So yeah, like Brett Favre or Shia LaBeouf, I’ve not yet retired from writing these columns  and will instead give the Best and Worst treatment to Michigan football for another year. As always, because someone new to the site will inevitably point this out, I am shamelessly ripping off the concept for this diary series from Brandan Stroud over at UpRoxx, though certainly not as funny or insightful.  Though I can promise that the wrestling references will be kept to a minimum.

 

Best:  TL;DR

Just to be up-front about this diary, it’s not going to be particularly heavy with position-by-position breakdowns or deep dives into Michigan’s or their opponents’ two-deeps.  You can find that lots of other places, and let’s be honest; most takes you’ll read about this team are all going to sound alike because, well, human eyes are pretty consistent.  Unlike the usual game columns, where I’m just barely trying to process the last game before Monday rolls around, this diary is going to be more holistically focused, on Michigan, on college football more generally, and even this particular site.  But conventions exist for a reason, and for season previews that means having a prediction on final record and, for shits and giggles, a couple of one-off proclamations that will likely only come back to bite me in the ass.

So here they are:

• Michigan will win 10 games this year, based on the team right now.  But since nothing is static over the season, the range of records I can reasonably conceive is a floor of 9 and a ceiling of winning a single playoff game.
• They’ll beat MSU and ND.
• It’ll be toss-ups against Wisconsin and PSU.
• They’ll probably lose to OSU (unless OSU shocks the world and boots Meyer, at which point that game becomes a toss-up – UPDATE:  They didn’t boot him), likely in an infuriating close game.
• They’ll wind up a couple of plays away from making the playoffs.  It’ll likely include at least one heart-breaker to some mediocre Big 10 West team who will treat their game as the Super Bowl and play out of their minds.  My money is on Northwestern, with the dark horse being Nebraska literally running the exact same plays, in the exact same order, as UCF did in Frost’s first year.  Either way, it’s going to be annoying.

Gambling and analytics say that 9 is more likely than 10, but that feels about right.  If that sounds like 2016 all over again, well, life is meaningless and eat at Arby's.

Best:  Running Before You Walk

When I started this diary series 7-odd years ago, I was a married guy with no kids, a wealth of free time and money in which to consume popular culture, and a perhaps-unhealthy attachment to how college students performed at sports I wasn’t remotely good enough to play at your local youth league, let alone at the elite level.  Now, I’m still that same married guy but with a couple of kids, no money or free time who can tell you the plot of a half-dozen Netflix shows about animated horses but nothing about Game of Thrones, and (I hope) a more refined understanding of just how hard it must be to be a college athlete.  Every year, you’re expected to be better than the year before, to juggle more responsibilities both on and off the field while more times than not, grown men and women whose continued employment relies on you playing a sport flail about your periphery and, well, act like human beings, warts and all.  All the while, due to some combination of pride, passion, and external pressures, you mature in this billion-dollar crucible, and in the end you hope to emerge stronger and smarter than when you showed up.

 

And along the way, there will be stumbles, there will be bruises and bloody knees, cries of anguish when your ambition exceeds your ability.  One of the things I never realized with having a second child is that you’ll relive virtually every journey toward milestones you had with your first child again, but it’ll naturally feel a bit like a rerun.  Like watching Seinfeld or The Simpsons with someone experiencing it for the first time, the jokes are still great and the experience objectively fun, but the beats don’t hit quite as crisply because you know they’re coming.  Walking, talking, etc., all those hallmarks of maturation are novel for your kids, but since you’ve seen it before you’ll want to speed it up, to expect some mind-meld to have occurred between siblings so that they can skip all the mistakes, all the bumps and bruises, and just get to the good stuff.

But that’s not how life works.  You’ve gotta suffer through the rough times to enjoy the good ones, even if that simply means being able to put one foot in front of the other by yourself, because every misstep along the way teaches you what works and what doesn’t, what you can rely on and what needs to be discarded.

