Michigan Museday is Uncomfortable Under Center

if we succeed, it's skill/talent?  And if we make mistakes, it's bad luck?

You can have a fullback and a halfback in a shotgun formation.  Christ, use a modified pistol formation with denard, a fullback, and a tailback all in a line.  Call it the Super-I.

The only results based charting you need to look at here is yards per carry. We get a lot more out of the shotgun. I felt it was obvious to everyone watching the game that our offense was struggling. We don't need play action from the I when we have Denard. Just having the ball in his hand with him as a running threat (ie shotgun) holds the linebackers the way play action is supposed to. So if you aren't getting the running back production out of the I it doesn't make sense to use it. Now every team needs to switch up the looks once in a while but I agree with some of the posters above that I would rather it be like 80% shotgun.

I would be interested in seeing what the breakdown is for yards per carry for our running backs out of shotgun vs. the I. I am guessing (small sample size caveats apply) that the non-Denard average is also better out of the shotgun, because a defender has to account for Denard's legs even when he doesn't run it. In most circumstances, Denard's legs are less of a threat when he's under center.

1. A lot of people have said that. I re-watched again (after several times last night while writing) and, well, what can I say? It was an excellent playcall and excellently executed and I guess it plays to the strengths of the players we have, and... I give up: this is the type of under-center play that when executed like this the personnel we have is perfect because they need to respect Denard's legs and that made ND overcommit to the play action, and it also works because Smith jet-bugged away from a tackle that probably catches A-Train or Perry.

2. Again, you got me. I went beyond the scope of my article there. The point was only to assess formations. The statement is true (even under center they use 3- and 4-receiver sets) but I didn't show that in this article.

3. I don't disagree that Denard can run a pro form offense. Vick's the closest thing in the NFL to Denard and he's mighty effective. Denard is a B+ pocket QB who can probably get to A- if given enough time to get comfortable with the footwork and knowing where everyone's gonna be so he can find McColgan open, etc. However he's an A+ spread QB. Either way he is more effective running pro concepts out of the shotgun than from under center.

The Smith TD wasn't luck because it was a good play call and mostly well executed less one really big missed block. You could say we got "lucky" with the three guys Smith dodged but I could say we got "unlucky" that Lewan missed his guy.

Having your Quarterback go 1-on-5 with every closing in on him and still get 7 yards is lucky even for Denard.

That's the big thing, isn't it? There's this whole narrative of "spread doesn't work" and "Hoke's coming in to go back to MICHIGAN offense." But then there's the real story which was that RR was a one-trick pony who built an awesome offense and was an unmitigated disaster almost everywhere else. The Drew Sharps of the world are the ones toting a mandate for offensive change as the defining characteristic of the coaching change. On the opposite end there's Smart Football saying using Denard like he's Brian Griese is downright criminal.

The "Spread" is such a misnomer now anyway. Michigan this year has actually been devastating from a Shotgun max protect formation (two flanking backs and a tight end). 

Really what this is about is shotgun versus under-center. Putting a QB under center, unless you're going to put all the backs there with him and run a Triple-Option, is how you protect him from having to move around so much. Do that with an effective running game and the defense has to cheat on play action and then you are free to unload your Tom Brady upon them. "Old School" offense didn't become so popular because there's an inherent rightness to it; it's awesome because it found a way to minimize the necessity for your quarterback to be a great running back too, allowing teams that could run it effectively (ie recruit an entire offense to compliment) to unleash Howitzer QBs upon defenses. You couldn't do that from the Wishbone, is why the great offenses of the '70s and '80s went with Triple-Option attacks. The I-Form specifically is a run formation that gives you mass going forward like the Wishbone but it's easier to pass from once you've forced the defense to cheat against the run. It's a particularly bad fit for Denard because it limits the very things he's best at. The only worse formation would be the Pro Set (used extensively by Carr in the Griese/Brady/Navarre/Henne years).

This shotgun's major weakness is you can't run out of it very well unless a) Your passing is so effective it makes the D susceptible to draws, or b) Your QB is so mobile (and O-line so agile) that if the D leaves its running lanes to pass protect he's liable to break a huge gain.

With Denard they have to respect the run every time he has the ball in his hands. So everything you accomplish by running ISOs and Dives out of the I-form you already get by putting Denard in the Shotgun. 

That's fine. I'm not bitching about the playcalling right now so much as saying I think there's a clear difference at this point in efficacy between shotgun and under-center. Improving the latter comes at the cost of efficiency. I'm willing to do that against Western and Eastern but wasting three snaps on trying to establish Hopkins as a run threat out of the I-form is a little unproductive when you're running against Nix and Te'o.

I have that -- did that at the same time. I'll post on Google docs tonight and you can take a look.

Confirmation bias is what you're saying, but that's not at all what I did. This came together pretty unorganized: I spent most of my evening getting the data organized then watching the game again to chart which plays were which. Only then did I think to post just the under-center plays instead of the whole chart. And only after screwing around in Pivot Tables did I stumble across the big disparity in rush yardage between the two sets.

