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.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:34 PM ^
what a huge gap between the 2 programs in Michigan right now. Sad
January 1st, 2014 at 8:50 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 8:35 PM ^
How the fuck did this team lose to Notre Dame?
January 1st, 2014 at 8:43 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 8:45 PM ^
Because Notre Dame challenged their secondary all night long downfield, like good coaches should but never do.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:49 PM ^
That actually was our gameplan against them, but we couldn't protect Gardner enough for it to work.
We might note that ND also held MSU to 13 points.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:52 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 9:00 PM ^
They got it wrong on the broadcast. Cook started against ND and played the whole game except the final series, when he was benched for Maxwell.
January 1st, 2014 at 9:21 PM ^
Yeah, Cook was up and down all season long. To his credit, he (and his receivers for that matter) played his best in the two biggest games of the year. But if bad Cook had shown up in either of the last two games they wouldn't have been Rose Bowl champs.
January 1st, 2014 at 10:13 PM ^
Yeah, I noticed that as well. Everyone acting like Maxwell was the starter for that game; Cook went 16/32 for 145 yards and a TD.
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.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:46 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 9:06 PM ^
I envy their steady improvement. Or really any improvement.
January 1st, 2014 at 9:07 PM ^
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.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:50 PM ^
There was a generous helping of PI calls too, some warranted and some not (IMO) that aided ND touchdown drives.
January 1st, 2014 at 9:45 PM ^
They had not settled the QB question and they actually improved as the year went on.
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.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:39 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 8:40 PM ^
Yeah, that's it.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:47 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 8:49 PM ^
might as well throw in ND's bowl win too.
January 2nd, 2014 at 2:26 AM ^
And that their bowl win and our bowl loss cost us the "Winningest Program of All Time" title.
January 1st, 2014 at 9:03 PM ^
You were upset over the Arizona win?
January 1st, 2014 at 9:05 PM ^
We would lose by 20+ to Arizona.
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.
January 1st, 2014 at 9:28 PM ^
But losing their rivalry game by 37 and winning the Nutritional Supplement Bowl doesn't incite me to envy.
January 1st, 2014 at 11:18 PM ^
Beating one single team that is anywhere near as good as Oregon makes me quite envious. I wish Hoke had a victory anywhere near as good as that one in his tenure here.
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.
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.
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.
January 2nd, 2014 at 6:42 AM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 9:31 PM ^
Like if in 2014 MSU plays Notre Dame for the national championship and Arizona plays OSU in the Rose Bowl while Michigan sits at home after going 5-7.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:35 PM ^
Thank God I do not live in Michigan. It's going to be a long off-season.
Congrats to MSU
January 1st, 2014 at 8:43 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 9:02 PM ^
Once we go 7-6 or 8-5 next year, will coaching changes be made or will the status quo prevail?
2014 schedule is alot tougher than 2013 schedule
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.
January 1st, 2014 at 9:18 PM ^
January 2nd, 2014 at 2:48 AM ^
maybe we should write a "congratz on the ROSE BOWL!!!" above EL now.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:36 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 8:36 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 8:37 PM ^
January 1st, 2014 at 8:44 PM ^
Borges single-handedly loss 3 games for us this year.
Borges is AWFUL and has been all year.
Michigan didn't look as good as Stanford did versus MSU and played them at HOME.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:51 PM ^
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
January 1st, 2014 at 9:03 PM ^
but Hoke as well
11 losses in 2 season my friend
Open your eyes
January 1st, 2014 at 9:44 PM ^
Shaw's performance was a Borge's performance---just without the blinders on.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:38 PM ^
They earned it. It's as simple as that.
January 1st, 2014 at 8:39 PM ^
I'd bet Al was sitting at home cheering Shaw's final drive play calling.....that was the epitomy of Borges.
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.