Jim Harbaugh took over a Michigan program in turmoil.  The last couple Carr years had been the slow deflation of expectations into Ferentzian statis, of settling in for a couple good wins and never fewer than 3 losses a year.  For a number of reasons you can totally read about in between squirting lemon juice directly into your eyeballs, Michigan rolled the dice with Rich Rodriguez, the outsider with the high-octane offense and, as it turned out, even more explosive temper.  He didn’t win enough and when he did it was either crazy fun or infuriating (based largely on what side of 67-65 catches your eye first).  In came Brady Hoke, a nice-enough man whose blood pact with the gods lasted exactly 1 year before the wheels fell off.  He left as he arrived, happy to be there yet woefully under-qualified for the job. 

Jim Harbaugh was supposed to be the savior, and despite some bumps those first two years he largely looked the part, delivering Michigan back-to-back 10-win seasons for the first time in a decade and putting them on the path to national prominence again.  Michigan was running with a head of steam, maybe a bit too fast given some structural deficiencies just below the surface (little offensive line depth, questionable recruiting at spots like QB, etc.), but all signs pointed to another reasonably smooth year in Michigan’s upward trajectory.

Then the season started, and Michigan wobbled their way through the early part of the slate.  They couldn’t pass block to save their lives, which meant their QBs kept getting hit, which slowed down the offense that really, REALLY needed to stay out of tough downs and distances, and the defense couldn’t quite cover for them.  They got nicked by an opportunistic MSU team, destroyed by a PSU team that appeared to unload their entire playbook on them, and as the season progressed the injuries kept on piling up, the blocking never got better, and Michigan’s season ended with a thud as they blew a double-digit lead against South Carolina. 

For the first time under Jim Harbaugh, Michigan didn’t look like a team on the rise, a team with unbridled potential.  They looked mortal, a team with inexperience and/or ineffectiveness at multiple spots and, for some reason, an inability to convince a number of top-rated players nationally to give them a look.  They stumbled and face-planted hard, and for a lot of fans those bruises haven’t quite healed.

But honestly, this is what we all should have expected.  Sometimes teams can just skate by on the downturn, the gaps between their best that all teams inevitably hit, but usually they don’t.  Michigan didn’t perform like a team that should be considered one of the best in the country, and in this conference that means you’re finishing 4th in your division.  It’s a hard truth, but that’s life.

And yet, this year brings new promise, and much of that comes from the lessons Michigan seems to learned from last year.  Gone are the multiple offensive line coaches, the Rube Goldberg-ian playcalls that required precision and timing Michigan never demonstrated, the search for an offensive identity.  Michigan grew up a ton last year and have the lumps to prove it, and even with one of the toughest schedules in the country, this feels like a year where we’ll see them back on track to being one of the best teams in the country.

Better(?):  Offensive Line

It’s not a stretch to say that Michigan’s (relative) struggles under Harbaugh are due to the, at best, inconsistent performance along the offensive line, in particular with respect to pass blocking.  Tim Drevno, as the de-facto offensive line coach (even though last year’s team-up with also-departed Greg Frey featured a confusing Tackles/Everyone else split), deserves the lion’s share of the blame for what sure looked like a confused unit last season.  Brian has often lamented that last year’s team didn’t meet a stunt it could pick up, and honestly there were times my absolutely neophyte eyes saw the flaws in the blocking scheme basically as soon as the ball was snapped, which says something a bit positive about me and a heaping pile of negative about how pieces of the line executed last season.  So both Frey and Drevno are gone and were replaced by Ed Warriner, one-time meh OSU offensive coordinator and all-time pretty good offensive line coach.  That tingling sensation you’re feeling right now is called “marginal excitement”, and it’s totally normal.

