Meh: Age Is More Than a Number

November is a busy month around the BronxBlue home, as beyond the two major holidays (Halloween is technically in October but with kids it absolutely bleeds over) seemingly every week or so someone has a birthday. Some of these parties are muted affairs (even moreso this year) featuring wry jokes and knowing smiles over shared adult beverages while others are high-octane, sugar-laced affairs featuring bouncy houses and pinatas getting the Office Space treatment. But one consistent trait throughout the whole month is how much things have changed from the year before. It's more obvious with kids, as each year constitutes a significant chunk of their lives, and so every step in maturation is more pronounced. But even for adults, a hell of a lot happens in those 364 days, and even minor decisions can have profound effects on how the year plays out.

I'll warn you up front that this diary isn't going to be as dire as some likely want/expect it to be. I'm eternally an optimist, and perhaps because I had "meh" expectations coming into the year I'm not all that surprised Michigan has struggled. Minnesota gave us false hope that the stumbles and inconsistencies that have been part of Michigan (and really most college teams that have significant turnover on their roster) for years wouldn't rear their ugly heads, but the past two weeks have shown a team short on experience and talent at some key spots while also breaking in a fair number of young players. Throw in this janky season taking place under the looming shadow of COVID-19 and I'm surprised a game hasn't been called on account of animals raining down on midfield.

While reading the various season previews put out by this site I was struck by how many position groups featured a majority of new faces getting their first significant playing time. That didn't mean guys returning hadn't seen the field, but with 4 new starters on the offensive line, new starting QB, multiple new starters are WR and the secondary, it was going to be one of the least experienced teams in the conference. In fact, per Phil Steele's "returning starter" metrics Michigan was tied with Maryland for third-fewest returning starters in the league behind only OSU and MSU. And that guide assumed both Ambry Thomas and Nico Collins were coming back, which obviously didn't come to pass.

Now, before anyone jumps to the comments to complain about excusing 2 straight loses due to inexperience while comparing UM to OSU's similar youth movement, I am not making that argument. Programs like them should be able to handle normal-ish attrition without spectacular implosion. The fact they clearly can't just reload can either be viewed as the cold reality for a program like Michigan, which hasn't been "elite" for quite some time, or a searing indictment of Jim Harbaugh's tenure at Michigan. Science has not yet discovered a unit of measurement sufficient to measure the level of interest I have in re-litigating that argument.

Regardless, the reality is this team was going to start the year with a ton of question marks at key spots even before a pandemic upended college football. To a lot of Michigan fans, the season started 3 weeks ago but to about 3/5ths of college football it's been going on for a couple of months now. There were virtually no "tune-up games" for P5 teams, so most squads fumbled through the first handful of games trying to figure out their identities, which lineups and play calls worked and which needed to be reworked or ditched, and how to prepare for games in really unique atmospheres. I mean, it's sort of a crazy top-25 this week, with undefeated Cincy, BYU, and Indiana all hanging out in the top 10, Wisconsin and Oregon both sporting shiny 1-0 records going into November, and no Big 12 team with fewer than 2 losses.  So part of what we're seeing now shouldn't be a surprise, more the natural flow of a season.

Michigan isn't a good team right now, and there's a strong case to be made they won't be good all season. Even before both Mayfield and Hayes were out against IU, Michigan had struggled to move MSU's pedestrian defensive line or consistently generate inside runs, and the pocket was far from impermeable. Michigan finished the day against IU with 13 yards on 18 carries, and even factoring out IU's 3 sacks we're still talking under 2 yards per carry. Milton and his receivers have struggled to consistently connect downfield all year, highlighted by last week's game wherein he threw the ball 52 times for under 6 ypa and a long of 36 by Roman Wilson. Against IU he averaged 10 ypa (yeah!) but only completed 53% of his 34 throws and sprinkled in 2 picks to go along with his 3 TDs. For the season, the longest pass play is 52 yards by Ronnie Bell, the only receiver on the roster with more than 9 receptions in his career coming into the season (rueful fun fact - Chris Evans had the second-most career receptions on the team to start the year at 42). Both Vincent Gray and Gemon Green have struggled mightily in coverage while the defense hasn't collected a sack in 2 weeks and only one interception all year, and that one was by Josh Ross. I don't have complete records but it's my recollection that Michigan only had 3-4 PIs accepted against them all of last year; they had 3 in this game and 6 for the season, and probably had a couple more that would have stood had the receiver not caught the ball despite it all.

