tempo

This is just a data dump.

To include tempo information in my HTTV previews I needed to reproduce good adjusted tempo data from last year's play-by-play information. This meant a TON of cleanup on the drive data the schools report to the NCAA (and which gets republished by, e.g. ESPN, in the box scores). Special thank you to Fox Sports for producing some of their own drive data to check against, and several schools that went back and repaired mistakes. No thanks to teams like Virginia Tech and various barely-FBS Sun Belters who routinely screw up their data and cause people like me all kinds of extra work.

I've removed Garbage Drives, using Fremeau's definition, plus two-minute drill situations were excised. Punts are also removed, mostly (by the schools themselves). Hopefully the college football world finds this useful. Unsurprisingly you won't have to scroll far up from the bottom to find Michigan. I've also bolded Michigan and their 2023 opponents.

Big table of data after THE JUMP.

The screens were pretty annoying, right? Why was Michigan not getting lined up? Why were they having so much success, even on long downs, with this tactic? What was the plan to beat them? How did they adjust? Let's dive in.

Opening up Multiple Fronts

A Walt Bell offense doesn't attack you with the normal array of football moves. They're irregulars, light infantry, moving units across the battlefield with lightning speed and choosing where to engage, which is ideally wherever you're late to arrive in force. The last thing they want to engage in is a battle in the middle. Your troops against theirs? Game over. What they would much rather do is split into two groups, always of varied compositions, use tempo to increase the likelihood of the defense failing to find their others and line up correctly, and use the second before the snap to pick one of those two widely separated points of attack to have the next engagement.

IU's trick was to create multiple fronts, separated by so much distance that defenders had to virtually declare by alignment before the snap which one they were going to be participating in. Bazelak would read the defensive alignment during the second his line was frozen and know which battleground to choose. In this case it was whether Colson (LB on the bottom) and/or Moore (safety just above the bottom hash) were part of the play near the snap or the play out in the flat.

Notice here that the line is run-blocking; they aren't told that the pull is live. But also notice that there's no mesh point; it's not an "RPO"—or at least it's not a post-snap read. The QB sees Michigan only has two guys playing way off for the three guys lined up on the field side, makes the check in his head, and throws it.

This style also dictates how you have to defend them. All those fancy pressures and coverages you use to confound an offense trying to win old-fashioned leverage battles can't help you against Indiana, because they're so spread out that none of your defenders are close enough to each other to swap jobs. Amoeba? Forget it. Want to use Cover 3 to get them guessing if the pressure's coming from the right or left? Get used to Indiana choosing your Rip/Liz calls for you.

I think that's what's going on here.

[After THE JUMP: The adjustments, the reactions, and IU runs out of ideas first]

11/27/2021 – Michigan 42, Ohio State 27 – 11-1, 8-1 Big Ten, Big Ten East Champions

The thing that cracked me was the folding chair.

I don't know when this happened, exactly, but it might have been around the same time the turnover chain spawned its infinite variations around the country. There are three guys on the Michigan sideline who maniacally wave around folding chairs at key moments. They must be walk-ons. I can discern no rhyme or reason as to what prompts the chair waving. It does not actually seem connected to turnovers—Michigan acquired none in this game. I do not know if it's the same three guys with the chairs or if it's a rotating cast.

But there are chairs, and they are jiggled at high rates of speed on the Michigan sideline, and sometimes they host small gatherings of hype. It feels like a cargo cult. The chairs have dropped from the sky and are venerated because we cannot think of anything better to do with them. Nobody has asked about them yet. Google turns up nothing but ads for folding chairs when asked about this. There has not yet been the Athletic deep dive about the slightly deranged 190-pound defensive end who seized upon the folding chair as his totem, and got his two buddies to join in mostly because the slightly deranged 190-pound defensive end absolutely will not shut up and if they agreed to wield the chairs they could go to the bar before 1 AM.

They are thus a perfect mystery. I cannot understand why this is happening and no one is bothering to explain. The chairs merely are. They are there, so they are there.

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

This year Michigan went around stealing sports valor from the Big Ten. They Jumped Around at Wisconsin. They did the Zombie Nation thing at Penn State. They may have gone HOO HOO HOO when MSU did their 300 thing, but no one puts that on television. Michigan's players would gather at the most hype-adjacent spot they could access to do the thing all the undergrads in the stands were doing. The chairs were there. Grasped and exalted, they were there.

In the third quarter, Michigan had just scored to go up 15 and something was playing during a commercial break. The Michigan sideline went nuts. The chairs were lifted again, and again, and again. They bobbed on an invisible ocean. Pure joy radiated from them.

