Michigan Stadium
[Eric Upchurch]
News bullets and other items:
- Wilton Speight is “day-to-day”
- Asked whether he will practice next week, Harbaugh said, “We’ll see.”
Can you talk about what De’Veon Smith and your offensive line gave you when you really needed it there in the third quarter?
“Yeah, I mean, grinding out first downs, grinding meat. De’Veon, he played with great motivation. And some great play from the offensive line. It felt like old fashioned, slobber-knocker football.
“Tim Drevno made some great calls. The touchdown, the long touchdown by De’Veon was a heck of a call. We’d been running to the strongside. Come back, pull, have the pullers to the weakside, it was just enough. Just enough space, and De’Veon, breaking tackles. The yard runs, the yards after contact, pushing for the first down was critical. I think it’s the most yards of his career. Heck of an effort by De’Veon.”
No disrespect to Indiana, but is it possible your guys were thinking ahead a little to next week. How was the focus, do you think?
[laughs] “I’ll tell you what, to win this game, it feels like one of the best wins I’ve ever been involved with because it was a playoff game, and it was beating a tough Indiana team. We have a lot of respect for them. They’re a heck of a football team. And the elements, too. That was…you know, feel good about our football team.”
Can you reflect on the run that O’Korn h.ad to set up De’Veon’s first touchdown, and how would you assess his play overall?
“Yeah, that was huge. We were struggling making third-down conversions and there was not just one but two defenders pressuring John, and [he] stepped out of it with good ball security. Got the first down and was being threatened there at the sticks and didn’t dive, didn’t slide. Kick through, kicked through an arm tackle and kept right on running, so that was a big play. That was a signature play for a quarterback in a big game, so I feel really good. Amara [Darboh] was also outstanding to extend our last drive. He did a lot of good things.”
[After THE JUMP: special teams, smashing the narrative, and waxing philosophical about Michigan Stadium]
REPAIR NOTICE: I originally posted this article earlier this morning but accidentally had some bad data from a dreaded bad sort on Excel. Things should be better now, and the conclusions were affected less than I thought they would be. Biggest change is Ohio State was credited with a few that belonged to Oregon State (an avoidable vlookup error), and the old home-road stats were all screwed up. They are fixed below.
I've been slowly building and picking through an all-plays database built from NCAA.org's play-by-play data. The easiest thing to pull out so far has been penalties, so let's play with those.
The benefit of the all-plays is you can tell the difference between penalties, since a personal foul says a different thing about a team and does a different thing to them than, say, a delay of game to set up a punt. I broke the various penalties up into "Violent" and "Non-Violent" behaviors.
- Acts of violence: Clipping, crackbacks, facemasks, illegal blocks, illegal use of hands, kick catch interference, pass interference (?), roughing the kicker (15), roughing the passer, tripping, and unnecessary roughness.
- Non-violent behaviors: Delay of game, encroachment, false starts, holding, ineligible receiver downfield, intentional grounding, kickoff out of bounds, offsides, running into the kicker (5), sideline interference, substitution infraction, too many men, unsportsmanlike conduct, and illegal fair catch, formation, forward pass, motion, participation, shifting, and touching.
- Michigan last year was remarkably good at avoiding the latter type (in yellow in the chart below), leading the study at 2.3 non-violent infractions per game:
lol…osu?
That's the Big Ten and the other 2013 opponents. I don't know if I want to count PI since its application can get downright chintzy, so that's broken out. Either way Ohio State managed to lead the conference in infractions per game, and was second in the study only to Terry Bowden's one-win (Morgan State) first season at Akron. Reason why this is? Online poll says:
Fact: 4.5% of people who take any online fan poll are Buckeyes
Yea, and Urban did steal "60 minutes of unnecessary roughness," previously committed to MSU. I was surprised that Michigan State appeared to have their pugilistic streak in relative check, i.e. they were only among the leaders, not far ahead as I supposed from watching them. It takes a while to gather all the data but minus the regular season Wisconsin game (data wasn't available) their 2011 penalty numbers were high but their personal foul quotient wasn't: 31 violent (11 of those pass interference) to 60 non-violent. Wanna guess where a disproportionate of those came from? Offsides. #JerelWorthyJumpsEarly.
