Resources: My charting, RU game notes, RU roster, CFBstats, Last Year

Yep they're still bad. But they sure can recruit running backs.

The film: Their more recent game against BC probably says more about Sitkowski if left in a clean pocket but their 30-0 blasting by Iowa the week before is closer to the level of competition Michigan's defense should present. And it lets us take a peek down the road, which I'd never do of course.

Personnel: My diagram:

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This is more or less the same group of guys as last year, minus a disappointing left tackle and a decent guard who transferred to an Ohio state university that to my knowledge doesn't have a football program. Texas Tech grad transfer quarterback McLane Carter has been ruled out for a concussion and anyway he was atrocious. That means we're back to Artur Sitkowski, who set some NCAA records last year as a true freshman for quarterback futility. He was a 4-star IMG prospect and looks it at times, but clearly all parties would have preferred to avoid using him this much in this part of his career, and his accuracy is such that I'm not sure the future is that bright either, especially after the licking he's taking.

The big difference now is they've finally recognized the one thing Rutgers is good at: recruiting running backs. RB/Slot Raheem Blackshear (+12/-1, –2 pass pro in my charting) remains on the field as a slot receiver/jet dude when he isn't the running back, and is asked to do all sorts of true receiver things he's pretty good at, and tight end things he's not. That's to get RB Isaih Pacheco (+7/-0, –0 pass pro) starter's minutes. You may remember Pacheco from such bad moments as "that Rutgers running back who outran our entire team one time." Brad Hawkins Apologists like me will be happy to know Pacheco is legit. Thus ends the list of Rutgers offensive personnel who would start on literally any other Big Ten team.

Since it's early in the year a quick reminder of how I do pass protection charting. A –1 is a pass protection that threatens the QB but is survivable, for example if an OT lets a DE around him at 7 yards the QB can still step up in the pocket. A –2 on a play equals death. You can get a –2 on one play if your block is so bad the quarterback has no way to get out of it. I divide this by the non-screen non-RPO pass snaps for a protection percentage. So if you've got two OTs at 90% you're giving up a sack every 10 pass plays.

The offensive line is as ugly as "remove the only half-decent players from the worst OL in the Power 5 and add a year" sounds. LT Raiqwon O'Neal (+2/-1, –7 pass pro) got to spend the day on the business end of star Iowa DE A.J. Epenesa, usually without tight end help. His 68% protection metric is [checks Ulizio] worse than any Michigan OL I've ever calculated this for, though also understandable for a 6'5" redshirt freshman going against a top ten pick. RT Kamaal Seymour (+2/-4, –5 pass pro) didn't face Epenesa, got TE help on almost every pass rush and still graded out at 77% so the trying not to be too mean things I said last year all still apply. All the guys inside had matching 82%s on pass protection, which is quite bad for interior OL but also largely Epenesa-induced. Returning LG Zach Venesky (+1/5/-5, –4) and C Michael Maietti (+1/-5, –4) were also mostly beat up by Iowa's bad DTs too. New RG Nick Krimin (+4/-3, –4) had a few impressive blocks that showed off his strength, earning most of those minuses for two false starts. As a group this line had 28 protection minuses and a 79% protection rating, which translates to giving up a sack on 37% of tries.

For this reason the tight end rarely goes out in a pattern. TE Matt Alaimo (+1.5/-3, –4) has just five pass targets on the season, and is no better than the interior OL. He's also the only option there, with Wisconsin grad transfer Kyle Penniston out indefinitely and their depth just H-back/fullback Brandon Meyers, who at 230 is still trying to grow out of being a running back.

The running backs don't stay in to pass protect either since they're the main receiving targets. Blackshear's numbers (9.4 yards per target, 81% catch rate, 255 yards and 2 TDs) are legit for a receiver, especially considering he has more than twice as many targets (22) as the next guy. The next guy is WR Bo Melton (10.9 YPT, 53% catch rate, 186 yards and a TD), who got bumped outside to keep Blackshear on the field and has been effective on long comebacks but otherwise shut down. Freshman WR Isaiah Washington (4.7 YPT, 36% catch rate, 52 yards) is the recipient of a lot of desperate chucks and throwaways because he's 6'3" and sorta fast. Yes they had a TE last year with the same name—no relation. This guy's just a tall dude who can run in a straight line. WR Mohamed Jabbie spells them, usually at slot. Nobody else gets much run.

