Dear Diary Lights the Tires and Kicks the Fires
Devin, I'm sorry about Funchess. Everybody liked him. I'm sorry.
Red or Blue. A week after a program-shattering loss turns fandom into an election year, with wins taking the place of electoral votes. This year's ballot has close races in quarterback, head coach, and AD, as well as referendums on blocking style, tempo, and punt formations.
On Saturday night those races appeared decided when everybody departed with eight minutes left of a two-score game against an opponent Michigan was outgaining. They'd seen the jewel of Rich Rodriguez's recruiting wasting an NCAA gift of a senior year in a new offense that still treated him like Tom Brady, so shell-shocked by years of abuse that any peripheral motion triggered desperation.
Then Shane, and the interception came, followed by the rain, and you could count the Hoke supporters by picking out the few hundred dots of blue or yellow between the blob of red. Everybody else looked at the scoreboard, looked at the radar, and recalled Michigan huddling—huddling!!!!—and calculated the obvious move. The 98,000 empty seats were a consensus: Hoke probably has to go, and Dave Brandon absolutely has to go first. The moment was stark, but it couldn't last, because stupid hope and the will to support your team is stronger than your brain's ability to store information it doesn't want.
The fanbase needs to have this conversation, and the diaries did just that. ST3 posted a curtailed Inside the Boxscore wherein his kid's quotes provided the subheads:
"Another huddle? Really?"
* Seriously, my son actually said that. I don't think he reads MGoBlog, and I hadn't said anything about tempo or huddling. So if a 9-year old can watch Utah succeeding with pace, watch Michigan plodding along, and gets exasperated at the huddling, why can't Brady figure this out?
Jhackney got home and thought about spiritual cleansings and what kind of coach doesn't wear a headset:
Dave Brandon is a whiz at marketing and salesmanship and Hoke is a whiz at clapping his hands while keeping his ears the same color tan of his face and running a clean program. There needs to be a coach that is involved in at least one side of the ball. Saban would mutilate your skull with his championship rings if you tried taking his head set away.
Every coach has inherent flaws—Nick Saban is an offensive dinosaur and doesn't care about his players beyond what they can do for him. It's whether the good things overcome those flaws. Hoke makes his program worse by willfully ignoring fundamental developments like the spread offense, tempo, the shield punt, and game theory. He and Mattison make it better by running it clean, recruiting excellent players and people, and building a strong defense. Like with political candidates, everybody's flawed; it's whether their angels or demons will come out ahead.
Best and Worst saw the fruit of Hoke's demonic seeds:
No, what killed my optimism about this team and this staff, about this program as it is currently stumbling through another shitty year, is how absolutely true-to-form it is to the dreams of the men in charge.
[…lights out on the Titanic.gif]
Ron Utah made the obvious comparison: we are experiencing a reverse Rich Rod. I'll add Bill Martin reversed to Dave Brandon and liken it to the classic two-party problem. Martin and Rodriguez alienated the crucial top of the fan pyramid with their Whiggish football ways, an inability to commit to a defensive faith resulting in total bedlam. Brandon went the other way; his Tory pandering alienated the students (SaddestTailgateEver on another little hoarded thing) and entitled alumni (dnak438 on his noodle exchange with Brandon) while Hoke's offense and special teams have repeatedly been derailed by dogma trumping sense.
Given most of the week to calm down, jmdblue wrote that he'd rather give Brady one more term to work things out while the upstarts drown themselves in their own corruptions. Unless someone can convince Colin Powell to run.
Etc. Alum96 reviewed the 2012 recruiting class to see if there was a development issue. If you don't compare against other schools though it means nothing, since most recruits don't play to their star rankings. Average size of each B1G team's offensive line starters. GIF about punting. Regular stats make M look good (see: outgained ND and Utah).
Best of the Board
 |
| Is it "bloviator" with an 'o' or "bloviater" an 'e'? |
The bloviators and stenographers who call themselves "journalists" have polluted the word to the degree that Brian Cook refers to himself as "…not a journalist; that's the point." I still believe in the classical meaning—credible person who provides information to the public—because there are still dudes like Daniel Okrent and John U. Bacon who define it. Here's Bacon getting a quote about how people at Michigan feel about their AD:
When you paid a few thousand bucks for your four tickets, and the guy sitting next to you got in for a couple of Cokes, do the department's leaders really think you will pony up for the same sky-high prices next year?
As longtime fan Peggy Collins Totin told me, "I feel betrayed for being loyal."
