I would have been guessing for a long time at 'who leads the nation in explosive plays', but we do have a lot of highlight film plays to back it up. Thanks to coaches Harbaugh and Gattis, the DeathStar is becoming fully operational. Perhaps its the 'homer' in me, but I think we'll perform closer to Alabama than we will those guys who struggled to score a touchdown against Georgia.

That’s what I love about this team. We don’t have the hallmarks of a great offense in the modern era, which is essentially a 1st-round QB leading a relentless passing attack; so people look at our offense and think it can’t win major games.

We have a unique combo of ball control and explosiveness that could become a winning formula for years to come.

Ever since the RichRod days this site has been fixated on the idea that a running spread with a Denard-type QB is the way to do it. Harbaugh doesn’t share that view of course, and when his offenses do well, it conflicts with the established MGoNarrative.  For some reason the narrative itself can never be called into question, so it is necessary to downplay whatever our “non-optimal” offense can achieve.

Even more surprised with the loss of Bell early on.  But I don't think I've seen this type of speed at all the skill positions at Michigan in a long time or possibly ever.  The young recievers really stepped up and showed how fast they are.  Edwards is rediculously quick that every time he is on the field, the defense takes steps towards him.  Corum has always had elite speed to go along with Haskins punishing runs.

I don't think we will have to worry about SEC speed with this offense.  

The bigger miss for me was the defense.  I thought our middle of the line would be mediocre to bad, and the linebackers would be meh, and not be able to clean up much.  I didn't think our offense could keep up in a high scoring back and forth.  The defense has outperformed my expectations by miles.  I really give a lot of credit to Hutch, Ross, and Dax, being leaders at every level and to the coaches getting the center of the line to play well enough to let the edges reek havoc.  The corners have also done a great job of keeping enough coverage to cause havoc as well.  Really amazing what the team and coaches have done.

I think it's fair to say the product we saw last year gave us very good reason to think Gattis and Harbaugh weren't a good mix.  But they changed up a lot of things and found the right mix of spread and harbaughball this season, that's for sure!

I echo Blake's sentiment here. I never saw the explosiveness -- or really even the aptitude -- of this offense coming pre-season, and I would never have predicted its evolution after seeing the second half of the Rutgers game. It just struck me as the typical "run into the wall and throw deep once in a while" Michigan offense we were familiar with. 

I'm glad it has evolved. I'm glad we're running less fake-read-no-read BS. I'm glad we're throwing to the backs. I'm glad we're throwing over the middle more. I'm glad we're continuing to be aggressive down the field. We will have to all of this and more to beat Georgia.

I guess it's a credit to the discipline of the Michigan commentariat that not everyone is crowing about how Michigan exploded the conventional wisdom about needing to run a spread-to-pass with elite talent to be a title contender, but... that's kinda what has happened, at least this year

Good thoughts from both you and Blake. My working theory of why the offense felt so not-explosive and why there was so much garment rending about Gattis is the following:

1. It's really hard to quantify the whole idea of "landing body blows" (i.e., running into stacked boxes) and how that might set up "KO punches" (explosive plays). Like, it make sense that this would be true, but I don't really know how true it is, and it sucks to watch your RBs running into stacked boxes so it just gives you bad feels.
2. Seth has opined several times that Cade is way better pre-snap than post-snap in terms of reads. So, we don't get hardly any zone reads where Cade keeps, and not even that many true RPOs. Rather, Cade gets to the line, figures out what he wants to do, sometimes checks into different plays, and we're off. Usually that works but sometimes it doesn't, and it's more fun to watch a QB guess right post-snap than to run whatever play the QB decided to run pre-snap, where the success or failure of the play gets credited to or blamed on the play caller (Gattis) and not nearly enough of the credit goes to Cade when it works.

Sure looks like bringing in Mike Hart was a home run for our running game. 

I think the downside is you don't land at a scholarship school, so suddenly you have to pay for college or drop out all together. I don't know how often this happens, but it probably does. Every kid who is good enough to jump up a level has to bump another one down a level. Those used to be taken care of by graduation or timing out without a degree. Now, you can bail after one or two years of college with no degree and not be able to get into a school on a scholarship. Going to the portal depends on if you want to play or be ensured get a degree for free. Kids bet on themselves; unfortunately, it doesn't always work out.

Oh, please.

IMO, it takes often a lot more guts/fortitude/personal growth to leave what you would call a "challenging situation" than to stay b/c the world thinks there's some sort of nobility in "persevering" in face of an asshole head coach/crazy fan base/horrible education. And Dabo and Clemson fits all three of those things to a tee. Would you stay in a horrible relationship or work environment if you had a chance to better your life or make a lot more money just b/c it would mean you weren't persevering? 

If you take out of context who Dabo is and what Clemson has been doing under the table, I agree, it is a perfectly reasonable statement.  

If you're a top 100 player, there is very little downside, but for the rest of the class, there is the very real risk that this kid just dropped their scholarship and there will be interest, but is there enough interest to use one of their precious scholarships on you?  This has already happened many times and some kids don't realize what they're risking.

Thibodeaux's even more freakish of an athlete than Hutchinson is (and Hutch is pretty ridiculous himself) and was considered the likely number 1 overall coming into the season as well. Teams might think there could be some untapped upside with Thibodeaux, even beyond his already good performance?

It seems like the Lions have never liked to draft Michigan players for some reason.  I remember them passing up Brian Griese to draft Charlie Batch.

Todd McShay was going over his draft list on the Ryen Rusillo podcast this week. He has Hutchinson #1 and said that it wasn't easy because Thibodeaux is more athletic but lacks Hutchinson's intangibles (drive, leadership, big plays/big moments).

Otherwise, I'd assume Thibodeaux gets a lot of love because spent most of the year near the top - from preseason forward - and only fell when he had a visibly blah game against Utah. 

"can someone more data rich than I explain why Thibodeaux would possible be considered over Hutchinson at this point?"

The Detroit Lions have a long, long history of not using high draft choices on UM players, especially those on defense. In the 1971 draft, for example, the Lions had two chances to draft Dan Dierdorf, who was a consensus All American OL for Michigan. In their wisdom the Lions declined to draft Dierdorf in favor of some who-dat from Clemson, and Dierdorf went to the Cardinals early in the second round, and eventual membership in the NFL Hall of Fame.

Subsequent draft years are filled with such decisions by the Lions—you could build a damn good NFL team out of the Michigan players that the Lions could have drafted but didn't.

Shorter explanation: the Lions have been run by idiots for the past sixty years.

I follow some draft guys on twitter.  I have seen several people have Thib ahead and have seen a couple defend their decision when pressed.  They say that both are close and the gap from those two to the pack is quite large.  They had Thib ahead because he saw an inordinate amount of double and triple teams this year and still produced whereas Hutchinson had Ojabo so he got more opportunities on an island.

As a Lions fan I hope they take Hutch as I think a lot of the qualities that lead him to come back to get over the OSU hump would translate well to turning the Lions into a respectable franchise.