charlie weis

Namibia loves The Victors. An intrepid emailer spent his time as an English teacher in Namibia wisely:

(There’s also mindblowing video of the kids singing “Like A Prayer”.) This email caused me to look Namibia up on Wikipedia, and now I know that only 1% of the land in the country is arable and that it wasn’t even independent until 1990 because South Africa invaded it as part of World War II. And that it’s the second most sparsely populated country on the planet behind Mongolia. Wikipedia, sometimes I hate you.

They’ll get crappier or better. I’m always looking for any sign that college football scheduling will get less insulting, and this is a good one:

Michigan's fifth meeting against Miami (Ohio) -- and third time since 2001 -- was apparently the last for the foreseeable future.

The RedHawks used to enjoy the big payday that came with a road game against a big school. But now they're trying to get schools to agree to play at home one year, with a trip to Oxford, Ohio, the next year.

Miami (NTM) has home and homes set up with Minnesota, Colorado, and Vandy, so Michigan will have to go elsewhere for its second MAC snack in future years. I expect the Eastern/Central/Western rotation will be more frequent.

As a big picture, though: when the bigger MAC programs start eschewing guarantee games for actual home and homes, that means power schools have fewer options for bodybag games, which means the prices go up, which means there’s more motivation to play a real opponent. Go Hawks.

And now, more

CRIPPLE FIGHT 2008

graphic illustration via College Game Balls

Ha. San Diego State coach Chuck Long was asked which team was better, Cal Poly or Notre Dame. The response:

"That's a tough question," Long said.

Hur.

Speaking of, I used the wrong box score in yesterday’s post on the SDSU-Cal Poly game. This is the right box, and it changes the table used to this:

So the Notre Dame offense was way, way worse than Cal Poly and only marginally better on defense; they also allowed the flaccid San Diego State run game—3.5 YPC last year against a Mountain West schedule—to rack up almost 5 YPC. ND did do a good job of holding SDSU’s dink-and-dunk pass offense to few yards after the catch.

Meanwhile in overblown LOL. The media has revisited Charlie Weis’s poindextery rant about Michigan and “their excuses and murble murble I want a deep fried deep-fried-ham sandwhich murble murble To Hell With Michigan” to an excessive degree as Cripple Fight 2008 approaches. Check it:

468 articles! Google News tends to throw a bunch of stuff that’s not quite related in there but that was a search for “Weis ‘to hell with michigan’”.

In these 468 articles there is one thing of note:

"Barwis was mad," said UM defensive end Tim Jamison.

He gets mad? I mean… like, there are differentiable levels of white-hot seething Barwis rage? Notre Dame is screwed.

I still prefer “we have not said one word about Michigan, we’ll do our talking on the field” before FBD I. Weis loves this sort of meta trash talk: we haven’t even bothered to trash talk Michigan, that’s how sad they are. We don’t make excuses except about thugs and hoodlums and service academies but boy I bet Michigan does. I won’t blame my kids but if they would just execute the gameplan we wouldn’t lose to Navy.

And he loves complete BS excuses for his jerko (that’s right, I said it: jerko) behavior:

“Anyone who’s a Michigan fan should know and understand that’s a tribute to Bo,” Weis said Tuesday. “I think that’s a very respectful comment toward coach Bo.”

I’m sure he was on the verge of tears as he murble murbled his way through the Domer red meat. Dude, at least stick to your guns if you’re going to say it. When Bo said “to hell with Notre Dame” he meant “to hell with Notre Dame,” and if you asked him for a clarification he probably would have gone Dana Jacobsen on your ass.

Also, Bo had been retired for ten years when he said the version he meant.

Actual onfield items. Rakes of Mallow has an excellent post on Notre Dame’s preferred strategy going into the M game, suggesting a lot of dink and dunk stuff that tests Michigan’s spotty underneath coverage instead of the We Pound It But Not Like That We’re Catholic (And Just Save The Pedophile Priest Jokes We’ve Heard Them) that was much discussed in the offseason. I also think this is Notre Dame’s best course of action: take the Michigan DL out of the game and force the linebackers to make a bunch of tackles/zone drops.