I've been pretty turned off this season for obvious reasons, and I was turned off for much of this game. I simply cannot expose myself to more emotional turmoil at this point. Hope and joy go hand in hand with loss. So I was stoic, for the most part. Little things squeaked out: a "go!" when Corum broke into the secondary, a "get him!" when Hutchinson flushed Stroud out of the pocket. Cracks in the façade. The impossible coming closer. Lucy, holding the football.

The chairs somehow exist outside of this, in the same way I spent 15 minutes "meditating" to the buh-buh-buh-basketball song at one particularly stressful juncture last year. Was this the stupidest thing I could possibly have done? Yes. Did it work? Yes. The chairs are dada and do not follow the rules laid down by Michigan football. They are otherworldly. They worked on me.  I am now into absurdist Buddhism.

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So. There is a great mass of humanity on the field at Michigan Stadium. I'm sixteen rows up. I am surveying this field rush. There are elevated helmets, and what looks like a "slippery when wet" sign. Children sit on their fathers' shoulders. Somewhere in there a guy I think I saw in my section is putting an absurd gold chain around Brad Hawkins's neck; Hawkins will wear it to the press conference. Soon, Carl Grapentine will gently suggest that people on the field cease hugging and crying on the Michigan players so they can get back to the locker room. This will not work very well, so Grapentine will suggest it more sternly.

That is the near future, though. In the present they're playing Seven Nation Army or that suddenly ubiquitous song about pumping it up, and my eyes are taking in a field rush that has carpeted a football field so fully that not a scrap of turf is visible. And there, at the forty-five yard line, is one of the chairs.

The stupidest fucking thing in the world. A folding chair, held aloft like a beacon. Like it means something to someone, this generic slab of metal and plastic that could be put in a high school gymnasium and lost among hundreds of identical copies of itself. Somewhere on that field was a person who looked at the great black emotional nothing of Michigan football and said to himself "I defy you. This is fun." Then he handed the chair to someone else, and he said the same thing, and somehow the chair won, and then the chair gave something of itself to me.

I wrote a big dumb column last year about how Paul Chryst's mask discipline contrasted with Harbaugh's and that was why this thing that just happened was never going to happen. Because Michigan was too chaotic and unfocused and the masks are the thing. It is the same big dumb feeling when I say that somehow the chairs are the whole thing. Going into Wisconsin, where you haven't won in twenty years, and not sitting sullenly on the sideline when the other tribe is doing their haka. Instead embracing the moment. Saying it doesn't have to be like this. Saying the past does not exist. Saying we can go into halftime up exactly one(1) point and tell them that they're shook.

As teams were headed to locker rooms at the half. ⁦@OhioStateFB⁩ ⁦@UMichFootball⁩
About to be an interesting 2nd H
⁦@CollegeGameDay⁩ pic.twitter.com/knxp97O4Oq

— Kirk Herbstreit (@KirkHerbstreit) November 27, 2021

And then it can be true. All of it can be true.

AWARDS

Known Friends and Trusted Agents Of The Week

legendary [Patrick Barron]

you're the man now, dog

#1 Aidan Hutchinson. On WTKA this Thursday I was asked what needed to happen for Michigan to win this game and the first thing out of my mouth was "Aidan Hutchinson wins the Heisman." Well:

Current Draft Kings Heisman Odds:
Bryce Young, -200
CJ Stroud, +400 (was -200 chalk last week)
Aidan Hutchinson +1400 (first time listed all season)
Kenny Pickett, +1600
Kenneth Walker III, +1800
Matt Corral, +2200
Nobody else with shorter than +5000 odds

— jamie mac (@justcoverblog) November 28, 2021

Heisman voters are and old and crotchety and reliably predictable bunch with no imagination, but you have to figure that if Georgia shuts Bryce Young down the voters are going to blanch at 1) an Alabama quarterback who can't even get them to the playoff and 2) an Ohio State quarterback after Hutchinson dominated a game against OSU in which he had three sacks.

Anyway, yes, three sacks. Yes, a holding call drawn. Yes, Ohio State flipping their first-round OL around in a desperate attempt to find anyone who could stall the guy out. Yes, this:

Aidan Hutchinson had 15 QB pressures vs Ohio State

Most in a game since we started tracking college in 2014 pic.twitter.com/Psmn0Fp6xh

— PFF College Football (@PFF_College) November 28, 2021

Also this:

Aidan Hutchinson did this to potential 1st round pick pic.twitter.com/uHPmZKnOsE

— Anthony Treash (@PFF_Anthony) November 27, 2021

Heisman. Best player in the country. Period.

