No audio on the popups for some reason; you're not crazy.

Update: if you're not seeing the popup links, click through to the post page.

Wha' happen?

Ah, I see you've awoken after beating yourself into unconsciousness midway through the third quarter. Well, I have good news: we won.

Wai, dude. Wai.

How?

Would you believe the offense rattled off three straight 80 yard touchdown drives, the last featuring a 58-yard quarterback keeper by Steven Threet?

Depends. Is this a Deep Space 9 episode taking place in the mirror universe? Is everyone wearing black leather?

I've been trying to figure that out for days, man.

Chart?

Chart.

As always, the Threetsheridammit chart legend.

STEVEN THREET

With Threet firmly entrenched as the starter I'll discontinue listing Sheridan's numbers and retrieve them should they become relevant again (and I don't jump off something tall).

I'm also not going to include a chart for "downfield" throws because the vast majority of the above were downfield attempts: Michigan only attempted five screens (3 CA, 2 IN, none successful).

That is a hell of a lot of throws, many of them extracurricular in nature. (By that I mean not DO, CA, or IN.) There are a whopping 13 throws in other categories, a large number of them TAs. Some of those were okay, as Threet scrambled for a couple first downs. Some were actual throwaways when he couldn't find receivers. When the TA count starts creeping above three or four that's an indication the quarterback isn't reading the defense very well.

Also, the vast majority of these throws came in the second half. In the first half I have 11 of 38 passing attempts.

As far as how the day went? Poorly. In past years we've had a metric where you add up all the good (CA+DO), add up all the bad (everything else other than PR), and take out all the screens to come up with a Competence Ratio. Threet's competence ratio in this game is 48%, which is below the 50-50 Mallett line and well short of the 2/3rds ratio that is a normal good quarterback. This was a major step back from the Notre Dame game.

That wasn't all Threet's fault, but we'll tackle the ancillaries later.

While we're at it, the receiverchart:

You would like to see more of those 2s getting caught, especially since a couple would have been large gains if hauled in.

Of note are the many balls attempted to Odoms that were totally errant. On at least one of these Odoms didn't help his quarterback out by being indecisive on an option route, and there are theories on the internets that Threet's day was better than it looked because the receivers aren't helping him out any. That may have been the cause on some of the throwaways; it was not much of a factor on any of the balls Threet actually threw. It's one thing to throw a timing route on which the WR isn't there or ready or throwing into coverage because he's running his route wrong; it's another entirely if you're overthrowing guys by yards and not even forcing safeties to move to pick your pass off.

Only five screens when Michigan's line was getting whipped?

I know. That's under 15% of Michigan's attempts in an offense that was simply mad for screens in Rodriguez's tenure at West Virginia. Hell, Michigan ran more screens than that under Lloyd Carr. What's going on? Well, the screens aren't working. Michigan's five screens went for –3, –2, –3, 5, and 0 yards and the five-yarder wasn't even a real screen, it was a long handoff to Mathews upon which no one missed a block because no one was blocking.

That is epically ugly. A dossier of reasons:

• Threet is bad at throwing them. This, I think, was the A-1 reason Nick Sheridan was named the starter before the Utah game: Threet consistently screwed up the simple throws that are the bread and butter of Rodriguez's passing-ish offense. In this game he took Odoms off his feet on one throw and threw another one well in front of him; against Notre Dame he threw the Minor fumble backwards, took Odoms off his feet again, and turned a touchdown into a field goal attempt by not throwing a Babb screen far enough inside.
• Our receivers and tight ends suck at blocking. Oh my God watching Mike Massey is frustrating. If he was on the field for every play my veiny fan rage at him would be approaching levels last seen when his brother was gamely attempting to set a Guinness world record for tallest defensive tackle.
• Our dodgy offensive line and general suckosity of offense causes teams to jump the routes with near-impunity. We burned Notre Dame a couple times with the fake bubble screen; we need to go back to that with more frequency.

I only see one of these issues getting fixed this year—the last one—and expect we'll be groaning about the lack of a screen game until 2009. Even in the Year of Infinite Pain, we always had Henne throwing a stupid bubble screen to Breaston. Those were the days.

About the line: I don't think they were all getting whipped.

Well, then who was?

Here's your protection metric: 37/46, Moosman –3, Ferrara –2, Molk –2, McAvoy –2.

Notice a distinct lack of anything? Tackles. If you go over the somewhat arbitrary +/- handed out on running plays above, you will see a ton of minuses handed out to the interior line and the occasional – to Schilling.

That was the story of Wisconsin's defense: their active defensive tackles murdered Michigan's interior line all day against both the pass and the run. Notice that Michigan's second-half run game was successful largely when it completely avoided Wisconsin DTs or fooled them into slanting away from the play. For example, the Minor touchdown run was a counter to the zone stretch the Wisconsin D was expecting.

The good news, such as it is, is that Wisconsin's starting tandem is probably the best in the conference. Newkirk and Chapman are both seniors and returning starters (at least sort of; Nick Hayden was around last year but there was extensive rotation) on a run defense that was above-average a year ago. Penn State might be better and Ohio State always has a lot of talent; other than that there's not a whole lot of epic destruction awaiting us outside of Northwestern's inexplicably good John Gill. (We're fortunate to have Kroul & Unusual Punishment off the schedule.) If the Notre Dame game was an outlier in the sucky opponent direction, Wisconsin is an equally large outlier in the other direction. (Notre Dame also spent the entire game in an inexplicable nickel for the second straight year, further supporting my theory that Corwin Brown is a mole.)

But, hey, the only thing Matt Shaughnessy did all game was take a critical roughing the passer call, so that's got to be worth something, right?

What was with that funky formation?

You mean the one in which Michigan had two backs in the backfield and three wide receivers to one side? I don't know. That's vaguely acceptable when the guy who's covered up is a tight end, because if you decide to pass you can use him as a blocker. But when it's a slot receiver? The defense can basically ignore Mathews because he can't go downfield, and to date every play run out of this formation has been a run. An ineffective run. I can't imagine there's anything particularly effective about it that offsets the high cost of having a nonentity on the field.

And while we're on the topic of this kind of bitching that reminds me of Debord, yes, Michigan only passed once on first down in the first half until the near-disaster Hail Mary at the end. This was sort of similar to the Penn State game last year, in which Mallett was almost never suffered to throw on first down until Michigan fell behind. I complained about it then and this was similar, though to be fair it's not like the pass attempts they did provide offered any confidence that passing was a better way to go.

Heroes?

Yikes. Honestly, no one on offense had a particularly good day. Threet showed tremendous resilience to come through in the second half but even then he was pretty rough.

Goats?

The interior line had a very rough day, and Mike Massey got yanked for a true freshman for a reason.

What does it mean for Illinois?

Illinois has gotten shredded by the real teams they've gone up against but our offense has proven itself at least partially fictional. I haven't taken a particularly close look but I have to assume the sledding will be easier for the interior line, though not as easy as it was against Notre Dame. Penn State and Missouri both obliterated Illinois on the ground. And in the air. All sorts of stuff, really.

We've got a downgrade in the Threet competence projection again, though, and it's hard to see a ton of long drives. It's also hard to see one first down in a half; mid-twenties, maybe?