Their only issue is that they don’t really have a guy to do that: Kamara is a ponderous, very sucky receiver, Tate is a straight line burner sort, and they’re down to a freshman at TE. That freshman is an OMG shirtless recruit… we may get a heavy dose of him.

One thing we’re sure to see: a half-dozen screens, maybe more.

LOLCFN. I’ve been trying to cut back on the spleen of late, but the Joe Cribbs Car Wash points out the greatest possible summary of what a dip Matt Zemek, CFN’s resident bubble pipe professor, is:

Very simply, ladies and gentlemen, if you think that Ohio State is in trouble against USC because of the way the Buckeyes played against Ohio, you know nothing about college football and have failed to pay attention to this sport during your lifetime.

CFN remains a place to go only if you want to kill brain cells, but now they’ve got extra pretension!

Etc.: Only Jonathan Tu could link Borges and college football. Shavodrick Beaver is going to be on ESPN2 Thursday night: there will be a CIL liveblog/chat session—and this one is going to actually happen because I will be around to make it so. 8 PM.

A very special email from BHGP contributor Hawkeye State:

Brian,

Because you are the de facto defender of recruiting services, I had to ask you this question:

David Barrent is a gargantuan offensive line prospect from West Des Moines. Relatively early in the game, and after a handful of offers from the middle-of-the-pack Big 10 and Big XII teams (Zooker, Nebraska, Minnesota, MSU, etc.), he committed to Iowa. Scout heralded his commitment in a breathlessly-worded post entitled "Four-Star In-Stater Commits to Iowa". Not only that, but they start the article with this paragraph:

While the state of Iowa produces a handful of high major prospects each year on the gridiron, the number of 'four star' prospects to come out of the state is a small one, perhaps one every other year. This year, there are three such players and one of them, David Barrent of West Des Moines (Valley) has committed to the Hawkeyes...

Clearly, Scout thought he was 4-star material. That is, right up until I received an updated Scout prospect list today and found Barrent had been demoted to 3 stars, despite the fact not one snap has been taken since that article in May. In fact, the only news I can seem to find on Barrent during that time is that he was the MVP of some camp in Chicago.

My question, then, is this: As a rational human being, how the hell am I supposed to take these guys seriously?

Subquestion: Isn't it in Scout's (and Rivals') best interest to have 4-star players remain uncommited until late in the game? If your team has a chance at picking up 3 4-star commits on the eve of signing day, aren't you more likely to buy a subscription to their sites to monitor their progress than if those players are 3-stars? Conversely, if you already have a 4-star in the bag, are you less concerned with whether you get another than if you have a 3-star and are in pursuit of a 4? Isn't this just blind self-interest? And doesn't that mean that the recruiting rankings from Scout and Rivals are no better than Lemming's Notre Dame worship? I'll hang up and listen.

HS

This is a common question, usually one offered up immediately after Recruit X has seen his ranking dinged after doing nothing in particular. Various points:

The guys running the sites are not doing the rankings. The breathlessly worded article referenced above was written by the Iowa guys at Hawkeye Nation [ grrrrr ... -ed], the Iowa Scout site. They have every reason to swoon so subscribers will be excited and happy. The men actually compiling the rankings are a different set of people.

The seemingly arbitrary drops aren't usually based on anything the kid does. Sometimes they are -- Michigan QB commit Kevin Newsome's been erratic at a number of passing camps this summer and has seen his ranking fall as a result -- but more often it's just a matter of early rankings being based on incomplete knowledge. This gets worse and worse every year as Scout and Rivals try to one-up each other with ever-earlier top 100 lists. A number of kids look good in early film and get rated high, then when film comes in on other kids or guys look particularly impressive at camp, they get slotted in above the previous high-ranked kids. This is no doubt what happened to Barrent.