#2 The Offensive Line. Zero sacks. Zero tackles for loss. One(?) zero-yard run, that on some tempo that got the snap count jumped. By the fourth quarter OSU defensive tackles were doing plainly insane things and getting fed buckets of garbage when that didn't work. Jump to the interior and get escorted past the play. Yeah, McNamara escaped some pressure. Also Hassan Haskins had ONE HUNDRED AND TEN YARDS before contact. Also Andrew Vastardis immediately reached the nose tackle on the long Corum run and the two guards wiped the LB level. Michigan is going to finish this year in the top 5 in sack rate allowed and just put up ~300 yards rushing on Ohio State.

I officially withdraw any concerns about getting rid of Ed Warinner and making Sherrone Moore the OL coach. Give me my hairshirt.

#3 Hassan Haskins. Haskins may have had a lot of help from the offensive line but he picked the right places to go, frequently churning through gaps that didn't seem to be there until he hacked through the thicket of arm tackles. Then he falls forward, every time.

Honorable mention: David Ojabo had a thundersack, drew a hold, and flushed Stroud into a Hutchinson sack. Blake Corum didn't have a lot of opportunity but maxed it out. Donovan Edwards may have had the catch of the year. Erick All was part of the murderous blocking. Vincent Gray and DJ Turner got got, as you will, but survived. Cade McNamara did everything right except for the interception, which was… not great, but I mean. JJ McCarthy hit his one pass and ran his package impeccably. Josh Ross had a massive tackle for loss to kick off the second half.

KFaTAotW Standings.

(points: #1: 8, #2: 5, #3: 3, HMs one each. Ties result in somewhat arbitrary assignments.)

55: Aidan Hutchinson (HM WMU, #2 Wash, #1 Rutgers, #1 Wisc, HM Neb, #2 NW, T3 MSU, T2 IU, T1 PSU, #2 Maryland, #1 OSU)
33: Hassan Haskins (HM WMU, T3 Wash, T2 NIU, #2 Neb, T1 NW, #1 IU, #2 PSU, #3 OSU)
23: The OL (#1 Wash, #1 NIU, HM Neb, HM NW, #2 OSU)
22: David Ojabo (#2 Wisc, T3 MSU, T2 IU, T1 PSU, HM OSU)
18: Blake Corum (#2 WMU, T3 Wash, T2 NIU, HM Neb, T1 NW, HM OSU)
14: Cade McNamara (#1 MSU, HM IU, HM PSU, #3 Maryland, HM OSU)
12: Donovan Edwards(T2 NIU, #1 Maryland, HM OSU)
8: Ronnie Bell (#1 WMU), Brad Hawkins (#1 Neb), Dax Hill (#3 WMU, HM NIU, HM Rutgers, HM Wisc, HM Neb, HM MSU), Josh Ross (HM Wash, HM NIU, HM Rutgers, HM Neb, HM NW, HM PSU, HM OSU)
7: Brad Robbins (HM Wash, #3 Rutgers, HM Wisc, HM PSU), DJ Turner (#3 NW, #3 PSU, HM OSU)
6: Nikhai Hill-Green(HM NIU, #2 Rutgers), Jake Moody (HM Wash, HM Wisc, #3 Neb, HM MSU), Andrel Anthony (#2 MSU, HM Maryland)
5: Cornelius Johnson(HM NIU, HM Wisc, #3 IU)
4: AJ Henning (HM WMU, #3 NIU), Roman Wilson (#3 Wisc, HM PSU)
3: Erick All (HM NW, HM MSU, HM OSU)
2: Junior Colson (HM IU, HM PSU), Mike Sainristil (HM WMU, HM Maryland)
1: Andrew Vastardis (HM WMU), Mazi Smith (HM Wash), Gemon Green(HM NIU), Chris Hinton (HM Rutgers),  Taylor Upshaw (HM IU), Michael Barrett (HM Maryland), Matt Torey(HM Maryland), Vincent Gray (HM OSU), JJ McCarthy(HM OSU)

Who's Got It Better Than Us(?) Of The Week

Michigan chasing the beleaguered CJ Stroud out of the pocket on fourth and forever, causing him to hurl up a ball that is well short of the sticks.

Honorable mention: Hutchinson's sacks; Ross stuffing a third quarter short yardage play; McNamara hitting Johnson deep; McCarthy hitting Wilson; Blake Corum jetting for 55; virtually everything.

​MARCUS HALL EPIC DOUBLE BIRD OF THE WEEK.

JSN makes an absurd catch on third and nineteen, which allows OSU to score a touchdown later on that drive, keeps them in contact, and causes the BPONE portion of your brain to freak out about how that will be the turning point.

Honorable mention: JSN makes a fourth down catch that is bobbled but does not hit the turf; Garrett Wilson skies over Vincent Gray for a touchdown; McNamara throws a red-zone interception to blunt Michigan's first-half momentum.

[After THE JUMP: baffled]