Michigan vs. Average
We're dealing with smallish sample sizes so conclusions are shaky. That said there are things to see when you look at which penalties Michigan was getting called against them versus a typical team on their schedule.
Non-violent things per season:
| Penalty | Avg Tm* | Mich | OSU | ND | MSU'12 | MSU'11 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| False Start | 16.5 | 7 | 20 | 21 | 14 | 20 |
| Holding | 14.4 | 13 | 12 | 11 | 15 | 12 |
| Offsides/Encroachment | 7.3 | 6 | 4 | 4 | 8 | 20 |
| Illegal Offensive Stuff | 6.0 | - | 4 | 5 | 5 | |
| Delay of Game | 4.3 | - | 2 | 3 | 1 | 4 |
| Coach Derps | 2.7 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Intentional grounding | 0.8 | - | 1 | - | 1 | - |
| Unsportsmanlike Conduct | 0.8 | 1 | 3 | - | 1 | 1 |
| Special Teams Derps | 0.5 | - | 2 | 1 | - | - |
| TOTAL | 53.3 | 30 | 51 | 47 | 47 | 59 |
* over13 games
Michigan's veteran offensive line was good for something last year: remarkably few false starts and none of those illegal formation/procedure things that plagued us in various offensive transitions. That's a feather in Al Borges's cap: the offense had their fundamentals down about as well as you can ask. Pre-snap penalty-avoidance may be correlated with offensive line experience, though I haven't proven this. Further study: is it experienced OL or just experienced tackles? Inquiring 2013 offensive lines want to know.
Violent crimes per season:
| Penalty | Avg Tm* | Mich | OSU | ND | MSU | MSU'11 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Personal Foul | 15.0 | 11 | 22 | 9 | 21 | 16 |
| Pass Interference | 9.2 | 9 | 8 | 6 | 8 | 11 |
| Various Illegal Blocks | 5.8 | 8 | 7 | 4 | 6 | - |
| Facemask | 1.8 | 2 | 4 | 3 | 1 | 1 |
| Roughing the Passer | 1.3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | - | 3 |
| Kick Catching Interference | 0.6 | 2 | - | 1 | 2 | - |
| Roughing the Kicker | 0.3 | - | - | - | 2 | - |
| Unnecessary Roughness | 0.0 | - | - | 1 | - | - |
| TOTAL | 33.8 | 35 | 43 | 25 | 40 | 31 |
* over13 games
Michigan's ability to avoid the peaceful infractions meant the Wolverines were the most pugilistic in the study by percentage of penalties that were violent. Cue the Urban Meyer chart:
Forgot to add the 15 yards for logo infraction
Really the Wolverines were average, the only thing standing out being chopblocks. There were a few of these called against Michigan last year that I thought were horsecrap (Mealer's v. UMass and Gallon's vs. Minnesota), and here's one that was legit (on Gordon):
If you don't spot it in 10 watches, watch it 10 more times.
I'm declaring Michigan a very average team at this.
Home Field Advantage?
