuff is well debunked.
  • Cissoko seemed to do well, though it was tough to tell with all the zone.
  • Zoltan!