Dear Diary Gets it All Wrong

Dear Diary,

My financial consultant generally is pretty good about predicting markets, knowing when to buy, when to hold, etc., so I invited him to join Misopogal and I as we hopped from tailgate to tailgate in our quest to procure tickets for Michigan vs. Michigan State.

On the way up, my consultant and I had agreed on a plan: We would spend pre-game trying to run into people we know, asking if they had singles with them. If not, we would wait until just after kickoff, when sellers were cursing their greed and desperate to pocket something before heading in. We had another ride lined up just in case not everyone got a ticket, our pockets were full of $10s and $5s, and we were ready – just in case – to bail for my consultant's 62-inch HDTV, where the DVR was running. I trusted this plan; my consultant has a degree in economics from Michigan State University, which I hear is a pretty good school.

At 1:30 p.m. my consultant started getting jittery. He wasn't accepting beers. He was muttering. At 2:00 p.m. he made a call: "We're not going to find tickets," and started toward the car.

I had dreamt of a Great Denardening, the exorcising of rebuilding demons against a pesky in-state rival, a victory to mark the nadir of the Dantonio era and give the local papers the loss they need to expose the program that put Glenn Winston back on the field.

Instead, I found myself in a lightless basement in front of a Matt Millen broadcast, muttering about "execution" in a room full of eight people educated by Mike Valenti, and my financial consultant - my little brother - calmly denying that holding ever occurs at Michigan State because Dantonio coaches them so well.

Whatever tickets actually cost outside the stadium at 3:35 p.m. yesterday, I would have paid it to be there instead of surrounded by people bent on extracting every juicy drop of Schadenfreude.* Sigh. Perhaps in two years…

Where We Went So Wrong

Though not so on purpose, there were an awful lot of bad prognosticators out there, as MGoDiarists spent most of the week predicting scores for the Michigan State game. Most thought it would be Michigan by 3 or 4 with scores in the 30s, suggesting we probably thought MSU was a slightly better Indiana. See:

In Chart:

He Picture-Paged My Life

There's little more I can add to BlueSeoul's epic picture-pages journey through the Indiana game, since Brian has used shots from it on virtually every front-page post this week. If you haven't read the whole thing yet, do so, because it's the one with lots of this:

And this:

On this play Roh is in a more traditional stack look.

But he doesn't see Doss coming in motion.

And because he doesn't go with Doss, it makes for an easy blocking assignment for the bubble screen.

Blueseoul has already won the Internet for this post, but he may now add Diarist of the Week honors. Also: now accepting ideas for Diarist of the Week trophies, preferably not something you probably picked up at Forwards in West Branch.

Our resident logoist (and sometime interviewer) Six Zero offered a new shirt design this week, honoring Phil Brabbs' fight against Multiple Myeloma (and his fight against Washington). How cool is it? LaMarr Woodley was seen in the stands yesterday with one of these bad boys on.

MGoCoach steve sharik also made pretty pictures for us this week. These break down the zone read "midline" play, which should have been useful against Michigan State (I thought I saw it twice, one on the dropped TD by Rountree, but I'm notoriously bad at picking this stuff out so don't trust me.).

Some 4-3 teams like to put their 3-technique away from the back.  If they do this, then the Mike is the backside B-gap defender.

If the defense puts the 3-technique to the back, then the 3-tech is the backside B-gap defender.

We also have some bad news in the picture department. monuMental's awesome (e.g. the now-I-can't-show-you Denard Action Figure) weekly backgrounds have had to cease because U-M and the Heisman Trust have lawyers on retainer with too little to do (that's just my opinion, not the blog's). This ends your weekly scheduled wallpaper for the foreseeable future. If, dear diary, your daddy was one of those stacks of legal papers used to shut down all things that don't make money, then I totally apologize, and please put (non-harmful) soap in his coffee.

Great Moments in Statistication

Meanwhile, Communist Football won a great victory for the proletariat over the evil capitalist empire, by ripping various offensive records from hoarding private databases, and sharing them in one common, Denard-celebrating central repository. Read it now before the numbers get updated with MSU stats and everything (note: not everything) goes to shit.

Rushing Yards by a QB, Single-Season

Denard currently has 905 rushing yards in 5 games. This projects to 2,172 over a 12-game schedule (yes, I am aware that stiffer competition is ahead). He has already destroyed the previous Michigan record for QB rushing yards in a season: 674 by Steve Smith in 1981.

...

And if you think Smith's 674 yards are shabby, at 56.2 yards per game—back in the days before Communist Football—keep in mind that Comrade Pryor, the second-most-heralded dual-threat QB in the country today, has rushed for 373 yards, or 74.6 yards per game. Denard is at 181.0 yards per game.