For comparison, here's the 20th item on a list that Gregg Henson is passing off as a petition signed by 450 former players sent to UM regents:
"2)Reminds me of Adolph Hitler"
So yeah, if this actually was a petition it's totally Godwin'd. Item 11 is about the corporations, and 13 is "Al Borges issues." Then he makes weird accusations about not hiring Miles or Harbaugh. Bacon mentioned on WTKA that there is a letter that players are signing—that doesn't mean it's Henson's letter.
Takeaways: From Bacon I gather that a million tiny papercuts are representative of a bloody fan sentiment against Dave Brandon's athletic directorship that is shared by former lettermen, who are also fans and have fan brains like the rest of us and therefore are probably reacting the same way we have been. So: the fans hate Dave Brandon. This isn't really news, and hasn't been news for awhile, and in that long while there's yet to be any evidence Brandon is on his way out.
DAMN YOU BOCCHER?
On our walk from [where we re-parked after] the 2013 Spring Game to our first event with him, I asked Marlin about the 2003 punting fiasco. He threw back his head and was like (paraphrasing) "oh God THAT punt formation. Don't even get me started on that! Everybody on that team HATES that rugby punt!"
Iawolve asked if the Boccher Punt Adventure might be influencing Brady, who wasn't with the 2003 team but certainly knew all the guys. Plausible, but if so it's an incorrect association because in that Iowa game they broke the shield to have those guys go headhunting. Maybe it's where that stubbornness comes from but I feel if that was in Hoke would have mentioned it one of the hundred times he was asked, because his knowledge of Michigan history is one of the things that we like about him.
HANG IN THERE KID
Lloyd's grandson has a tumor. Players visit.
OSU BAND CELEBRATES COOPER ERA
Ohio State band gets bored with beating current Michigans, tries to go back in time to beat 1990s Michigans, does not do so, settles for having Brutus beat old dudes in yellow sweaters. At one point they do the Time Warp with the stadium announcer performing the quotes. Unfortunately (presumably) nobody was in drag, so we still do that better.
Your Moment of Zen:
September 27th, 2014 at 5:28 AM ^
You don't understand why huddling while down 16 points with under 10 minutes to go is a problem? Your Harbaugh example holds no water as Harbaugh's teams are generally ahead and don't need to go to the hurry up. However, if you have watched any 49er games this season you probably have seen them go hurry up like they did against Arizona while down in the late 4th quarter. Hoke had every right to be criticized about huddling in that situation.
September 29th, 2014 at 9:03 AM ^
Look, I don't believe huddling or going Manball is a fireable offense. It was just the wrong offense for the personnel that they had, and that problem was exacerbated by going to extremes.
The thinking behind "if they tried to go faster than a snail right now..." is incorrect. Going faster in practice makes you better able to execute when you're going slower, but not vice-versa. Bo consistently used high tempo in practice to get his players more reps, and then they could block and run and pass better because they'd had more reps.
That's a practice issue. The game issue is that the inability to manage tempo has consistently stalled drives, burned timeouts, and forced Michigan to snap the ball before they've had time to ID the defense and coverage. It has also made it nigh impossible to come back from deficits. That Michigan was outgaining Utah and Notre Dame demonstrates that, minus extreme plays (turnovers), more possessions would have favored Michigan, yet Michigan lost several possessions by letting the clock slip away once they were down.
The point is that these things hurt the team. ALL coaches do things that hurt their teams or put some guys in bad positions, because coaches have to do what they know and are comfortable with. But the things the coach does well have to compensate for the things he doesn't do well, or else the coach has to improve on the things he doesn't do well. We constantly advocate for Hoke to do the things that he dosn't do well but are easy to learn, and tempo is right at the top of the list. It is a thing Brady CAN do with this team.
September 30th, 2014 at 3:08 AM ^
I disagree with the specific cases - namely, the 2014 offense needs to huddle, because if the they try to step it up a notch they'll come apart completely. Even when they're behind, because they're that bad.
I agree with the general case - Michigan needs to be able to run their offense faster and failing to add tempo to the offense is a failure on Hoke/Borges' part over the years they were here.
It is not clear to me if we should expect a new OC to come in, install a new system and ask players to run it at tempo right away. My recollection is that this usually leads to a rougher initial period as more mistakes are made, but that it pays off long-term as you get more reps and more information about what you can and cannot do.
Given that tradeoff, though, it would not be unreasonable for Nuss (or Hoke, if you believe that he dictates tempo) to say "let's get it right first then speed it up".
September 27th, 2014 at 10:59 AM ^
Anyone else make the connection of 98 and 7 to past football seasons, rather than qbs. Both were seasons with bad starts where Michigan rebounded to have decent, or better, seasons. Maybe it's just my polyanna-ish hope that we will scramble out of the quicksand and win some games.
Comments