Yeah we learned that last year against Georgia didn’t we.
 

Same could be said for an air attack that can’t run. Just need to find a healthy balance or at least be dangerous enough in the passing game when called upon - survey says this seems unlikely this year. 

Yeah, this must have been what it felt like in the 1970s. You know you have a good team, and you know your team has an obvious flaw, but because of your schedule, you really don't know how the end of the season will play out when you finally face the other good teams.

Anyone that understands football knows this. It's never good to be one dimensional or too predictable. People just don't feel the need to keep beating it to death. It's not NC or bust every year.

I guess I don’t understand how the theme that we don’t have a “functional” passing offense has come to be. Maybe it’s just that expectations rose and we didn’t notice it. 
 

Last year, our starting QB was ranked #56 in passing efficiency. Middle of the pack. Arguably functional, but clearly not enough to win a national championship, as noted in the Georgia game.

This year our starting QB is ranked #18 in passing efficiency. Certainly not elite, but absolutely “functional”, at least on a relative basis. I think we would all agree the passing attack is not where we want it to be, but we are obviously still performing at a higher level than last year, and we have a plethora of data/metrics to show that. 
 

Among them, a top 5 scoring offense, a punter often as busy as the Maytag repairman, and a deadly yards per play average on play action fake plays (which I’m hoping we are saving for OSU since we don’t seem to call as many as I would expect). 
 

All this with a true sophomore QB who stands to get better with more experience (even if not as quickly as we’d like). 
 

So, at the least, I think a pretty good case can be made that we are “functional” in the passing game, with a reasonable chance for further improvement at the end of the year. 

I have a very strong feeling that Jim Harbaugh has a very good clue regarding this matter. There have been times in the last several games where defenses have walked the safeties up-putting 9 in the box and Jim did not care and they still could not stop Michigan from grinding out 5+ yard runs-and shoe-string tackles away from taking it 70 yards to the house. And there has to be a point to Jim doing this-beyond the game being played at the moment. He is daring, and wanting, OSU to believe they have to bring those safeties up too-and they will pay both for doing so or not doing so...they "get to" pick their poison.

As a coach, one of your significant strategies is to force teams to play in schemes and styles that are outside of their character...because they never do it well on a one-time basis. I had the great pleasure of playing for a great coach who was a master at this-and we won many games where we had no business even being strongly competitive-because of this "one-time" strategy. And for the consummate hand-wringers in this regard, JJ can make teams pay-regardless of how they try to force him to play. The game still needs to slow down just a split-second longer for him...and when it does it will be a glorious thing to behold. And Jim Knowles is not sure what to do with this because disguising pass coverages is much easier than confusing the blocking schemes this Michigan OL is employing and the (quadruple) reads JJ is making. Contrary to popular belief on this forum, all those pundit experts out there and all the OSU sites, JJ can throw the ball-may have the best arm talent of all these terrific young college QBs now playing. And regarding OSU-they do not have anyone in the front seven who can run with JJ. 

That's all...worry if you wish.

I suppose I'm in that *crowd* of people - running the ball, controlling TOP and wearing down defenses - this is clearly what we do well against inferior competition and I like winning. So, I like this strategy.

But it would make me feel better to see us connect on a 30+ yard pass play. 

I'm with Seth (I think): we're winning games, and that's fine with me.

Of course you're right Mr. asagoblin (may I call you ThadMatt?), our passing will need to be better weaponized. 

However, the fact that the team has had success passing makes me think of the transitive property of football wins. Though the transitive property has some validity in football, it's a weak predictor.

Similarly, I think that though passing hasn't been stellar lately, that doesn't mean it can't be stellar through the next games.

We do seem to have two vocal outlier groups in the fanbase: one group acts as though the sky is falling, no matter the performance, and the counter group insists that nobody is ever allowed to complain, ever, and if you do, not only are you a simpleton, but you aren't a real fan. The fact remains Harbaugh has beaten OSU once, and has won 1 bowl game while at Michigan, in all the other years those two games were typically our worst performances of the year, either in the score line, or in team discipline, where those genius plays that we'd been "saving" all year were supposed to come out and carry the day. After we dominated Ohio State last year, Georgia dominated us on both sides of the ball, from kickoff to final whistle. While it's possible we're far better than we let on, and we're just sandbagging in guaranteed wins, there does exist a very large body of evidence countering that hypothesis that you have to ignore to believe so. We need to be a more complete team, and have a reliable passing offense, or we'll continue to get embarrassed in January.

I mean, they're all wearing cups, and Sainristil more flipped him than anything.  His jools were probably fine.  The landing was far scarier; fortunately he landed on the broad part of his back.

Not necessarily to the hospital. I caught a solid surface hard right on the boys, and though I was incapacitated for about 5 minutes and had vivid purple coloration for a couple weeks.

And I know the difference: another time pitching softball, a line drive seemed to hit me right on the dong but instead it hit my upper, inner thigh, with vivid purple coloration there. (I've got a picture, if anyone's interested.)

I think Harbaugh's thinking was that we would get the ball back after halftime so we didn't need to do anything risky. The problem was that we had over 4 minutes to go when we got the ball and we just let it bleed down to under 5 on the play clock on multiple plays with no sense of urgency. Also, giving the ball back to Logan Smothers at their 30 shouldn't cause you to play conservatively. There is not much of a chance of that guy airing it out and going down the field with under a minute to go before halftime.

I think it was an honest mistake that Harbaugh admitted to in the post game presser.  It looked like they were going to call TO but the penalty temporarily stopped the clock, then Harbaugh rightly so declined the penalty, but then everyone forgot the clock would start on the ready for play.  Shouldn't happen but that's what happened.  Harbaugh would have called TO if he realized the situation.  This is speaking to a few plays after the 4th down delay which I thought was appropriate as you don't want to be stopped on 4th with 45 seconds left.  

I get the feeling this is the kind of program Dave Brandon always wanted.

FIFY. It's a massive misconception that Hoke was the driver of our manball offense while he was here. Borges came with him from SDSU, where they ran a West Coast passing spread. It defies logic that he would all of a sudden decide that manball is the way to go, regardless of how poorly it fit our personnel. Plus the dude was a DL coach through and through (there are even quotes from recruits' parents describing how he would introduce himself not as the head coach, but as a defensive line coach); I doubt he cared much one way or the other what offense his teams ran (similar to Harbaugh's position on defense). 

So, on the one hand, you can pretty much throw out the notion that Hoke drove our offensive scheme (and it clearly wasn't Borges either, he was always a West Coast offense guy), and on another, it's been confirmed that Brandon meddled in the inner workings of the football team way more than any AD should. The logical conclusion is that Brandon forced manball on Hoke...

Wins can be exciting as well as stress free. They are not mutually exclusive.

Watching that play, I thought that guy was about to break his neck - I'm sure the Nebraska sideline thought the same thing.

I enjoy the HBO plays.