Congrats Sparty

Submitted by MGoPietrowski on
Hate 'em or Hate 'em.
That's one hell of a defense.
Thanks for bringing a little cred back to the BiG

bacon

January 1st, 2014 at 8:34 PM ^

Good for them.  Winning the Rose Bowl is a great thing and I look forward to the next time that Michigan has a chance to play there.

Joined: 01/04/2009

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stephenrjking

January 1st, 2014 at 11:28 PM ^

Stanford's gameplan, too, and notice that they hit a couple of those deep passes, narrowly missed a couple of others, and drew a penalty or two against the defensive backfield. Not enough to win the game, but they were there. The problem is that MSU "downloaded" them in their typical fashion and the time to execute those plays simply ceased to exist.

Joined: 03/15/2012

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stephenrjking

January 1st, 2014 at 11:30 PM ^

We were so smug about it, too. I know I was, watching them flail helplessly against bottom-half MAC teams while Michigan torched Notre Dame. Pretty sickening to see how things have turned around; they never reached the heights we showed we were capable of, but they also had consistency. And, of course, a much better defense. 

Joined: 03/15/2012

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mGrowOld

January 1st, 2014 at 8:38 PM ^

Let's sum up the bowl season so far on the dispair-o-meter of sadness:

 

Michigan lose big? check

Arizona win big? check

MSU win Rose Bowl? check

All I need is for the Buckeyes to win in the Orange Bowl and I will officially enter the deepest ring of Dante's Inferno of football hell.

Joined: 10/04/2010

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mGrowOld

January 1st, 2014 at 9:18 PM ^

No, not at all.  It just made me real sad thinking about what our team could've been right now if we had given Rich the lousy 50k he needed to hire Casteel so we had a competent defense the first three years.  I look at our future and don't see our coaching staff being able to get our players even close to what I saw tonight in the Rose Bowl and watching Rich's spread n shred dismantle Boston College without even having a decent QB made me even sadder and what could've been.

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Yeoman

January 2nd, 2014 at 1:43 AM ^

And I suspect different people will have different answers. How important to you is the big win, as opposed to avoiding bad losses? Losses to bad teams, I mean, as opposed to big point spreads.

Lloyd Carr's record against top-ten teams (EOS, using Massey rankings) was 12-15. That ranks with the best--Saban is 9-9 at Alabama--and it's much better than Bo's .220 percentage. But most of us think Bo had a better career, because he was much less likely than Carr to lose to lesser teams.

I'd never looked at this before tonight. Bo only lost 3 games in 21 years to teams out of the top 50. (Wisconsin '81, MSU '84, Minnesota '86).

In his five years Moeller never lost a game to a team out of the top 50.

Carr lost 2 ('96 Purdue, '07 ASU) in 12 years

RR lost 7 in three years.

Hoke has lost one in three years ('13 PSU--they're currently #51 but that could change as everyone's bowl results go in)

Isn't that the real measure of how far we declined? To me it's not so much the lack of big wins as that, in 38 years we only had five losses to bad teams. The Massey database goes back to 1960 and we had never had a season with more than one loss to a team out of the top 50 until 2008.

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UMgradMSUdad

January 2nd, 2014 at 8:02 AM ^

It is interesting to look at records in this way, but I'm not sure it's fair to make comparisons from now and the recent past to the way things were decades ago.  There is much greater parity now since the scholarship numbers are lower.  Teams like Michigan and Ohio State used to stockpile so many good players that their 2nd and 3rd string players would have started at a lot of other schools, and every year there would be several blow out wins by 4 or more TDs.

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Yeoman

January 2nd, 2014 at 11:13 AM ^

There were fewer D1-level teams in the old days, too, so "outside the top 50" was a more exclusive group than it is now. And fewer non-conference games. It's no accident that Bo's three losses were late in his career.

But the big shift in Michigan fortunes isn't decades in the past. What you're talking about is only relevant to Bo, among the coaches on this list*. Everyone else's career was in the modern, scholly-limited era. I agree with your point, it's a very big part of the difference between Bo's record against 11-50 as opposed to Carr's, for example. But it doesn't explain what I'm after here.

The first scholarship limitations were in 1972, 105. Then to 95 in 1978, and the current limit went into place in 1992.

Before the current limits, Bo and Moeller had lost three of these games in 23 years. After the current limits went in place, Mo and Lloyd lost 2 in 16 years, very slightly (and insignificantly) better.

I don't think you can blame the scholarship limts for the bottom falling out 16 years later. The effect at the time was minimal.

 

*Sorry, that wasn't clear. I'd done a post earlier in the day but apparently on a different thread that included the records of Mack Brown and Bob Stoops, along with Saban and the five Michigan coaches, hence the "list" that I thought I'd put here but hadn't. Bo was the only one of the eight to coach in the unlimited era.

 

 

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stephenrjking

January 1st, 2014 at 11:35 PM ^

I live in Minnesota, but you never really get away from being a Michigan fan. It is always there.

However, it is nice not to constantly encounter reminders of football or arguments about what must be done. I don't know any real MSU fans up here, the Vikings are as disastrous as the Lions, and the sports that matter for the Gophers (and UMD Bulldogs) right now are ones that Michigan is actually competent in. 

One of my small pleasures this fall was the act of listening to the radio on a Monday after a Vikings loss. Really helped me relax.

Joined: 03/15/2012

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taistreetsmyhero

January 1st, 2014 at 8:51 PM ^

And Stanford is a way better team than Michigan so that comparison is irrelevant.
Point is, I know Stanford's playbook is run-heavy, but once you are given a half's sample size that it's not working, is there no plan B? And you call 3 run plays with 1 time out and only 2 minutes left? I'm not down with that, and keep him the hell away from the lions

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snarling wolverine

January 1st, 2014 at 9:13 PM ^

I'm not real sure where the meme of Borges as an ultraconservative playcaller comes from.  Saturday, our true freshman QB threw it 38 times while our tailbacks carried it a total of seven times.  When we played MSU, the ratio wasn't too different (except that Gardner took a bunch of sacks to increase the number of "running plays").

A more legit criticism of Borges is that he tries to do too much and doesn't focus on a few bread-and-butter plays, which Stanford does.

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