Mailbag!

Brian,

Not sure if you've addressed this, but what's your take on Brandon Graham vs. Lamar Woodley as seniors?  Graham has been putting up Tacopants-esque numbers in UFRs and has to deal with some blatant holding no-calls on a regular basis.  I know Woodley was similarly beast-like, but how do they compare?

Steve

I've been thinking about this myself: I think Graham is better. I haven't gone over the UFR numbers yet—slightly busy this time of year—but I know Graham set a record against Michigan State earlier this year and has been owning offensive tackles all year. Woodley set standards by being consistently around +8 or +9 with forays up to 12; Graham's baseline is around 12 and ranges up to 18. NFL backup: at this point he's probably going to be a higher pick than Woodley, who managed to fall to the second round, was.

Graham's numbers are going to end up better than those of Woodley, who finished his senior year with these stats:

Recorded 36 tackles (28 solos) and led the team for the second straight year with 12 sacks for minus 119 yards and 16.5 stops for losses totaling 131 yards…His 119 sack yards are the most ever by a Michigan player in a season…Also recovered four fumbles, returning one 54 yards for a touchdown…Tied the school season-record with four forced fumbles.

With three or four games left, Graham has 44 tackles, 17(!) TFLs, and 6.5 sacks. He'd have more sacks if the secondary ever covered anyone. He's spent large sections of the year battling double teams. He's not playing next to Alan Branch or in front of David Harris, Shawn Crable, and Prescott Burgess, so teams have far more leeway when it comes to blocking him, and he's still regularly crushing plays in the backfield. He makes a ton of plays that don't even show up in the stats, too.

If we're just going on senior-year production, I think it's Graham. At some point during the Penn State UFR I fired off an email to Dr. Saturday that was basically "Brandon Graham is an All-American; the rest of the defense makes me cry." Dr. Saturday might listen; no one else is going to pick out a player on a terrible defense for post-season awards, no matter how richly deserved they are.

Brian –

I think one of the reasons we all suspected a decent turnaround this season was that there was no way the team could repeat as having the worst TO margin in the country.  At this point in the season that has not happened, and it is stunning to me.  I wanted your thoughts on the subject.

Look at the infamous drive from Saturday.  Regardless of how that turned out, the play calling at the goal line, the inept OL play at the goal line, whether the refs got it correct on the reviews*, or how it turned out Michigan fumbled the ball THREE TIMES on that drive.  Forcier fumbled and Moosman recovered.  Roundtree fumbled and was ruled down.  Minor fumbled and was ruled down.  How can three different players fumble the ball on the same drive
???   That isn’t random luck, that’s a systemic problem, isn’t it
?? 

• I can understand why our defense isn’t creating take-away opportunities, because they suck.
• I can understand that freshmen QB’s are going to be turn-over prone and that Robinson is responsible for a ton of those.  (However, if you would have told me that the Forcier/Robinson pair would have been as inept as the Threet/Sheridan pair I would have slapped you in the face.)
• I can understand to some extent that Brown and Minor would never be mistaken for Mike Hart. 

But something is broken here.  Is it talent?  Is it coaching?  Is it something else? 

I mentioned this in a bullet at the end of the game column yesterday, citing a diary post that put Rodriguez's pre-Michigan numbers in a nice table so you could see them:

Here are the Michigan numbers:

So we've got three negative teams here: Rodriguez's 3-8 opening season in Morgantown and the last two at Michigan. You could argue that the turnovers caused the crappy records of those teams, but a quick glance at the yardage for and against—not so good—suggests that the relationship is the inverse: the crappy teams' crappiness is exacerbated by lots of turnover issues.

The defense sucking is apparent: 20 turnovers last year and on pace for maybe 17 this year, numbers lower than any Rodriguez had at West Virginia and approximately 60% of the WVU average. The offense is running at a 40% higher  turnover clip, too. It is a wholesale failure.

The emailer ran down three reasons, all of which I think apply to the situation, and left one out: poor pass protection. Turnovers are pretty random but not entirely so, and the one thing that consistently causes them is pressure on the quarterback. See: Kirk Cousins in the MSU game, who turned the ball over three times because he got hit as he threw or was stripped as he was sacked. Quarterbacks naturally turn the ball over more than anyone else, but only if they're getting pressure. Michigan's combination of freshman quarterbacks and a leaky offensive line is murder for TO margin, especially when those quarterbacks are as raw as Robinson or as moxified as Forcier.

Rodriguez does not have a history of lots of turnovers on offense so the assumption here is that the last two years of butterfingers are a talent issue, not a coaching one. Michigan's failure to acquire turnovers is obviously a talent issue, too, but could have some coaching components to it since Jeff Casteel stuck with WVU. It's too early to tell in Robinson's first year.

Hi Brian, long time reader and listener,

Seems to me the Oregon team looks a lot like Michigan is supposed to.  Chip Kelly, who studied under Rodriguez, isn't even in a full year and has a team that looks cohesive and fully engaged in the spread system.  I know they were a spread team before, but it still doesn't make sense that there is no comparison between the two teams. 

I guess my question is, hasn't Rodriguez had enough time to recruit those fast players, even if the team is not yet complete enough to win like Oregon?  Michigan has all these smaller guys but still seems as slow as it ever has. Why the glaring differences?

Nick

Chip Kelly is in his third year at Oregon. Mike Bellotti brought him in as offensive coordinator before the 2007 season after Kelly's spread 'n' shred at New Hampshire tore up I-AA defenses. Bellotti had also been an offensive coordinator elevated to head coach when Rich Brooks left Oregon in 1994. Oregon set up a smooth coach-in-waiting transition and avoided any unusual attrition in the changeover.

As far as the offense: in 2005, Oregon moved from a traditional passing attack with Joey Harrington under center to a spread 'n' shred when Bellotti hired Gary Crowton. Only redshirt seniors were recruited with a different offense in mind..Oregon is in year five of a transition period that had its ugly moments, like a 38-8 loss to BYU in the Las Vegas Bowl, and never had the sort of black hole at quarterback Michigan did. Jeremiah Masoli was a third-string sophomore JUCO transfer; Michigan's third string quarterback is Nick Sheridan.

So, yes, Chip Kelly is a first-year head coach but this was essentially an internal transition for a team already set up to run a spread 'n' shred.

Q: Has an RR offense ever featured running back screens? I know we do the bubble stuff and the RB wheel routes and flats, but what about a more traditional screen? It seems like Abundance of RB Talent Relative to WR Talent + Opposing Defenses Knowing They Can Overwhelm the OL With Blitzes should = Let’s At Least Try a Few Screens and Maybe One of Them Will Go to the House.

Yours,

Willie Beavers

I don't think so. Michigan's used a flare screen several times this year—Carlos Brown scored a 60-yard touchdown against Indiana on it—but the traditional drop-back-and loft-it-over-a-zillion-guys screen is not a staple of the offense. I'm not sure why, but I get the impression that it wouldn't work very well because it would be easy to scout: oh the tailback is running in this direction, which is unlike any of the directions he usually runs because it's not a stretch play it's probably this thing we saw on film and is not very disguised.

Yep these are my readers, I steal from Simmons, go:

It's not the city of trees, but 17 trees and counting are missing branches of various length in New York City.

RAGE!

For those wondering what this means, I promised to rip a branch off every tree in Ann Arbor if we lost.