Whatever Comment Count

Brian

1/1/2018 – Michigan 19, South Carolina 26 – 8-5, end of season

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[Marc-Gregor Campredon]

I don't know how people get mad about this shit still. I just turn off, because for the last decade Michigan football has been either a disappointment or in a brief interim period that sets you up to be disappointed. But yes many many people still get fucking furious about Michigan football for some reason.

I'm tired of talking about it. I'm tired of this cycle that always seems to be at the bottom. I'm tired of this toxic-ass fanbase screaming at stuff. I could muster some takes, I guess, but I've already said them and anyway they seem beside the point. December was nice since it lacked football. 2018, so far, is bad because it had football.

In a situation like that I'd rather not talk about football. Especially because I have nothing left to say. Maybe it'll be better next year. Maybe it won't. Either way it's a meaningless distraction on the way to the grave. Eat at Arby's.

Comments

NateVolk

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:25 PM ^

Fabulous coach in his 11th year. So it's an actual long-term program. 7 returning starters on defense, a returning quarterback with meaningful game experience the prior season. 

From the above list. Just give Michigan Speight for 13 games and we probably hit 10 wins too. At least 9. 

I respect Michigan State unlike some on here. I also think if you are looking honestly at all three of the games with them since Jim came on and conclude their program is leaps and bounds better than Michigan's right now, you are choosing your own reality to fit your misery.

Those are toss ups and will be at least until Dantonio exits. I am fine with and the fan base would do well to get fine with it too.

matty blue

January 2nd, 2018 at 1:59 PM ^

i work with a guy that bitches about michigan football every time i see him. 

the coaches are stupid.  the coaches are great, but the quarterback is terrible.  the quarterback is fine, but the offensive line sucks.  the offensive line sucks because the coaches are stupid.  wait, isn't that where we started?  round and round he goes. 

i dread seeing him, and i avoid him at all costs.  when i'm unable to avoid him and he gets himself all fired up, i am counting the seconds to when we get interrupted and i can stop pretending i give a shit about what he thinks.

i'm guessing that's the germ of this post - this season sucked, and yesterday sucked, and i have absolutely zero desire to hear a single word of hot fucking idiot takes on any single bit of any of it.  if you want to wind it up and rant about how pissed you are, and how unacceptable it all is, and how this needs to be done and that needs to be done, and blah blah blah, by all means enjoy it, and you have my pity.  congratulations, nobody will want to sit anywhere near you on september 1.  now go away.

BlueGoM

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:02 PM ^

Sounds like someone is ready to move on from running the blog.

Anyway, I would claim it seems people had visions of NC's in thier head once Harbaugh took over.  I 'd be happy with consistent wins over MSU and OSU, but those seem elusive as well.

The team is better off under Harbaugh than it was under Hoke or RR.  But what's missing is solid QB play.  Not sure when that will come.

 

cobuckeye

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:04 PM ^

Welp...I know how you guys feel.

W-L-T-Michigan game

6-4-1-W

4-6-1-L

8-4-0-L

7-4-1-L

8-4-0-L

8-3-1-T

and Illinois terrorized us.

That is what I got to enjoy with my cheap student tickets as a Buckeye college student and the years directly before and after were not much better.

Things change and will change again. The buckeyes will suck again before I pass and Michigan will dominate. History happens and the bad luck ends.

What did I do during the "bad times"?

First of all, I didn't know they were bad times. It was all normal to me and I just enjoyed the wins when they happened. When we lost, I still had a fun time with my friends experiencing the loss together.

Michigans status with other B1G fans has already changed in the last three years with JH running the show. You are a factor and a fear once again. The Michigan/OSU games have meaning once again.

Stay the course...chin up...and this will all be history in a few years. You only fail if you lose faith.

Happy new years to you all and Peace...

Esterhaus

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:17 PM ^

Never has possessed the

   winningest record in college football

   largest football stadium in America

   writer Larry Kasdan and The Big Chill

   in state rival that is MSU

   across-the-border knock-off trade school that is ND

   most achieved student body for a public university

   proximity to a currently failed burg that only a few generations ago was the wealthiest major city in the world

You simply cannot understand. Nice try but not even close.

Bodogblog

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:18 PM ^

You guys want a post from Brian because you want something to shake your first at.  You're all angry and still processing.  He's not playing that game, I don't blame him. 