High rated kids are far more likely to fall than rise. Howard Stassen maintains a list of the most overrated teams in college football based on a composite of pre- and post-season rankings. The top seven: Michigan(yay!), Texas, Notre Dame, Nebraska, Florida State, Southern Cal, Oklahoma, and Miami. Since the span covered is 1989 to present, this would also be a good approximation of the best teams in college football. Indeed, FSU, Miami and Nebraska are 1-2-3 in winning percentage; Michigan is #7, Texas #9, Oklahoma #13, and Notre Dame #17. How can the top three teams of the era also be the most overrated? Well, if you start off #1 you can only go down. If you start off outside the top 25 you can only go up.* (Washington State is the most underrated team.)

Four and five star recruits are FSU, Miami, and Nebraska here. It's a mathematical certainty that a player ranked at the very tippy top of a bell curve distribution of talent is likely to fall when additional information is incorporated into the rankings. High-rated commits are indeed likely to slip in the ratings, but so are high-rated uncommitted players. The difference is uncommitted players have no one to bitch for them.

End discursive points.

I think it's perfectly legit to drop this tackle without him actually doing anything except eating cheeseburgers. That's not to say recruiting services don't have their problems. There's a reason MGoBlog's season wrapup of recruiting doesn't just say "Scout ranks X, Rivals ranks Y" but has an extensive section on each recruit detailing his recruitment from offers to early rankings to camps to late rankings: there is information in there not encapsulated in rankings. I do think there is a slight bias towards uncommitted recruits, but that's because uncommitted recruits continue to pick up public offers and are more likely to attend the various camps both services run -- they're more likely to be in the limelight. But given the strong results put up by the ranking services in terms of both All-Americans and NFL draft picks, it's hard to dispute the usefulness of star rankings.

Recruiting services can be annoyingly overblown, maddeningly political, and barely English at times... but they've got that cheddar in the form of onfield performance.

*(this insight originally brought to my attention by Vijay of IBFC.)

Dear Brian,

Love the new digs. Hope you get all the bugs worked out the way you want them to. _____ questions:

1. Recruiting: If Jay Hopson isn't able to recruit MS players to UM, will he keep his job? Is it even possible to pull in recruits from that state without totally random MLB-playing uncles in Detroit?

We'll see what Hopson's haul ends up as at the end of the year. He's not just handling Mississippi, FWIW: he's also responsible for Oklahoma, where Michigan is in it for four or five high-profile players, and other sections around the country. Premium-board insider buzz is generally positive about his effort level and general personability.

I remain skeptical about recruiting Mississippi, which has some weird juju around it that causes kids to pick sure pain over, like, almost anything else. And their education system is somewhere between "nonexistent" and "Somalia" so the chances of picking up a guy who just can't stay eligible seem higher than usual.

2. Notre Dame: With Charlie's benefactor gone at ND and he has a mediocre to poor season, will the contract for life still prevent his firing (I really dislike him and the way he used the Saints to pry all that money out of ND)?

Kevin White wasn't actually Weis' main backer. The firing of Tyrone Willingham was done against White's wishes, as was Weis' contract extension. (Internet Notre Dame fans are still mostly in loooooove with Weis and universally loathed White, if that gives some insight onto the relative sides here.) Weis is likely secure until his heralded recruiting classes are upperclassmen. It would be hard to boot him until Clausen's a senior, IMO.

3. Zone-Read Option: Are there any examples out there of successful (meaning Alamo Bowl or better) teams running the Z-R-O based offense with non-Pat Whites at the helm? Going back to "Stalactites of Fear" I think that would go a long way towards calming some fears. I have heard of Sean King and his success at Tulane w/ Rod, but Threet and Sheridan are not NFL prospects. After that Woody Dantzler was the PWesque player for Rod at Clemson, and well are there any other examples out there at the BCS level? Rothlisberger at BGU with Meyer rings a bell, and Alex Smith as well from Utah, but what are the metrics we can use to compare all those players to what we have. I guess my question is: how much worse off are we with our talent at QB (passing and running)?

A couple of objections: Roethlisberger played for Miami. They ran a spread, but it was a M-versus-Florida passing spread, not the spread 'n' shred. And Steven Threet is not necessarily chopped liver. He was Rivals' #8 QB prospect two years ago, a four-star with a number of attractive offers. In an alternate universe where Carr is still the coach and Mallett is still around, I bet he's still your odds-on favorite to start this fall.