Some of these issues are unlikely to improve as the season progresses; corners don't get faster or more athletic the more reps they see, nor do linemen suddenly grab a power-up mushroom and get appreciably bigger or stronger. But there is reason to believe that Michigan will improve as the year progresses, if for no other reason than the fact that young players tend to improve a bit with more reps and cohesion. That may not show up in the record given the schedule that lies before them, but I also see some credence in what Harbaugh said after the game that he thought the team was close to turning the corner. That corner isn't into a top-10 team capable of making a run at the playoffs, but it's better than the performances we've seen the past 2 weeks.

Worst: Derailed

This should be obvious to anyone who watched the game but Michigan's offense struggles immensely when it can't consistently move the ball, most noticeably if it doesn't pick up chunks of yards early on in drives. For the game Michigan 3/11 on third-down conversions, and for the season is only converting 39% of those opportunities, matching last year's mark. But against IU it wasn't just that Michigan only converted 3 third-downs, it was that on average they faced third-and-11. And that continued a trend from last weekend against MSU, where they faced an average of 3rd-and-9. Hell, the fact Michigan converted 7-17 last weekend was part MSU's defense being pretty bad (as if having an -53 point differential against non-UM teams shows) and UM getting pretty lucky.

This is not an offense capable of methodically walking down the field on a team; it just isn't. There's an explosiveness that we've seen in spurts; they briefly made a game of it to start the second half by marching down the field 80 yards in 5 plays on completions of 23, 52, and 13 yards. The problem is that so much of this offense now rests on Joe Milton, and frankly he isn't accurate or mobile enough to pull it off. People ragged on Patterson last year but he's more athletic than Milton and had a bit more touch; while he's gotten better it still feels like every throw coming from Milton is a bullet or him consciously trying to throw it "softer", which seems to manifest itself in balls that sort of just hang in the air. These are part mechanics and part comfort issues, and you assume the latter will resolve itself the more reps he plays in games. But the expectation this offseason was that the QB would be able to lean on a good running game to keep him in manageable downs and not have to extend beyond what he was comfortable handling. Instead, Milton has thrown the ball 107 times already and is 2nd in the league with 869 yards. That's not remotely sustainable.

I'd like to say there's some quick fix to this stagnant offense but I can't think of one beyond "block better" and "don't rush for less than 2 yards a play". Indiana has a really aggressive, experienced defense (they returned most of their starters from last year), and Michigan rolled a dilapidated offensive line with a couple of guys making their first career starts and also a couple in new spots. So the fallowness on the ground is somewhat explicable; still, they couldn't really move the ball last week either beyond running outside the tackles, and even in this game you saw IU sniff those plays out pretty quickly. Guys like Evans and Corum are dangerous as receivers and I assume Gattis will try to expand that part of the offense more, but it's just a band-aid over a bullet wound if you still rely so heavily on your first-year QB to keep you in games while also starting so far behind the sticks.

Worst: Bury Me Under a Bed of Flags

Michigan leads the league in penalty yards and is second in number of penalties a game, and it's coming from all parts of the team. The part that jumps out most to fans, like I mentioned earlier, are the numerous pass interference penalties. Gray has been the most glaring culprit but guys like Hill, Green, and Hawkins have all come in for penalties that ranked from real to somewhat dubious. And what hurts even more is that sometimes they are in perfectly good position to defend the ball and yet still clutch and grab, turning what are likely good defensive stops into free yards and first downs. And because karma enjoys irony, both Green and Gray were victimized in this game with great catches by IU receivers even when they had good position.