This isn't an indictment of the I-form as a concept, or even as something Michigan can run. It's saying that results-based charting isn't giving a full picture of the efficacy of the two sets.

A big thing I noticed that ended up not being part of the scope of the final article was how they tweaked the shotgun plays. On the first (and only) Hopkins run from the gun there's a DT who  beats (Barnum? Molk? couldn't see) and Hopkins doesn't bounce far enough from him to get into the otherwise pretty big hole. If he gets past that great play by the DL, the play basically puts Hopkins one-on-one with momentum against a linebacker 3 yards downfield. Later Michigan ran this same play except Denard had a loooooong mesh and then pulled the ball and FOLLOWED the RB. Sure enough the same hole was there except Denard got past the DL better than Hopkins can and instead of one-on-one with that LB there was a lead blocker to spring Denard for big gains. They did this at least twice for 20+ yards.

If you're looking for evidence of how Borges is tweaking the Spread 'n Shred positively, that's a great example of something RR's teams only ever did by accident after a QB should have handed off and instead pulled and had to follow his RB.

I'm REALLY excited to see what else Borges can do with these guys from the Gun. RR was all about getting a waterbug one-on-one with a guy in space but getting Denard 2-on-1 with a lead blocker is a recipe for being like dang. Meanwhile I'm fine with using some plays here and there (especially against Eastern) to continue refining Pro concepts, especially the way they use receivers and timing. I just don't see that as being Denard's forte -- he's the opposite of a robot out there and seems to resort to his instincts faster than trusting a rote.

I agreed with you up to the guy out of position part.  The guy he "outran" was actually a DT who read the play pretty well and actually got a hand on Smith because Smith was forced to juke the first guy inside.  If the first guy gets any more of Smith, the DT makes the play.  Anything but a poor play by the guy Lewan missed makes this a one yard gain.  

Great play design, poor execution, and thankfully saved by Smith.

That's pretty rough criticism for 1200 words. Would you care to elaborate, or, you know, offer something productive?

UPDATE: if you thought that was long, I urge you to skip Dear Diary this week because it's Looooooong. This is entirely the fault of too many good diaries. Why am I telling you this anyway? Sorry I killed your cat.

In this game the play action was very successful. The long passes were mostly out of I form play action. But I think Denard will always have time to throw because teams rarely do an all out blitz on him because if you get out of your lane he is gone. And if that's the case, the play action doesn't add a whole lot. I think he could have chucked the ball up to a receiver from the shotgun or play action and the footwork would have been better from him in shotgun.

And I totally agree that the problems with the offense so far are not because the scheme is bad. I just think, for now, Denard is much more effective in the shotgun. By the end of the year or next year, who knows.

I though this was the most useful in terms of actually introducing facts into the debate

You say 1 in spread. Mispogottn says 2. Any idea why?

It skews the yardage gained a bit too. If every 3rd and 1 or 2 you run out of the I, where the goal is to get one or two yards, it can be very successful, but doesn't give you a big yardage output. (Yeah you could break it...but that's not really what the blocking is designed to do. You don't instruct the player to bounce outside so he can go to the house when he's more likely to lose yards and not get the 1st).  And A shotgun play isn't going to be a run play out of short yardage situations, but only long ones. So there's no skewing it down.

Which ties into why the sack in the shotgun was put as a passing loss, rather than a running one.  Beyond going against old school statistics, in the modern sense, can you really say when Denard is running or not? I mean, you can tell the designed plays, sure...but for that to be fair, any time (from any formation) Denard took a pass play and took off with it, breaking it big, you'd have to count that as passing yards. You can't just take out the negative from the shotgun because it suits the meme, but leave the positives in.

I disagree. The best part about the passing offense is that Borges is a passing master and while it'll take some time to learn them all, his routes will end up being way more effective than RR's. Rodriguez used mesh routes from time to time but mostly his passing game was right out of high school -- flags and posts and outs and bubbles/stuff out of the backfield against single coverage that work because opponents sell out to stop the run. The few teams (Iowa, OSU, MSU) who could passively defend against the run made passing difficult but they'll have a harder time once the WRs learn the Borges way of exploiting zone coverage.

I would not say they were lucky.  But I would say that you can't count on them being replicated.  They caught a stone-footed ND DB by surprise.

They are 50/50 jump balls to whoever goes up and gets them.  B1G defenses will have guys that can get up there.   Nobody will be surprised anymore.

I really disagree about the philosophy that we need to scrap what Denard is good at and immediately get to a new system because that's "the future".

This year and next year are not waste years that we might as well use for training.  With a D that is starting to gain a pulse and with some down opponents, we can be in the B1G hunt if we let Denard be Denard.

I'm all for investing for the future, but you've got to have some victories along the way to get there (ask RR).  If the past 3 years have taught us anything, it's that the Michigan faithful have the patience of a 2 year old.  So feed the beast enough to keep it at bay and live to fight another day.  

So what if Shane Morris is the first "real" QB student of the new system?  If I'm fresh off the glow of competing for the B1G the previous year, I can live with that.

I'm talking right before the season. Remember, Michigan was ranked. We had higher expectations for that team than we do for this one.