Hokepoints: Denard Under Center

It was a good read for me on a Wednesday morning in Shanghai. Always good to see fellow Wolverines in town. You doing the game at Gold Cider Club on Sunday morning?

That you speak of te blocking with no mention of one AJ Williams

He's averaging 117 yds/gm. That would be 1521 yards on the year. I would argue that, given our current coaching staff and their propensity for the WCO, we are lucky that his rushing is even this high so far.

Exactly. I really wish that the Air Force game wasn't so tight so they could have experimented a little more against a decent, but not great opponent. I am not sure what they did in the UMass game because it isn't reflected above and I'm not sure that would have been the best test subject anyway. I would like to see them try this a little more on some weaker opponents down the stretch, if they get up a couple of scores. The problem is Illinois and Minnesota seem to be the only teams that fit the bill the rest of the season.

I was confused initially as well but it's ranked by yards per attempt. hope that helps

I sorted by yards per attempt. Rating would have been the other but as I mentioned below rating is thrown off by having four INTs already when he's really responsible for like 1.5. When we were comparing Tate to Threetsheridammit one thing that jumped out to me was how the YPA matched what we saw as better passers much more so than other stats.

Good point. When I evaluate quarterbacks, I only look at the number of throws they made.../s

Besides rating, what do you actually think is better?

Craig Ross is shaking his fist at you right now. He considers YPA to be the single most important offensive statistic there is, let alone for a QB.

I think people are focusing too much on the ranking of Denard as #1 and not enough on the top 9 put up by Seth and the Sparties. The point is, no B1G QB is covering himself in glory right now, so if you squint at the data hard enough you can sort of make a case for Denard's being the brightest of all the tires on fire.

Yards per attempt is probably the least important QB statistic on that list

Wow, I strongly disagree here. I think YPA is the best measure out there. It answers a very straightforward question: how productive is a QB when he throws a pass? QBs with high YPA are throwing - and completing - challenging throws.  Because those throws may be difficult, his completion percentage may not be great, but the payoff when passes are completed is large.  One 50-yard completion moves the ball more than six 7-yard completions.

Completion percentage, in contrast, can often be dependent on play calling. If a QB is simply asked to throw dumpoffs and screens all day, he can put up a pretty good completion percentage but may not be doing enough to move the chains. MSU's Andrew Maxwell to date is a prime example of this. In the ND game, he completed over half his attempts, but averaged just four yards per attempt, which is horrible.  Time and again he completed passes short of the first-down marker.  If it's 3rd and 7 and you complete a four-yarder, that helps your completion percentage but doesn't do much for the team.

I don't think the Michigan schedule can possibly work against Denard here.  Pretty much every Big Ten team has played at least one terrible opponent.  UMass is not that much worse than New Hampshire, CMU, etc.  OTOH, Denard has faced by far the toughest opponent of any QB in the conference in Alabama.

Linear, based on getting the same number of attempts as last year so you can compare the two against each other. So like 25 Dead-Ons vs. 22 last year, etc.

So...you're giving him credit for a touchdown pass that wasn't a touchdown, and you're saying he's the best quarterback in the country despite all his turnovers, two pick-sixes, and poor completion percentage?  But hey, he ran all over Air Force and UMass, so that's all that matters...

If, as you say, the I-form was making up for the accuracy inefficiencies with more big plays then that should be reflected in the YPA. It's not. And that's with Michigan running out of that formation 56% of time. I tried them together, and I tried them split up, and when I split them up I immediately saw that the yards per attempt and the accuracy rating for the I-form matched the Shotgun, while the Ace rocketed off.

That was when I realized it's probably not footwork but more time to throw that was probably causing it. Look down at the protection metric and see how clean the O-line kept Denard when we went Ace, despite more pass rushers.

I kind of had an inkling with this since I've done the Shotgun vs. Ace vs. I-form thing from the UFR database three times in the last year and knew the Ace had some weirdly high effectualness (if that's a word).

When I did the "Football hmmm" series over the summer I delved deeply into what I thought were the strengths of an I-form "MANBALL" offense. The great glory of the I-form is that it gets a running back moving forward with a lead blocker and momentum. If you have Aaron Shea lead-blocking for Anthony Thomas while betting that Steve Hutchinson and David Brandt are coming out ahead in their one-on-one matchups, then wheeeeee until somehone hits A-Train and he falls forward (he always fell forward) for an extra two yards to give Michigan its 1 millionth 2nd and 4. If you're trying this with Vincent Smith and Stephen Hopkins...

I don't like that you've accused me of 'subconsciously massaging' the data, for one because I'm not Brian and have my own damn set of biases and zealotry, and two because I was very consciously going in trying to find evidence that MANBALL was actually working, or specifically that the footwork coaches talk so much about--cadenced by drop-back passing--was perhaps a key to Denard accuracy. Instead I got surprised: it's the West Coast stuff that's actually having great success.

I think Borges is with me on this. Think back to that goal line formation we used so much early last year, when Michigan would line up in the I-form and then motion Smith to the flanker, thus turning the formation into an Ace set with Hopkins as the 1-back. What Michigan was doing with that was making the defense go "Big" with its personnel, but then not running Big because we don't have that personnel yet. This has been the crux of most of the formation hand-wringing from both me and Brian, not that the offense itself sucks but that most of Michigan's starting personnel from 2011 through 2013 are guys whose strengths tend toward a spread running game, and whose weaknesses are more apparent in an ISO game. If we had 5 Lewans and De'Veon Bell, or, say, Michigan's 1999 personnel, I'd be singing hymns of rock-pounding. What we've got is Toussaint/Smith, Mealer/Schofield/Barnum/Omameh and, you know, Denard.

And most importantly, please note that the entire crux of this article in the end is that Borges is doing a magnificent job with the fusion cuisine. He has come much further toward the spread than he's asked the offense to come to him. And also note that this particular very effective changeup we're discussing is the exact strategy that he is an expert in: West Coast (not MANBALL). Michigan is 75% the offense that the players were recruited for, 12% the offense that Borges literally wrote the book on, and 13% the offense that Brady Hoke would have us become again someday. If this offense was a pitcher, it's a guy with a wicked unhittable 2-seamer, a changeup with perfect mechanics, and a regular fastball that on its own wouldn't scare anybody but in context works as well as a the 2-seamer. In other words it's Max Scherzer; is there any problem with saying that Scherzer shouldn't try to be Justin Verlander?