[after THE JUMP: content about the Rutgers offense]

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Spread, Pro-Style, or Hybrid? Spread with an emphasis on screens (IE plays when nobody has to block please).

So it's a shotgun pass-because-we're-bound-to-be-behind outfit, with the run game heavily reliant on RPOs and screens. They usually jet motion the slot, because it's Blackshear and this gets him running outside sometimes. They want to get play-action going but the run game doesn't come out enough to make it scary. RPOs are mostly your garden variety bubble screen types to keep overhangs from getting too involved, or a hook that apes the look. They'll also run a fair amount of unbalanced sets, since nobody believes the tight end is going out in a route anyway and this way they can at least overload one side.

Basketball on Grass or MANBALL? Zone running, primarily inside zone favoring a backside cut off a double on the backside DT. The alternative is zone stretch. I charted just one power play.

Hurry it up or grind it out? Grindy. They don't huddle but they were 95th last year in tempo and that doesn't seem to have changed.

Quarterback Dilithium Level (Scale: 1 [Navarre] to 10 [Denard]): I gave Jack Coan a 2 last week and he ran in for a touchdown at the galloping speed of a solid 3. Sitkowski has 4 yards on 4 attempts that I didn't bother to remove sacks from because I'm not sure he's taken one. He gets a 3.

gfycat chose "paltrysandybuffalo" for the auto-generated link

Frames Janklin Factor: You would expect a team like Rutgers that starts a game like this 90% to lose would take more risks. On the other hand, Rutgers has an Aussie punter that got Iowa twitter flapping like they'd seen a glimpse of what heaven must be like. Punter Adam Korsak had 10 punts for 476 yards, two of which got returned for a total of 11 yards. He had a long of 69 (nice!). He put the ball on the Iowa 3, 11, 8, 8 again, 1, and 2. When you've got a weapon like that and an offense averaging 2.7 YPP on standard downs, do you go for it on 4th and 3 on your own 44 (he left it on the 3) when it's still 0-0 early? I probably would have advocated going for it on 4th and 2 on the Iowa 42 down 7-0 late in the 1st quarter, but when you've got a weapon like that I get it.

Dangerman:

No matter how many Rutger running backs decommit and become Heisman candidates elsewhere (we just saw one last weekend), they still manage to stockpile more. Last year Raheem Blackshear was the only thing they had going for them. He's still a nifty running back with more power than his stature would suggest:

Blackshear was their top receiver last year despite lining up at running back, and this year they've doubled down on that aspect of his game, running him as mostly a jetback slot receiver. Defenses know this and make sure to always have some extra material on him, so the Blackshear game is largely relegated to sideshow—his 18 plays in this game went for 1.61 yards per, none of which were his fault really. A quick summary of his usage since it's a substantial portion of this offense:

• Runs of 8, 6, 5, 4, and 2 on RPOs where he took the handoff, his blocking got beat, and he made something anyway.
• Runs of 5, 3, and 2 yards on a pitch sweep, jet sweep, and one under-center power run designed to just give him a chance to ball
• Eight screen or quick out patterns when the blocking didn't get set up or the quarterback couldn't get it out
• Two downfield throws where he finds a rare island amidst a sea of zones and the quarterback misses, one of which he almost dug out.

Blackshear had identically (9 catches, 126 or 130 yards) productive receiving days versus UMass and BC. Keeping him contained is well worth the extra manpower, which against this defense ought to be affordable.

Blackshear also got a few attempts to block, where he showed he's very willing, but due to his size, is also very reliant on the aspect of surprise. There wa one very ill-fated attempt at picking up a blitzer I won't show you because it brings back Toussaintian memories. There was also a split zone kickout on AJ Epenesa I will show you because this is the kind of thing you only get to do once in a football career, and it sets up our other star.

