blake o'neill

Previously in this series covering the 2010s: Favorite Blocks, QB-RB-WR, TE-FB-OL, Defensive Line, Linebacker, Secondary, Worst Calls.

We were in the midst of assembling our list of best and worst plays from the last decade of Michigan football when someone suggested that a particular incident wasn't really bad or good, but was spectacularly dumb. Someone suggested a list of smartest and dumbest plays of the decade.

It will not shock the reader that assembling the list of the most stupefying things was far easier than best, worst, or smartest. Our top ten has 11 plays in it because we remembered something halfway through. It was that kind of decade. A stupid, stupid, stupid decade.

11. Any Play Against A Service Academy, Let's Pick This One

2019 ARMY

This was an RPS -2 play that set up a touchdown for Army but it's the vibe, man. The vibe.

Michigan did this three times! They signed up to play a bunch of maniacal option fanatics three times over the past decade so they could do a bunch of military frippery pre-game. I hope those dudes parachuting into the stadium was worth three hours of bowel-clenching terror, because that's what every one of these games was.

Last year's Army game noses ahead of the two Air Force outings because it was significantly more terrifying, a game that went to overtime even with the aid of Don Brown's "MOVE" false start. Also this was the year after Army took Oklahoma—Kyler Murray Oklahoma!—to overtime, and happened mere weeks before Michigan cancelled a home and home series against UCLA.

The Black Knights had embraced the tao of option fully by going for it on any plausible fourth down. This happened four times in regulation, each of them another twist of the knife. Michigan spent the game running basic inside zone and never running the split zone play their QB ground game was built on. Michigan scored 14 points in regulation; a few weeks later Tulane would put up 42 on Army.

Every single second this was happening every Michigan fan was thinking "why are we doing this again?"

-Brian

[After THE JUMP: a journey into the heart of dorfness]

RIP Ufer. Via Dr. Sap, rembrances of Bob Ufer on Michigan replay, 1981:

Also Harbaugh on Ufer:

"When there was an away game, we'd just gather around the radio and listen to it. Roll around, jump around on the furniture," Harbaugh recalled Monday during his radio show. "And I had a record, too. I had a Bob Ufer record, a vinyl record. John, my brother, had a stereo and I would listen to that almost every night before I went to bed.

"His calls of the game were just so awesome."

Well, yeah. PFF on Jourdan Lewis:

Jourdan Lewis owns the top PFF cornerback grade at +15.9. Opposing quarterbacks have posted a quarterback rating of 36.1 when targeting Lewis. In addition, Lewis has allowed only 18 receptions on 51 targets and leads the nation in passes defensed with twelve (the second place CB has eight). Lewis passed a major test in this last week’s epic game against Connor Cook (+26.1) and the CFF fifth ranked passing offense, Michigan State Spartans (+47.5). Lewis was also just named as a finalist for the 2015 Jim Thorpe award which goes to the top defensive back in the county.

They also have a list of the best-performing wide receivers on their college home page; Lewis's foe in the epic one-on-one battle last Saturday is at the top of the list. MSU is an interesting combination of very good players and very bad ones.

Minnesota incoming. Jerry Kill was just forced to retire, of course, and now Gopher fans are like… uh… what now?

The good news: Tracy Claeys, the new interim head coach, and the coaching staff have been through this before -- sort of. Back in 2013 when Kill stepped aside midseason to deal with his health, Claeys took over as interim head coach and led the Gophers to four straight Big Ten wins. This situation is a bit different, as Claeys is no longer keeping the ship afloat until Kill returns -- Kill is not coming back. So the good news is that I don't expect Claeys to be in over his head. This staff has been together too long to fall apart now, and they're well versed in how to handle adversity.

The bad news: This final stretch of games is brutal. Injuries have ravaged the depth chart. You've got a roster of players who've now lost their head coach. The future of the coaching staff is uncertain. The cloud of a Title IX investigation and the search for an athletic director hang over the university. In what has been a disappointing season, this could be the straw that breaks the camel's back. It is possible that the Gophers will play inspired football the rest of the season to honor their former head coach and pull off enough wins to become bowl eligible. But it is also possible that the Gophers' misfortunes continue with a streak of five more losses to end the season.