Yesterday we lost the game, all the twitter wars, all offseason arguments with your Sparty and OSU friends, and a good bit of hope for 2018.  That's it.  There's a lot to fix on this team.  They have to get to it.  We'll see in a long while whether it works or not.  Little else to say. 

The disappointment is a good opportunity to be a better fan.  By not obsessing so much.  Unplug, get to some other interests that better lives, and plug back in later.  This time not so completely.  What does that mean?  Does it really matter if you can rub your brother-in-law's face in it?  2016 was fun, 3-9 was a blast.  We were dicks and it was grand.  We waited for this year to wave our dicks in more faces, particularly OSU.  Maybe we put away the dicks, for good.  Maybe remember this disappointment and focus on the positive of our team when they rebound, rather than the misery it may cause others'.  And yes they will rebound. 

Or wait to someday wave it around again.  But it's a wait from here and there's little else to say. 

Wolverine91

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:21 PM ^

Man it's tough to be a Michigan fan. But as most mentioned, we should be use to this. It's been like this for the past decade and it's fckin annoying. This season, the players, the coaches, the recruiting this year, has been a disaster. 2017 sucked. I still have hope because for some reason I've never gave up on this program and I won't start now but it's getting harder and harder by the day.

swoosh

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:22 PM ^

Michigan melts down and then the blog, the sky is falling, 

 

I guess for 9 million a year I expected more, if you're going to run your mouth I twiiter I expect more.

 

My advice to Coach would be get off twitter and coach your team, my advice for you Brian is to have a couple shots of something strong, you'll feel better;)

markusr2007

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:22 PM ^

For me the horror film started long ago.

Younger guys here have no fucking frame of reference.

Try growing up as a young kid watching you favorite team crush all but one opponent in the regular season, go 10-1, be ranked in the top 10 every year. Roster running over with national stars and blue chips.

Then go to the Rose Bowl and just lose.

Every. Damn. Year.

Bob Ufer genuinely cried on radio for good reasons.



It leaves a mark. On our way to the grave.



In the words of that human cyborg relations droid from Star Wars film, Michigan football fans “were made to suffer.”



And suffer we will.

The lows make those rare highs as a college football fan all that much sweeter.

Or so I am told.

Enjoy it all as much as you can. For most cannot.

GPCharles

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:38 PM ^

the future.  I'm mad because an 8-4 Michigan team lost to an 8-4 South Carolina team and surrendered a big lead in the process.

We came out in the 2nd half and marched down the field with a mix of pass and run to score our only touchdown of the game.  The next two times we abandon the pass and go back to a power run game with 3 OL starters missing.  Who plans these games and who calls the O plays?

The first half was totally BORING!  The second half we started out strong and then put the total offense away. Why?

ramuk8891

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:39 PM ^

I don't know what to do anymore. The only thing I can do is change my expectations for this football team. We should ALWAYS judge a football team by how they finish and not by where we 'think the future' will be.

Either we change our expectations as fans of this football team to mediocrity so that we're never dissapointed or we keep expectations high and constantly get dissapointed.

Either way, I don't want to talk about next year's team until January 2019 (end of the season). All this pre-season hype is complete bullshit and doesn't get us anywhere. 

Maize4Life

January 2nd, 2018 at 2:48 PM ^

to Basketball a Program that ya know ACTUALLY PRODUCES some results, championships and Trophys and Banners..Football U r dead to me...

NelzQ

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:10 PM ^

Brian almost encapsulated my sentiments 100 (except the eat at Arby's ending). I disengaged my emotions at the start of the game; I always do nowadays. I only reconnect them when it's safe to do so.

Here's hoping the correct adjustments are made in the off-season. Go Blue!

Northville

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:14 PM ^

Shea Patterson. HUGE pick-up, no matter how much this sad-faced blog oddly wants to downplay it.

Kid looks like the real deal (he's closer to Drew Brees than Tate Forcier, IMO). Defense should be nasssty. Team is young. New S&C coach. Future is bright.

If there are coaching issues to iron out, I believe Harbaugh will do so. If not, a poor performance next year will force his hand. 

My love for Michigan football is as strong as ever. GO BLUE!