As to the questions posed... as I was writing my chart-heavy piece in this year's Hail To The Victors I assembled a chart. It was a glorious, glorious chart. I loved that chart, and love it still. Here it is:

Table 1: Yards Per Carry For WVU, NU, And Michigan In The Zone Read Era

Northwestern's offense under Randy Walker was basically the spread 'n' shred, except he ran it with guys like Zak Kustok and Brett Basanez and very, very little other talent (five offensive draft picks over the time surveyed here -- Michigan had five this year) and every year until the last two, when Walker died and everyone graduated all at once and the program was thrown into chaos, the talent-free Wildcats killed Michigan in YPC.

Steven Threet isn't Vince Young... but he might be Brett Basanez.

4. The Football Strategy Window: I agree with Chris at Smart Football and yourself that the Spread Z-R-O offense reached its zenith a couple years ago, and now that "everybody's doing it" the strategic advantage of running it has been diminished (I watched Kellen Lewis get shut down by PSU with a simple read-stunt by the DE and WLB). How likely is it that Rod and company would do a Bear Bryant style trip to Darrell Royal to learn a new offense (the Wishbone FYI) to stay on the bleeding edge of offensive football? I just want to know just how likely is it that Rod really does "not stay predictable" in the words of the offensive coaches.

I addressed this idea in a super-nerdy post in which I copped to a brief period of Magic: The Gathering participation. The main idea was thus:

Magic, like many games, has a distinct rock-paper-scissors aspect to it. If you have a Goblins deck it could tear through anything that's particularly slow but be weak against a "Control" deck designed to keep everything dead or immobile. And Magic, like many games, often inspires copycats when one strategy tends to win a number of tournaments in a row. Once Goblins start rampaging everywhere, everyone thinks that's the way to win and runs them, and it's at this point your lame-o Control deck can show up, lock everything down, and coast to victory. If this happens a bunch, the metagame starts getting split between Goblins and Control and a third thing that might do okay against both gets added in and so on and so forth. At any one time, there are usually two or three dominant archetypes and then scattered weirdos trying to invent a new one and almost always failing. When a weirdo breaks through, though...

Rodriguez is obviously one of the breakthrough weirdos, but now his offense is well on its way to becoming a dominant archetype. Michigan will never have one of those games like West Virginia's Sugar Bowl against Georgia where you blink five times and it's 35-0.

But the thing about dominant archetypes is this: they get dominant and stay dominant because they are better ways to do business. It's likely that Michigan will experience great success with the Rodriguez offense as-is because it's really hard to stop even if you know it's coming. I expect that Rodriguez will slant less heavily to the run as he acquires access to better downfield receivers and quarterbacks who are true run-pass threats and not NFL wide receivers; I don't think he'll have to reinvent his personal wheel to scratch out 30 points a game.

Thanks for everything,

Tyler Sellhorn

Teacher, Assistant Football Coach
Fort Wayne South Side HS

P.S. You had to crack on my banner entry, didn't you?

Dude...

...yes, yes I did.

Will the stadium already be louder next year with the renovations? The upper deck is there already and can keep the sound in. It's a matter of not having fans there yet. What do you think?
Robert Hovenkamp

I'm not a sound expert or anything, but I think the metal superstructure won't have much of an effect on noise levels this fall. Without a full glass wall to reflect sound right back where it came, most of it will pass right through the superstructure and much of what does get reflected will bounce harmlessly away from the stadium. You'll have to wait for 2009.

I'm out for the fourth tomorrow. See you Monday.

I get an email that starts like this about every week:

Brian,

So I'm searching for reasons to be optimistic about the upcoming football season.

I got the first one ten seconds after Manningham, Mallett, and Arrington all lit out for the NFL or Arkansas. Each one drips through my consciousness, leaving a residue of paranoia. We can't really lose to Utah, can we? Or Minnesota? Or Notre Dame?

SMQB says... maybe!

