i find certain things very important indeed

via Twitter

There are a lot of clever things a clever coordinator can do on defense to cover up for a weakness. Programs unable to recruit enough of the kind of defensive backs who can play man will commit to zone (Iowa). Those short on athletes in the second level can add hybrids and blitzes to make up for it (Indiana). Slower ends can be supplemented with 3-4 OLBs (Wisconsin), smaller ones can be covered by DTs and a good thumpin' Mike (MSU), and if you don't have a 3-tech, well, half of football bases out of a three-man front for a reason. Nose tackle, though:

Things happen too fast in the A-gaps to take a loss there. If you don't have a guy who can both stand up to doubles and demand them, all of your Winoviches and Garys get doubled, your secondary gets abused, your linebackers get blocked, and your clever coordinator is spending all of his time dreaming up mitigation strategies instead of stopping the opponent. This is why for years Michigan fans have been imploring our program to add at least one gettable nose tackle-shaped nose tackle to the end of the class in case the more dynamic options at the top don't work out. Failing to Moneyball this problem with build-a-bears and the odd competition-averse blue chip is the reason coaching legend Don Brown just got fired. Here in January 2021, Michigan's current class has zero plausible NTs signed, one local four-star on the hook, and a lame duck DL coach who has little hope of finding more.

The good news: the state of Michigan has at least one nose tackle-flavored nose tackle who projects to nose tackle, and he's game to play for Michigan when he graduates in 2022. The better news is he's got a lot of athletic upside. The bad news is he's never played nose tackle.

GURU RATINGS

As you'll see in the scouting, Miles is a nose tackle-sized person River Rouge has been playing at end, sometimes as far out as a stand-up SAM. That speaks highly of his agility, but hasn't made projections easy:

Rivals ESPN 247 247 Comp
3*, 5.5,

SDE, no rank
no profile 3*, 86, NR OVR

#45 DT, #17 MI
3*, 0.8466, #671 OVR,

#49 DT, #23 MI
3.40* n/a 3.58* 3.47*

Bottom row is my conversion of the above to a 5-star scale. Links are to profiles.

As with fellow recent commit Connor Jones, Miles has barely been seen by services. ESPN doesn't have a profile up. Rivals lists him as an SDE and slapped him with a 5.5, which is Rivals for "I'm working on something but I'll get to it I swear." 24/7 has little more than that, but put Miles down in the MAC/MSU portion of the in-state rankings. They also show an apparently more recent 6'5"/275; Rivals has Miles at 6'4"/265. His high school roster still says 240. So he's grown.

[Hit THE JUMP for scouting, video, and the rest.]

bathtub [Patrick Barron]

10/26/2019 – Michigan 45, Notre Dame 14 – 6-2, 3-2 Big Ten

There are two kinds of K-Pop bathtubs. One is full of bubbles and girls who are trying their very best to embody bubbles, to become bubbles, to float away on mountains of kawaii. Often there is fruit. Or… crunchberries? Probably petals. But maybe crunchberries!

image

Sometimes there are donuts?

image

This is a nice bathtub full of nice people having a nice time and maybe there is the chance someone will have sex, or at least positive feelings about another human being, later. Breakfast has been provided for the aftermath of either.

The other kind of K-pop bathtub is a suicide bathtub. A black, wet suicide bathtub. Water drips suggestively from fingers.

image

image

The bathtub is a dichotomy. It is a font of strong emotions, positive and negative. There is no middle ground. It is shaped like a bowl, and it is wet. Michigan Stadium was both kinds of K-Pop bathtub on Saturday night, depending on who you were rooting for. Today in Mudville there are donuts and Snoop Dogg. Today in South Mudville:

image

The brilliant video I culled the above shots from oscillates as wildly as possible between the two states of K-Pop bathtub and is as good of a sports fandom analogy as has yet been produced.

[After THE JUMP: man hotwires floating hamburgers into existence]

Rutgers fan celebrates a first down, 2016 [Patrick Barron]

One of our photographers, Patrick Barron, has been trying to make fetch happen in our Slack for a little while now, except in this case "fetch" is actually a useful way of measure how grisly a blowout is. (Also we've discovered that SBN's Jason Kirk had the same idea a couple weeks before Patrick, so he's now Rutger Leibnitz.)

I mentioned it in the game column but here's a more complete introduction to…

The Rutger

A rutger is when you have fewer yards in some aspect of the game than your opponent has points. For example, the 2018 Michigan-Michigan State game saw Michigan (21 points) hand MSU (15 rushing yards) a rushing rugter, at least by NCAA stats.

A Total Rutger, where you have fewer yards than the opposition has points, is a rare event. Total rutger events in the past decade of college football, with FBS matchups bolded:

Season Week Offense Defense Def Pts Off yds Rutger
2013 4 Florida Int Louisville 72 27 2.67
2017 8 Kansas TCU 43 21 2.05
2016 6 Rutgers Michigan 78 39 2.00
2012 2 Savannah State Florida St 55 28 1.96
2008 14 Mississippi St Mississippi 45 24 1.88
2015 20 N Illinois Boise St 55 33 1.67
2014 2 South Carolina State Clemson 73 44 1.66
2017 1 Charleston Southern Mississippi St 49 33 1.48
2016 2 Savannah State Southern Miss 56 41 1.37
2009 4 UTEP Texas 64 53 1.21
2014 1 Delaware Pittsburgh 62 57 1.09
2014 13 Savannah State BYU 64 63 1.02

Michigan-Rutgers 2016, TCU-Kansas 2017, and Louisville-FIU 2013 were all Double Total Rutger events, which sit in a subclass of the rutger: the Rutgers. Nobody has achieved the Triple Rutger in recent CFB history.

Congratulations to Mississippi State, which is the only team to both rutger and be rutger'd, and the only team to get rutger'd in a rivalry game. FCS-level Savannah State is the most generous rutger provider in all the land.

Rushing rutgers, aided by NCAA sack accounting, are stunningly common: about 600 rushing rutgers over the past decade. There have been approximately 200 passing rutgers. With about 8000 games in the data set, any particular game has about a 10% chance to be a single-phase rutger.

[After THE JUMP: beyoooond the ruuuuuutger]