 

pinkfloyd2000

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:17 PM ^

Obviously, there were plentiful injuries and other inactives yesterday—but one guy that I heard nothing about was McDoom. Didn’t see him on the field at all. I am not saying that he would’ve made the critical difference in the end, but I was really surprised not to see him at all. Any idea what happened with him?

triangle_M

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:26 PM ^

I think the common and rational prediction was an 8 win season.  It was an 8 win season.  We have a lot of people who are unable to separate the performance of a football team from their self-esteem.  It is entertainment, not honor/shame.

Lh112

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:36 PM ^

The problem with this team will not be solved by 8 months of off season work with the same coaching staff, there needs to be coaching changes. we saw that as bright as day in the bowl game. what then is the problem? it all comes down to schematics. it has nothing to do with this team "not wanting to win" or "not having the passion for the game". OF COURSE THEY WANT TO SUCCEED. 

The main problem here, and to me its bright as day, is the fact Jim Harbaugh and Tim Drevno insist on running a 1980s offense in 2017. The "power-o" offense will never work unless you play weak competition like Wisconsin in the B1G west, and Stanford in the PAC-12.

If Harbaugh wants to not be known as a resounding failure who couldn't beat his rivals, its time to drop the caricature of what michigan football should be, and go with what is proven to work in the 21st century: a spread offense with a mobile qb. The read option and run/pass option is difficult to defend for very simple reasons: the human brain can only process and respond to external stimuli at a certain speed. When you have a linebacker who has to make a 50/50 decision to take a running back or qb, that second of apprehension from the defense gives the offense a big advantage. this same aspect is completely absent in Harbaughs offense. the defense stacks the box, reads the play immediately, and blows it up. 

the solution at this point is to 1) get patterson eligable 2) fire drevno and pep and 3) hire someone who knows all the ins and outs of the spread offense and spend the next 8 months implementing it. 4) re-calibrate recruiting to accomodate this switch.

Think about which teams have given our defense nightmares over the last decade. they are all spread teams with mobile qbs. Georgia, Oklahoma, Alabama, Clemson all run variations of the spread offense. UCF who is 42 spots below Michigan in the 247 sports composite recruiting rankings went 13-0 because they put up a LOT of points and ran the spread to perfection.

Imagine 2009 Rich Rod offense, with a Don Brown defense, does that not get you excited!?

mgobaran

January 3rd, 2018 at 8:50 AM ^

2018 recruits will have very little impact on the 2018 Game. Both Teams will have a base of players made up of Top 5 classes. Michigan can win at the Shoe. Just have to actually do the damn thing. Go over to 11 warriors if you that easily throw in the towel. 

bronxblue

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:59 PM ^

The "power-o" offense will never work unless you play weak competition like Wisconsin in the B1G west, and Stanford in the PAC-12.

Okay, you just lost me here. FFS Wisconsin just went 13-1 and lost one game (to the #5 team in the country) by 6 points. Yes, the Big 10 west isn't an elite division, but Wisconsin runs an offense that absolutely works in today's game. I'd love to hear your rationale for why it doesn't. As for Stanford, they have been running some semblance of that offense since Harbaugh's era, and have averaged 10 wins a season for almost a decade. And last time I checked, the Pac-12 plays pretty good defense.

And while I very much like a run-based, spread offense as much as the next guy, saying Georgia runs a "spread" offense is absolutely insane. Jake Fromm ran 48 times for 94 yards on the year, a nice 2.0 ypc average. Alabama actually runs a good amount of zone rushing, and as the season progressed Hurts ran a lot less and threw a lot more (he broke 50 yards rushing in a game only twice after week 3). As for UCF, they played exactly 2 ranked teams this year and beat them by a total of 13 points. They also went 6-7 last year running the same system, so maybe player development and talent played a bit more into that than the style of offense employed.

Good offenses work regardless of scheme; bad offenses the same way. There are lots of garbage "spread" offenses in the world. You beat defenses by putting players into advantageous situations, and I have never seen a compelling argument why misdirection via formation and playcall isn't fundamentally worse than a QB who makes 1 or 2 reads and then runs.

Lh112

January 2nd, 2018 at 4:07 PM ^

Jim Chaney (Georgia's OC) is a well known spread guru. Fromm isn't as mobile but they still run the spread.

If you think that all we need is a new clueless moron to run the same offense instead of drevno, then youre going to be in the same spot a year from now scratching your head about why our offense sucks so bad.