The main reason I'm so much more skittish about the Wolverines, maybe the sole reason, is because of their nearest parallel entering the season: 2007 Notre Dame. This is not a logical comparison based on probabilities. ND was in the same kind of woeful shape, personnel-wise, heading into last season, and everybody knew it; the Irish didn't get a vote in anyone's preseason top 25, either, off back-to-back BCS games. Losing a slew of quality career starters will do that for a team. But it won't necessarily result in the worst record in school history, or one of the worst offensive performances of all time; there are no demerits for failure to predict depths so completely outside of anyone's experience. Applying the same pessimism to Michigan based on one nearby, at-the-ready example is beyond hyperbole, if for no other reason than the Wolverines won't be facing ten straight bowl teams to open the season; even if they did, two of them would play in the MAC and another from the Mountain West. It's not the kind of schedule that will let any halfway respectable outfit bottom out that quickly.

The incredibly incompetent Notre Dame team of last year also pops up in the season prediction of Nittany White Out, though as a Penn State blog that actually posts things like "Rich Rod is a traitor and a snake" their opinion must be taken with a grain of salt large enough to encompass a decade-long losing streak.

This is what every emailer that starts off with some plea to reassure him wants to know. Nobody expects to beat Ohio State or even make a New Year's Day bowl, but Jesus, did you see Notre Dame last year? Humans are exceptionally good at modeling others' emotions, especially when said others are rivals of yours, and it takes little cognition to arrive at the conclusion that Notre Dame 2007 was Not A Good Time.

Take it from Brian Stouffer, the impresario from the (sadly dormant) House Rock Built and the man who wrote this year's Notre Dame preview for Hail To The Victors 2008:

Under a pale November sky in Palo Alto, Jimmy Clausen accepted a snap from center, trotted back a step or two, and dropped his knee to the ground, sending the final dozen or so seconds of the game clock spinning off into the history books. A strange, sullen silence draped itself over the Irish fans in a crowded bar on the north side of Chicago as it slowly dawned on everybody that the season was finally over. Thank you, sweet merciful Heaven, I thought to myself, taking a long swig from my tenth or fifteenth beer of the night, this godforsaken season is finally over.

Michigan fans appear to be kept up at night by the spectre of that emotion at year's end. And it's not just the Notre Dame parallel that many of the college football digerati draw that bothers. No one outside of East Lansing and Ann Arbor paid it any mind, but the Michigan basketball team just hired an offensive genius from Morgantown, bestowed upon him a rickety roster that was a poor fit for the genius's genius system, and had a Notre Dame of a season.

After a midweek game against Minnesota that saw 100 weirdly enthusaistic Gopher fans outcheer the entirety of a dismal Crisler arena, I wrote a post titled "It's Only Dark In Your Hearts" that concluded like so:

I have four more tickets sitting at a drawer at home; I don't know how many more of them I'll use. [I turned out the answer was 'all of them', by the way. I'm a sucker. -ed]

The idea of feeling like that after a football game against Minnesota haunts many.

So why won't this happen? First... it might. Michigan is unlikely to sink to the horrific depths Notre Dame did solely because of math -- hooray Gaussian distributions -- but failing to reach a bowl would be a real blow to the internet argument capabilities of Michigan fans. And that's totally within the realm of possibility, especially since the Big Ten mandates all 7-5 teams have to be picked before 6-6 teams. So this is not a "ha, that won't happen, you are stupid for attempting to predict the future because my ability to predict the future is much better than yours."

HOWEVA, I don't think it will. And I think so for these reasons:

1. Rich Rodriguez is not Charlie Weis. Charlie Weis is an immensely overweight sociopath who had never coached a team stricken by youth or, really, accomplished anything whatsoever without the aid of the opponent's defensive signals. Rich Rodriguez forged West Virginia into a national power despite operating with recruits far less highly touted than the ones Michigan has at his disposal.

This is by far the number one reason available. Outside of ludicrous pipe dreams like Urban Meyer or Mack Brown or Pete Carroll, Rich Rodriguez was perhaps the bar-none top candidate for any college looking for a coach. The only reason he was not a ludicrous pipe dream was the poisonous relationship Rodriguez had with West Virginia's dysfunctional leadership. He is proven. Over seven years at West Virginia he took a program that had fallen considerably during the last few years of Don Nehlen's tenure and turned them into West Fuckin' Virginia, and he did it with his system and his coaches and his players as the head coach. Charlie Weis was a below average offensive coordinator who left his team no worse off after he left.