The Big Ten record is 1,270 by Antwaan Randle El of Indiana in 2000; the NCAA FBS record is 1,494 by Beau Morgan of Air Force in 1996. Both of these records are easily within reach. Denard only has to average 84.2 rushing yards a game over the rest of the regular season to break the NCAA FBS record.

The Mathlete was at it again with his PAN, trying to soothe our fears about this year being like last year (gee, why should I have such fears?). The Mathlete says that Michigan's offense is a lot better this year than it was last year. How much? I make chart, in PAN:

Based on the sets of numbers, Michigan initially has been 7 to 11 points-per-game better than year’s offensive unit. This represents a very high level of play.

The Mathlete won't go there, so I will: if Michigan's 2010 offense replaced last year's kind-of-capable offense, here's our 2009 season with 9 points more offense per game:

Ed (Miso): Woo 8-4! Thanks comments section for the catch.

This exercise is fruitless, but The Mathlete's really is not.

Laveranues did some analysis on something we brought up during the Indiana liveblog: when should Michigan try onside kicking? Answer: never? I get the feeling like this would be a great thing. Brian mentioned on the main page that he thinks there's 0% chance of this happening since the kickers have enough trouble just kicking field goals, but I'm with Laveranues: let's have one guy who practices nothing but perfectly placed onside kicks, and then do this 1/2 of the time.

If you're a chart fan, though, try out mistersuits's It means everything to them diary. We all agree that his "why" is baseless – Brian called him out too and you can see my response in the article - but the "what" is really interesting stuff about Michigan opponents and their tendency to go for it against us on 4th down.

After break, no more good Diary stuff, but you can read my bid for TWIS

*Dear Rich Rod: Stop Losing to Teams Called "State!"

For people whose job it is to exhort Schadenfreude, here's a list of Spartans who can't name eight members of their team, yet that will not stop them from haunting my life and my Facebook notification page for a third year in a row:

• My little brother
• My little brother's disc golf friends
• My little brother's girlfriend
• My sister (whose application to U-M grad school I just helped her write)
• My brother-in-law
• My sister-in-law
• My cousin, who was texting me before the game predicting Denard would not score a rushing TD and then we ended up betting a steak dinner on the game W/L, and I know is going to make me pay because he goes all out on this kind of shit.
• The IT guy who has to install every update of iTunes for my office computer because company policy says I can't install things on my own
• My brother's neighbor who's always out on his porch drinking a very strong vodka drink or another, and doesn't have a dog in this fight but thinks it's funny because Misopogal once told him it's funny to give me shit about this.
• That dude I was friends with when I was 12 who just reconnected on Facebook but only puts Sparty!!!!! updates on my wall and now has a Days Since Michigan Beat MSU in Basketball or Football counter up, as if the "Days Since Michigan Beat Ohio State in football" wasn't way way past that.
• …and doesn't believe me when I swear I care more about hockey than basketball because I came to Michigan in 1998 and would you rather root for Ellerbe in Crisler or Red in Yost?
• My brother-in-law's friends, who are always cool guys until someone mentions I'm Michigan and they go "auuwwwwwhhh. Sucks to be the little brother NOW doesn't it?"
• Every MSM sports outlet in Metro Detroit
• My father and brother's office partner, who's a big booster
• The guy in my office who used to have the MSU sports beat for a certain paper, and is pretty good-natured about the rivalry except he thinks I'm a homer for supporting Rich Rod and says so.
• Misopogal.
• Ohio State. We know you're laughing because your parents have a bigger house and you just have lots of baby sisters who never beat your pants off, but save the "I hope Michigan gets better so it'll be sweeter when we win crap" and remember that the reason we hate losing to Sparty most is that it makes it less likely we can beat your asses, which is all we want in the world.
• Misopogal's best friend who didn't even know they played but likes to "Like" everything MSU on Facebook then send me messages because at State the first thing they teach you is it's important to F with a Michigan fan whenever you can
• My sister-in-law's roommates
• The girl who is always at my mother-in-law's house like what-her-name-the-girl-who-was-friends-with-DJ-in-Full-House
• Misopogal again, because for some stupid reason the one thing I dislike most about her is she's a Spartan fan just because her brother used to let her party in East Lansing and now she has no idea why she's a State fan but refuses to change, and I figure if MSU goes back to being as unwatchable as the Lions she won't bother anymore, but since Michigan has never beat State since I've known her, this is getting harder and harder and srsly guys I'm a blogger for Michigan and deathly scared my wife will never stop being a fan of a school whose fandom is more about hating Michigan than celebrating anything cool about Michigan State.
• RCMB. Hey, Karma, what was this your three years off or something?