 

bronxblue

January 2nd, 2018 at 9:44 PM ^

Chaney was a spread guy under Joe Tiller at Purdue and with Urban Meyer yes, but more recently he ran a very pro-style-friendly offense at UT,  Arkansas, and Pittsburgh.  Like Michigan, he runs an offense that plays to the strengths of his team, and in this case it's a bunch of high-caliber RBs and a dominant offensive line.  Fromm averaged about 19 passes a game for 170 yards.  

I don't honestly know what you think makes offenses different in some fundamental way, since your whole argument is that spread is different and so it must be better because look at the playoff teams.  Of course, OU's spread is different than Alabama's and Clemson's (and Clemson's offense wasn't all that good), and Georgia doesn't really run any conventional "spread" offense beyond sometimes going 4+ wide.

Clemson's offense this year was 35th overall (Michigan's was 41st last year), Alabama's is 19th, OU is 1st, and Georgia is 18th.  All of those teams save for OU, though, have top-10 defenses, and that's something Michigan has fielded before and will likely do so again.  So Michigan, when they are running a reasonable approximation of their offense with more than 2.5 seniors, is probably going to field an offense in the ballpark of a playoff team and you'd assume a similarly-elite defense.

Get mad if you want and call for change, but you don't seem to be providing any real analysis here supporting your claim that Michigan's offense is fundamentally different.  And just for fun, if you look back at Michigan's 2008 offense and remember how few returning starters they had, you'd see they finished with the 92nd-rated offense.  It got better as the team matured under RR, but in 2011, when Michigan's offense was at it's peak (#11 in the nation), guess who was rated 3 spots higher?  Jim MF Harbaugh's Stanford Cardinal.  

pescadero

January 3rd, 2018 at 9:01 AM ^

"Wisconsin runs an offense that absolutely works in today's game. I'd love to hear your rationale for why it doesn't."

 

Power offenses can be just as successful as spread offenses...but they take more "investment" to achieve the same success. A top end power offense requires significantly more time investment to achieve the same level of proficiency, thus has a worse cost-benefit ratio.

 

It basically hamstrings your roster because a significant part of your roster is off the table.

 

 

UofM Die Hard …

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:33 PM ^

"Whatever" is perfect to end this season.  That team in the bowl game was the same we have seen all year, bad OL play, bad QB play,  turnovers, and play calling that makes you scratch your head. Why is eveyone so damn surprised?  

 

Ya we got shit to fix and we know what we have to fix, stop with the non-sense comments of getting Jim out of Ann Arbor. If this was a Hoke or RR leading this team we go what....5-7 to 6-6?   Yet we end up at 8-4 in our down year.....sucks because we all want to see 10+ but 8 wins in a re-load year isnt anythign to write off. 

 

And for everyone calling for a major shakeup to the staff.........everyone was gushing over our play calling against the Buckeyes, they called a great game.... you just need your players to make plays

So whatever is right, Jim is the guy to get us to where we want to be.  

UofM Die Hard …

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:56 PM ^

defense is part of a team right...like 11 guys on the field wearing Maze and Blue?   He hired Don Brown.  Now does he have work to do on offense, absolutely but offense you obvioulsy need to be precise with eveything you do, eveything, or a play will fail.  That precision takes experience, and you bet your ass some 18 year old right out of highschool will have that in his bag.  

 

pescadero

January 3rd, 2018 at 9:04 AM ^

"offense you obvioulsy need to be precise with eveything you do, eveything, or a play will fail. "

 

Spread offenses are more "failure tolerant" than Harbaugh tries to run. Michigans offense is more crippled by single point failures than many offesnes would be.

Blue_Cheesehead

January 2nd, 2018 at 3:35 PM ^

11-2, minimum.  Position by position our players are as talented, if not more so, than MSU and Wisconsin.  Why do they not perform?  Coaching.  M needs to retool the offensive staff.  Sorry, Drevno is not the guy.

Mbee1WS

January 2nd, 2018 at 4:22 PM ^

There are many different types of "spread". OSU is a power spread attack. Georgia leans more pro than spread, but still runs power. Clemson is more similar to OSU. Oklahoma is a spread to pass team. It's not one or the other, but more where teams fall on a spectrum