Raise your hand if you think the Bill Stewart era is going to go well at WVU. Yeah.

How did Rodriguez do this? I don't know. I do know that some people can relate to the sort of people who end up as really serious college football players, can motivate them and organize them and inspire them, and that this is a real skill possessed by a very small number of very rich people.

Weis, meanwhile, implemented a half-ass version of the spread 'n' shred he would abandon a quarter into the season, neglected fundamental things like teaching people how to block, and alienated his players to the point where several of them bolted the team midseason despite plenty of opportunities for playing time. It was without question the most abysmal coaching performance at a BCS school since John Mackovic experienced armed insurrection at Arizona. It was three standard deviations below the mean.

2. Lloyd Carr was not Tyrone Willingham. Notre Dame fans' favorite excuse for the failings of Weis E. Coyote -- Tyrone Willingham likes golf -- was legit. The 2004 Notre Dame recruiting class was almost impossibly atrocious:

SIGNED LETTER OF INTENT	Pos	Stars	Ht	Wt	40	RR
Anthony Vernaglia	ATH		6-4	218	4.5	5.9
Junior Jabbie	DB		6-0	185	4.4	-
Maurice Crum	LB		6-1	215	4.6	5.7
Justin Hoskins	RB		5-11	190	4.4	5.7
Terrail Lambert	DB		6-0	185	4.43	5.7
Darius Walker	RB		5-11	197	4.45	5.7
Chauncey Incarnato	OL		6-6	280	5	5.6
John Kadous	OL		6-7	310	5.6	5.6
Brandon Nicolas	DE		6-5	260	4.86	5.6
Ronald Talley	DE		6-3	233	4.76	5.5
David Wolke	QB		6-3	205	4.68	5.4
Abdel Banda	LB		6-2	215	4.5	5.3
Justin Brown	DE		6-4	225	4.7	5.3
Darrin Bragg	QB		6-1	190	4.5	5.2
Leo Ferrine	DB		6-0	180	4.4	5.2
Tregg Duerson	DB		5-10	180	-	4.9

Take away the names and this could be Michigan State or Oklahoma State or any crappy team that manages a couple of good athletes and backs it up with garbage. It gets worse when you consider that two of the very few contributors were the first rats to flee the Good Ship Weis: Darius Walker entered the NFL draft early (in the same way I could enter the draft: he was undrafted) and Ronald Talley decided he'd rather start at Delaware than start at Notre Dame.

But wait! It's still worse: in reality the class was worse than that as a lot of the guys in it got overrated because they committed to Notre Dame. There is one area in which recruiting sites do fudge rankings, IMO, and that's with the tail end of the class at big deal schools. Almost anyone who commits to Michigan as an unranked or two-star player will end up with three stars if the services have time to rerank them. Normally this is a small effect, but when ND starts bringing in a full class of questionable recruits the big school bump becomes a major factor.

These guys were the seniors and fourth-year juniors on last year's team, and the class after them -- the Willingham-Weis transition year -- was hardly better. Michigan's recruiting has never been close to that dire. The 2005 class was #6 nationally; 2006 was #13. Even with the outflux of talent to the NFL and Ohio State's bench, Michigan has far more talent than Notre Dame did last year. The Willingham classes started out with hardly any talent and then experienced major attrition; at least Michigan is starting from a lofty perch.

The magical 2007 Notre Dame season was a lethal combination of awful coaching and awful talent. Michigan has excellent coaching and okay to good talent. I'm not saying you should make plans for New Year's Day, but this ain't gonna happen en route to 3 and 9:

Clearly, there will be growing pains. A season like Tressel's initial foray at Ohio State -- a bleh 7-5 that would have been 6-6 without JohnNavarre's exceptional generosity -- is well within the realm of possibility. And by that I mean "is the most likely outcome."

This should be fine with you. Michigan needs a year to pupate, and then?

DEATH BUTTERFLY