[Eric Upchurch]

We should have known from the start. Ace and I got dropped off at the northeast corner of Kinnick with a simple task: get the parking pass and credentials. We picked up the envelope, untangled the strings on our credentials, and found precisely zero things that were definitely or even slightly resembled a parking pass. We now needed the guys to somehow turn around and come pick us up without bringing traffic to a screeching halt, and from there we needed to go to the parking garage and hope they’d accept the email that said we were approved for parking.

Ace and I crossed the street to wait and ran into Kelly and Jacob, two of The Daily’s beat writers. They were looking for a missing co-worker. Hindsight’s 20/20, but it should have been obvious in that moment that there were four Michigan media members on a corner and not a single thing going right for any of them, and that ended up serving as an omen for the night. We then dove into the van as the guys drove up, pulled up to the parking garage, and were shut down by the attendant. And the one in the next lot. And the one in the lot after that.

We ended up parking behind the equivalent of a coney on the outskirts of campus, running out of time to go to Demorest’s tailgate, and one of us slipped and fell partially down a hill while making fun of someone’s taste in music. It was me. I fell down a hill.

I didn’t notice the blinking neon “Hey, I’m a metaphor and something’s not right here” sign, and a lot of that is because you can usually count on nine games worth of data to be somewhat predictive. According to Football Study Hall, Iowa went into the game with a 5% win probability. They then forced Michigan’s offense into far and away their worst performance of the season en route to a bizarre, special teams-fueled upset. With game and cumulative numbers in hand, we can see how big an impact one bad game has while also preliminarily judging how predictive the performance was.

[Hit THE JUMP to find out how off Michigan’s offense was according to S&P+ and FEI, and a quick look at Indiana’s advanced stats]

Michigan’s offensive season success rate dropped 1.7% to 46.9%, which dropped them in the national rankings from 13th to 23rd. Bad, but nothing to freak out about; Michigan was 23rd nationally before the Maryland game boosted them to 13th.

On defense, Michigan dropped out of the top overall spot and is now ranked second. The defense’s Success Rate allowed rose a significant 3.5% from 23.7% to 27.2%. Iowa ripped off a few big plays, but the most striking bit from the game was that they were able to stay in favorable down-and-distance situations better than anyone Michigan has played in weeks.

Explosiveness is where Michigan’s offense took the largest hit in the national rankings. Their IsoPPP fell from 1.35 to 1.29, tumbling from 33rd to 48th nationally. Michigan’s longest run against Iowa was a Chris Evans 12-yarder, and their longest pass completed went for 29 yards. Their second and third longest completions were 17 and 12 yards. Your eyes did not deceive; Michigan’s offense wasn’t able to get chunks greater than four yards with any regularity.

On the flip side, explosiveness is where Michigan’s defense flew up the national rankings. The defense’s IsoPPP ranking has been hovering around 90th most of the season, but after the Iowa game they’re now ranked ninth (!) overall. The downside of that is that the IsoPPP had been so high because it’s a measure of how long successful plays were, and opposing offenses had run many plays that met the S&P+ definition of success. Iowa’s Success Rate was 39% against a Michigan defense whose season rate going into the game was 23.7%

Nothing of tremendous consequence in this area. Michigan’s offense lost 0.7 yards of starting field position after factoring in the Iowa game, while the defense is now letting teams start 0.4 yards closer after factoring in the Iowa game. Not bad considering Desmond King was hell-bent on returning anything that wasn’t kicked into the end zone.

Michigan’s offense fell from eighth to 13th nationally in points per trip inside the 40, while the defense’s average points rose by 0.8, not enough to bump them out of the top spot in the country. The numbers aren’t much of a surprise considering how the Iowa game went: both teams had four scoring opportunities and both teams averaged 3.25 points per.

S&P+ really hated how the offense performed. Michigan’s expected turnover margin in the Iowa game was –2.12; they finished the game –1. That high negative expected turnover margin really dropped Michigan in the national rankings, as they fell from 14th to 38th. Their actual turnover margin ranking didn’t dip nearly as much, falling from ninth to just 14th. The disparity between expected and actual led to an increase in Michigan’s turnover luck, as they’re now getting 2.39 points per game from that, up .36 points per game from last week.

The story of the game was Michigan’s offense completely stalling out. Until last week, Michigan’s offense hadn’t performed worse than the 70th percentile (per Football Study Hall). That game in the 70th percentile came against Wisconsin, and the next lowest was a 78th percentile performance against Michigan State. In the Iowa game, the offense performed in the 11th percentile. The only reason I’m a little cautious not to completely disregard what happened is Speight’s injury, as we don’t know what an O’Korn-led offense looks like over a full game. Otherwise, the offense performed so much worse than it has in every other game that it looks to be an outlier.

Michigan’s offense fell eight spots in the national rankings to 14th in available yards gained, with the percentage of said yards falling from 61.8% to 57.5%. Stats that are pretty big-picture and look at outcomes more than inputs show a big decline. For example, Michigan’s touchdown rate (drives that end in a TD) dropped from 46% to 41.8%, which dropped them from fourth to 14th in the country. Zooming in and looking at more specific measures show a similar decline in production. Fremeau tracks something he calls value drive rate which looks at the percentage of drives that start 50 yards or farther from the end zone and reach the opponent’s 30-yard line. 55.4% of Michigan’s offensive drives met the criteria before the Iowa game, good for ninth overall. The offense’s cumulative percentage after Iowa is 50%, and they’ve now fallen to 17th. I can find more examples like this, but at some point the marginal utility of how informative they are declines to the point where it’s probably more productive to summarize: that was really, really bad. You know that. The numbers show that. The numbers also show that the impact from a single game was so great that it was probably an anomalous performance.

As for the defense, their numbers were pretty good across the board. Connelly has their performance in the 85th percentile, which isn’t all that close to their worst performance of the season. The worst Michigan’s defense has performed this season is a 63rd percentile performance against Michigan State.

Looking Ahead

Oh, #chaosteam. Even when you’ve changed and actually gotten some semblance of a defense you’re still just so chaos-y. Indiana’s defense somehow performed in the 80th percentile against Ohio State, and followed that up a few weeks later with performances in the 29th and 31st percentile against Maryland and freaking Rutgers, respectively.

It’s actually kind of difficult to find an area to key on in their advanced stat profile because they’re just all over the place. Their rushing offense is worse than I expected (rushing S&P+ and rushing success rate in the 100s) while their rushing defense is way better than I expected (19th in rushing S&P+ and 25th in rushing success rate). The poor play of the rushing offense is obviously attributable to the black holes on their line that Ace discussed in FFFF, since their backs are more talented than a 103rd-ranked opportunity rate would indicate.

The good news is that it’s still a good idea to go after their secondary. As Seth noted in the defensive FFFF post, they’re going to play press all day. When they can’t stick with a receiver that backfires spectacularly; Indiana’s ranked 108th in passing IsoPPP, the big play measure.

What stood out most to me was the disparity in Indiana’s performance on standard downs and passing downs. Their standard downs success rate is 44.5%, which ranks 104th. Their passing downs success rate is 37.3%, which ranks 16th. I feel like waiting to pick up necessary yardage until your back’s against the wall and you’re in a one-dimensional situation seems like a bad idea, but, you know, CHAOS.