Unless Minnesota seriously outperforms expectations they will be facing a choice between promoting an interim on a team that didn't do so hot and trying to find a coach in one of the most competitive hiring markets in the history of college football without an athletic director. Hopefully they've got a Jim Hackett hanging around; more likely what that means is that Claeys is going to get the job even if that doesn't end up seeming like the best idea.

Mike Leach FTW. Leach on time of possession:

One stat a number of coaches have railed against for years is time of possession. Some still point to it, but many don’t anymore. With the rise in tempos, it becomes irrelevant.

“The biggest waste of time is time of possession,” Leach said. “What’s interesting to me is that was the national obsession for decades. Now, it’s viewed more of a waste of time. It probably took 50 years for that to happen.”

It's not quite dead yet. Leach also rails against the NCAA applying sacks against rushing attempts. Preach, Mike Leach. Preach and beat Stanford this weekend to throw the Pac-12 into complete chaos.

The new guy. The news has started using Tony Paul as their everything beat writer—equestrian is coming right up—and part of his gig led him to track down people who know recent 2017 basketball commit Jordan Poole:

“Yeah! If you have a coach who is just like, ‘If you’re open, shoot it,’ why not?” Poole said. “If the coach is telling me to shoot, he does not have to tell me twice.

“That’s what really caught my attention as a player.”

It's a fit.

Here is an 80 yard punt by Blake O'Neill. I clipped this for UFR and then forgot about it and frankly I'm just putting it here so that for next year's season preview when I go all rapture mode on John Baxter I can find it:

This has been "Brian puts something on the internet so he can Google it later." You're welcome.

Etc.: ESPN has comments? Pete Carroll is promoting a rugby-style tackle for all levels of football. Interesting adaptation. DJ Wilson speaks. Jarrod Wilson, pleasantly boring. Derrick Walton back. The Bentley treasure trove opens.

It was inevitable in the aftermath of the Michigan State game: websites looking for #content tell their unpaid intern to type in Blake O'Neill's twitter handle and report back with all the bad things they find there. Copy and paste and you have #viral #content for your crapsite.

That's right! It's a screenshot of a screenshot tweet! Original did not black out usernames FWIW.

Once the crapsites have aggregated their #content, larger players step in to say the most blindingly obvious things possible: that is bad. Don't do that. Something something society. It's obvious that the larger players don't do much more than read the sensationalized headlines thrown out without considering whether they are justified.

Arguing with crapsite proprietors is fruitless since they have found out they have no ability to acquire viewership through doing good work. But I would like to emphasize that I went through every account on both of those posts (neither of which contains a death threat, by the way) in an effort to see if there was something these twitter users have in common. Aside from one Sorry For Partying type named Mitch* who seems to be a current student and a random, lonely Patriots fan with a sad attempt at facial hair, this is what they look like.

it goes without saying but don't harass these children

They are literally children. The third and fourth are the "death threat" issuers**. They are about as dangerous as an egg salad sandwich. They are approximately 15. They spend 90% of every day thinking about how great it will be when they get to put their hand up a girl's shirt. They represent nothing other than the fact that a healthy slice of teenage boys don't know how to act. I and much of the readership will know this from personal experience. We were fortunate to not have twitter.

Scolding these kids is pointless. They will learn, and then there will be a new generation of them writing the same stuff on FaceSnaps 2030. Extrapolating anything about any fanbase from the portion of it that has a phone but not a driver's license is equally pointless. If you're going to report on it you should know that your next article should be about what Becky told Morgan in the locker room about McKinley.

We now have "global access to the written opinions of morons." It sucks for Blake O'Neill that Scott Tenorman got all up in his mentions, but it's worse that #content farms continually try to spin the hormonal excesses of the nation's youth into pageviews. Twitter should seek to implement a technological fix for this kind of pile-on. Until they do the snap decisions of children should be ignored by people who don't know them.

Go ahead and be proud of the fact that your reject these notions if you have such low expectations of yourself. Be proud of the fact that you think cancer sucks, too, while you're at it. It's about as useful an activity. One day we will beat twitter and cancer by scowling about them on the internet. You just wait.

*[You suck, Mitch.]

**[It should be noted again that neither of those tweets is any kind of threat. As far as terrible things said to people in the aftermath of Bad Sports Event go if that's the best you can come up with things are going pretty well.]