There was one for Michigan, not the other guys. Michigan was relatively clean at home and in limited samples got kinda duked in the neutral games (Brian gave the refs a composite –5 for the Alabama game alone, which is about the difference between a typical day of Obi Ezeh as a senior versus Kenny Demens as a senior). Overall I noticed very little difference in any type of penalty with regards to how it was assessed against home versus road teams. False starts are a little more common for road teams (like one every 10 games) but that's about it. Things broke out a bit more among the small samples of a single team's season:
PENALTIES PER GAME
| Team | Pen/G | Home | Away | Neutral | Home Field Adv. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Akron | 8.2 | 6.7 | 9.7 | - | -45% |
| Ohio State | 7.8 | 8.6 | 6.3 | - | +28% |
| Nebraska | 7.1 | 6.7 | 7.8 | 7.0 | -16% |
| Purdue | 6.8 | 5.4 | 8.2 | 9.0 | -51% |
| Michigan State | 6.7 | 6.3 | 7.0 | 8.0 | -11% |
| Minnesota | 6.6 | 7.0 | 5.8 | 8.0 | +17% |
| Illinois | 6.2 | 5.9 | 6.6 | - | -13% |
| Indiana | 6.0 | 6.7 | 5.3 | - | +20% |
| Northwestern | 5.8 | 5.4 | 7.0 | 2.0 | -29% |
| Notre Dame | 5.5 | 6.4 | 6.0 | 1.5 | +7% |
| Connecticut | 5.4 | 5.0 | 5.8 | - | -17% |
| Penn State | 5.3 | 5.0 | 5.6 | - | -12% |
| Michigan | 5.0 | 4.3 | 5.2 | 6.5 | -20% |
| Iowa | 5.0 | 4.9 | 5.5 | 4.0 | -13% |
| Wisconsin | 4.6 | 4.4 | 5.2 | 4.0 | -17% |
| Central Michigan | 4.6 | 4.3 | 4.8 | 6.0 | -12% |
| Other | 6.6 | 7.2 | 6.2 | 6.8 | +13% |
| AVERAGE | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.3 | 6.2 | -3% |
Non-violent
| Team | Pen/G | Home | Away | Neutral | HFA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ohio State | 4.3 | 4.6 | 3.5 | - | +24% |
| Michigan State | 3.6 | 3.1 | 4.4 | 3.0 | -40% |
| Michigan | 2.3 | 2.5 | 2.2 | 2.0 | +12% |
| Avg Team | 3.8 | 3.7 | 4.0 | 3.2 | -7% |
Violent:
| Team | Pen/G | Home | Away | Neutral | HFA |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ohio State | 3.6 | 4.0 | 2.8 | - | 31% |
| Michigan State | 3.1 | 3.1 | 2.6 | 5.0 | 17% |
| Michigan | 2.7 | 1.8 | 3.0 | 4.5 | -64% |
| Avg Team | 2.4 | 2.4 | 2.3 | 3.0 | 3% |
Either they let the Wolverines get away with murder at home, we turn into Michigan State on the road, or those calls just went against us more often than they should have.
Hey kids: I am headed out to NYC today. That plus knee rehab equals no time (no time). Mathlete will hit you up later today. It's June, be chill. Posting should continue as normal after today.
From reader Will Gallagher comes this item:
Hi there. I'm watching a Japanese movie and halfway through, I was surprised to see the main character wearing a blue shirt with maize lettering that says "The Lord is my Shepherd, but Bo is my coach." Just in case you needed any more MGoShirt ideas. Screenshot included.
I've asked after what this movie actually is… but probably can't put it in the store since it's obviously someone else's idea. [ED: "Rainbow Song." From 2006, which makes that shirt even weirder.]
For now, the Asian pop culture reference scoreboard stands at Iowa two (a terrible indie video and Girls' Generation), Michigan one. Unless you want to count a dozen Korean pop stars snuggling with your helmet more than a shirt, which fair enough.
Dollin' up the boxes.
I have neither enough points to start a thread nor the requisite photoshop skills to make this look right, but see attached and tell me if that is or is not an improvement... I like the full "UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN" myself, but could be talked in to the block M. It needs something, with the stands full you can't even tell its Michigan Stadium.
I think the emailer is right: the boxes, while gorgeous on the outside, leave a little something to be desired once you're inside the stadium. They could use some maize trim and a simple, non-halo-esque logo or notification that this is a university. Professionally photoshopped, of course.
Another thing to do is to put the retired/legends numbers on one of the boxes like they do many other places. Before the boxes, Michigan never had anywhere to put said names. Now they do.
Also, when are we going to get the long-waited crazy person bleachers on top of those things? "See Michigan play football from the moon!" That's a freebie, Hunter S Lochmann. Call me. We'll push that envelope… to the moon. Call me, seriously. I have ideas for days.
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