A few simple stats and football encouragement
77, 72, 41.
Those are our national offensive rankings the past 3 years. An average of 63rd. Duing those years, the team has had 3 winning seasons and a BCS bowl.
Who was in 64th place in 2011?
Florida State, with an anemic run game worse tha Michigans in 2013, at 112 ypg. They were propped up by a decent to excellent pass game at 278 ypg, just 30 more than 2013 Michigan.
That was not an aberrant case. They had been trending down, with the 34th and 23rd offense in 2010 and 2009 respectively.
In 2012, they instantly bounced up to 9th with 205 rushing yards per game.
This isn't an exact comparison, but a mighty leap can be made, and I am confident it will be.
Took 'em TWO years to make the title.
Don't worry, I'll be sipping that Spring Game Kool-Aid on Saturday.
Love the optimism Blaze but other than the statsical similarities of the baseline what parallels do you see between FSU and us that makes you think we will make a similar jump?
Interesting you should ask. For one, FSU hd to replace their longtime NFL drafted LT with a freshman.
There wasn't like a major upgrade or something at QB though, right?
was still EJ manuel i believe in 2011 and 2012 , seem to remember watching a game or two of theirs and it was mentioned the oline was crazy young
i'm not 100% sure but didn't fsu have to play an extremely young O line 2 years ago? I think it was even younger than ours last year.
Shane Morris is the next James Winston (on the field only)???
Actually, to follow the parallels, you can pencil Witon Speight for the Heisman Trophy after the 2015 season. Apparently Shane has to get passed over in order for us to win it all.
The year before last, FSU played Florida and were bullied off the field. I watched that game and left thinking the Seminoles were a long way away from being elite, despite their excellent recruiting profile. They just weren't tough, for all the derision that word receives around here.
Somehow they turned it around last year, because that was no longer the case. I'd be interested to know how they made that turn.
I don't think we have the same player budget FSU does...
At least the way TeamRankings calculates this, our rushing offense when from 13th in Division I in 2011-12 to 41st and then 101st in the two seasons leading up to where we are now, Interestingly, our passing offense - in the same time - went from 88th in 2011 to 94th to 41st by their rankings last year. Splitting the offense into its requisite components makes the three-year trend even more illuminating, I would think.
Not that UM hasn't recruited well because they have, but not as well as FSU has. FSU had 5-star recruits every year. Here is the comparison (ESPN) from 2008-2012.
2008: FSU 12, UM 13
2009: FSU 8, UM 10
2010: FSU 6, UM 14
2011: FSU 1, UM NR
2012: FSU 2, UM 7
UM has pretty darned good talent, especially for the B1G, but they don't have FSU talent IMO.
Are you saying Michigan had 13 Five-Star recruits in 2008 and 14 in 2010? What do those numbers represent?
I wish
That is all
1. You would be better off looking at average stars because class size has an effect.
2. I would not use ESPN as the source.
3. You are using the Rich Rod years to predict where Michigan will go in the future and most of those players are gone.
If you look at average 247ranking between 2011 and 2014, there is very little difference between Michigan and Florida State with the exception of 2011 which was a split year and Brady Hoke had a late start. What has hurt Michigan is a roster decimated by players who were not on the roster for whatever the reason from the years recruited by Rich Rod.
Now it's up to Brady Hoke to show he can coach his players in addition to being a good recruiter.
I agaree with both of your points, but that really only reinforces that the talent FSU has is more usable and only further entrenches the point that FSU (2013) is well ahead of where UM can hope to be next year. I don't have access to 247 rankings I don't think...assuming it's a paid service. But, I'd be curious if you did a comparison of the number of 5-star recruits (247 rankings) in the same time span. I feel like UM doesn't have any in that time frame (Roh, Campbell, Stokes, and Dorsey who never came are the cloest I can think of but I doubt any were 5-stars). I'd be willing to guess FSU had at least one or two in every class.
A stat that I think is crazy and is based on some simple, unofficial math is 69 of the current 99 players listed on the roster are FR and SO level. That includes FR, RS FR, SO and RS SO and scholarship and non-scholarship players but it's pretty telling to the youth of this team. A team that will only get younger when the rest of the 2014 class gets to campus.
That's a little scary but also inspiring because when those players start becoming JRs and SRs this team should be a monster.
Until that happens upperclassmen like Frank Clark, Jake Ryan, Desmond Morgan, etc. really need to step up and take control and lead this team.
as our younger players mature. Even in 2015 when we have a new starting QB, I think we will continue to make improvements with our offense! I'm still optimistic about getting back to the 10 wins per year threshold in 2015. I'm not sure if we will win the B1G. There will probably be some big games where a coaching decision or mistake on the field could cost us winning the B1G east!