The blocking on this play is weird because LT Raiqwon O'Neal left the DT too early and the DT sorta tripped or got toppled by O'Neal's last shove and ended up not making a tackle attempt (I gave O'Neal the + for that). What's impressive about it is how RB Isaih Pacheco piloted around it it so smoothly, idling briefly then cutting past before the DT can recover. In contrast to Blackshear, the 13 plays for Pacheco went for an average 5.15 YPP, partly because Blackshear was out there as a distraction.

You no doubt remember his debut last year when Devin Gil got out of his lane and Pacheco outran Hawkins for 80 yards. He didn't do anything so dramatic here but he showed a lot more RB skills, especially a knack for setting up his blocks and pressing one gap before going out another.

Pacheco too is heavily used in the screen game and regular passing game. Rutgers will often run out both of them, motion them to a five-wide set, and run regular passing routes. Sometimes they even look like a downright respectable offense doing so:

This turned out to be an isolated incident, mostly because they were getting Epenesa'd.

HenneChart:

Most of those INs for both quarterbacks were with the pocket about to break down or while on the run. Sitkowski especially needs to be set, when he can operate like the machinic distributor he was no doubt trained to be over many years of quarterback training. You can see that in his numbers against BC, while this is the flipside: with Epenesa regularly crumpling the pocket, Sitkowski was throwing off his back foot or rolling somewhere, and then no mascot was safe.

OVERVIEW:

Michigan could stand to focus less on the Ronnie Bells opened up by the focus on Nico and Black, and just chuck the ball at Nico. Rutgers is the opposite: they have two guys at the same position who belong in the Power 5, and will spend all afternoon gamely trying to keep anyone else from mattering.

Iowa played these guys right: sit back, rush four, and don't worry about things too deep after the fade moment has passed, so long as you can get those four to generate pressure. Rutgers is mostly likely counting on it, and planning to get the ball out fast. You don't have just three sacks with this kind of line without a super-light trigger.

This will be a welcome return to the first few weeks after Wisconsin's pile of meat. Often the best thing Rutgers can get out of their blocking is they fall down at the right spot:

Or at best a ton of ridiculous holding that the very understanding Big Ten officials won't call because c'mon you guys, they're trying, and it's the 150th anniversary of when they discovered 20 on 20 soccer or something.

The run game is based on keeping the linebackers away at all costs, a tradeoff defenses are often willing to make because the Rutgers OL isn't going you punish your front too badly before the help gets back from their backpedals. The overwhelming majority of Run+'s I charted were the running backs making chicken salad. Here's Blackshear getting +2 while salvaging a bad RPO read and some bad blocking:

Notably their nominal offensive coordinator, John McNulty, is on the sideline, while wide receivers coach Lester Erb is calling plays from the booth. McNulty was a nobody NFL assistant attractive to Rutgers and Rutgers only because he was the OC there under Greg Schiano, Schiano references being good for the feels in the realm of Rutger.

Erb's resume isn't much better—he was the WR coach under Kirk Ferentz for the 2000s before getting bumped to RBs for our own Erik Campbell, which means it was Erb's mess Soup did such a great job cleaning up, and Erb's room that inspired Angry Iowa Running Back Hating God. Since then he did a stint at Nevada and came to Rutgers in 2017, both still at RBs. Iowa didn't bother doing anything fancier than rush four and cover 2 (I charted exactly 3 blitzes) and the stuff Rutgers was doing could be seen a mile away. They are very much a pro guys who don't understand spread offense trying to spread offense because they have no choice kind of staff. If you're feeling down about how it sometimes feels like our offense isn't even trying to get yards, watch theirs sometimes. Like the "let's roll toward Epenesa with no blocking" play:

Or the marginally superior "let's roll toward Epenesa with blocking" play:

Or the "let's not block anybody" play:

Or don't, because they actually get the ball to their best players. But in this world there is balance.