The other chief culprit in terms of penalties this game (and really all season) has been the offsides by the defense. We saw 3-4 this game and a couple last week against MSU as well. While the announcers pointed out that Penix had a hard clap-and-count that drew some guys off, I also think their awareness that they needed to generate pressure as a means to protect those corners in coverage played into their eagerness. So often you hear about "coverage sacks" and most great defenses have that symbiotic relationship; every second a QB has to go through his progression because his target is covered is another second an end or blitzing LB can break through. But like last weekend with Rocky Lombradi, Penix typically found his 1st or 2nd option open and so the pressure never got home. And once both Hutchinson and Paye started getting hurt (Hutchinson didn't play after the first quarter, Paye bounced in and out in the second half), even the threat of pressure from the line sort of evaporated.

I'd like to think some of these issues can be fixed, even if the corners just revert to Brian's "punch the ball when it arrives" style of coverage. But there are physical limitations with the secondary that you probably can't paper over in a couple of weeks, and it's pretty clear at this point teams recognize these deficiencies are attacking them. So my guess is we'll keep seeing a lot more penalties than we're used to. It was nice, though, to see Luiji Villain support Gray after another tough beat.

Gray got another PI.

But I'm here for Luiji Villain literally picking Gray's head up. pic.twitter.com/cEMmzOoCg6

— Due# (@JDue51) November 8, 2020

Best: Young Receivers

I do want to point out that a number of the young receivers made plays in this game. Cornelius Johnson high-pointed a ball well for the first TD, and Jackson, Wilson and Henning continued to show their potential as downfield threats. And Ronnie Bell had himself a career game with 6 catches for 149 yards and a TD, against a couple of good corners. Small victories in the grand scheme of things, but as Milton evolves and improves my guess is we'll see these guys emerge even more.

Worst: Coaching Change

I'm squarely on team "unless you've got a better option, coaching changes don't make a ton of sense". I don't think Harbaugh has lost this team; if he has then perhaps that changes the calculus a bit. But Indiana is a really good team this year; I'm much more bothered by the MSU loss than this one, and even then we're talking about 3 total games thus far. This site's position appears to be the ax, and that's a perfectly defensible position. But at the same time, what has absolutely submarined Michigan for most of the 2000s has been the program's near-constant state of flux. RR had 3 years, Hoke 4, then Harbaugh is sitting at 6. Each time you make a change there's a cost, and I can't help but look at Notre Dame under Brian Kelly and wonder if that's not a better approach than trying to find yet another coach who is tasked with returning Michigan to "glory". It absolutely feels like Brown should be replaced; I don't blame him for all of the issues on the defense but at this point there's little upside to his retention. What is happening with Bob Shoop will likely lead to another opening, likely filled by a younger recruiting-focused guy. But I think Harbaugh has shown a willingness to shake things up when pressed, and given how disjointed this offseason is likely to be pulling the trigger on a coaching change probably wouldn't leave Michigan with a ton of good options.

Quick Hits

• I do wonder how much different this defense would look with Ambry Thomas at corner. I know people say a team in year 6 should be able to handle a loss of a key player, but Brown's system relies so heavily on great 1-on-1 coverage that a breakdown there really does hamstring the rest of the defense. Coming into last year people were worried how the defense would perform with only Lavert Hill and Thomas's emergence after his illness proved to be a godsend.
• Michigan, Michigan State, and Penn State have a combined record of 2-7 so far this year, 1-6 if you factor out the UM-MSU game. They have been outscored by an aggregate score of 235-309. The top teams in each division are OSU, Indiana, Northwestern, and Purdue. 2020 isn't going out without a fight.

Next Week: Badgers(?)

On the one hand, Wisconsin's positive case count is down to 14 active cases, and so they've been able to start practicing again. So that's a positive sign for this game to actually happen. On the other hand, Chryst is one of the infected staff members and Wisconsin hasn't played a game since midway through October. In that game they beat the crap out of Illinois but it's also Illinois, and there's so much uncertainty around who will play that it's hard to get a read on them as a team. The little bit we saw they looked deadly in the air and pedestrian on the ground, which absolutely tracks with how this season is shaping up to look. Feels like a loss but I could also see Michigan surprise the Badgers and pull off the upset.