 

Now, I do want to point out that last year’s offensive line wasn’t necessarily the complete trainwreck it’s been characterized by some.  They did seem to figure out run blocking as the year progressed, mostly because they settled into the primarily power-based approach that had shown promise in 2016 and the guys you wanted to see get more comfortable (Bredeson, Ruiz, Onwenu to an extent) did.  By the end of the year, the line ranked 20th in the nation in adjusted line yards, which is a fancy way of saying that Michigan’s shiny top-15 rushing attack was the product of consistent blocking and not, say, having a transcendent talent toting the ball and bailing you out.  They never figured out how to keep their QBs upright, though, finishing 117th in adjusted sack rate last year, a near-100 position drop from 2016’s 28th-place finish.  And if that latter number doesn’t mesh with your memories of 2016, you are (a) not alone, and (b) realizing just how bad 2017 must have been at stopping people from angrily hitting Michigan QBs.

Early returns with Warinner point to a simplified collection of line calls while still maintaining the running fundamentals that this team seems to have figured out work for their personnel.  The line isn’t likely to be a 1-year turnaround considering we’re about a week away from the first game and there are still questions about who will start on both ends, but offensive line more than a lot of positions is one where you can technique/rep yourself into competence, and Warinner has a strong track record of turning globs of potential into, at the very least, solid starters. 

And really, that’s all Michigan probably needs to get out of their front 5 to be a coin-flip or better in virtually every game on their schedule.  Outside of OSU and maybe PSU if you squint a bit, there isn’t a terrifying defensive line that they’ll face in conference, and mobility at QB plus some movement away from the longer-developing passing plays we saw last year should further mitigate those concerns.  Yes, I’d love to live in a world where Michigan just mauled people for 4 quarters like Wisconsin does, but Michigan simply doesn’t have that talent on the offensive line right now.  So in the interim, give me “sustainable competence” and never look back.

 

Best:  QB Depth

When Shea Patterson, the ballyhooed Ole Miss transfer was finally granted free passage to Ann Arbor, most Michigan fans expected him to earn the starting QB spot from, amongst a cadre of options, incumbent/last-man-standing Brandon Peters.  Patterson was the #1 QB in the same class as Peters, put up some solid numbers as the starter for the Rebels last year before he was lost for the year, and by all accounts has been a quick study of Michigan’s now more up-tempo, RPO-infused offense.  I want to make it clear I am very excited by the prospect of a competent Michigan passing game, and I’d be lying if I said watching Patterson just flick balls 40+ yards down the field didn’t feel like manna from the heavens.

But I think a lot of people are comparing what Patterson did in a handful of games last year, on a different team with a totally different offensive philosophy, with last year’s, um, uninspiring passing attack and assuming he’d be demonstrably better in that same situation.

Wilton Speight entered last season the presumed starter and for good reason; he was coming off a pretty impressive first year as a starter in 2016, putting up solid numbers against good defenses and, at times, being the only semi-competent part of the offense (witness Michigan failing to break 100 yards rushing or 3 ypc in all three of their 2016 losses).  Still, John O’Korn had apparently given him some fight for the starting spot, and while his one start in 2016 had been downright ugly, it still felt like a bit of an outlier for a guy who had looked really solid at Houston.  And behind both of them was Brandon Peters, a top-100 recruit and top-6 QB nationally coming out of HS, the expected successor who was coming off a redshirt and one who had shown promise in the offseason.  At the very least, Michigan fans were reasonably confident that they had some depth at the QB position.

And yet, by the end of the year Michigan’s QBs had combined for 9 TDs (!), 10 INTs (!!), 54% completion percentage (!!!) and 6.4 ypa (!V).  The only schools to throw fewer TDs were a smattering of terrible teams (1-11 Rice, 2-10 Tulsa, 2-10 Georgia Southern), Army, and you guess it, count ’em 3 Big 10 teams (Rutgers, Illinois, and Minnesota).  Georgia Tech threw for more TDs, Florida threw for more. Hell, 1-11 Kansas nearly doubled up Michigan in the air, fergodsakes! 

And while I’ve seen a number of rationalizations about that performance, the one that I don’t buy is that all three of these QBs somehow forgot how to play football in 2017.  As far as I know, none of them were slipped Urban Meyer’s memory pills, and Jim Harbaugh had not one year earlier surprised everyone with a wholly competent Wilton Speight, so I doubt he’d lost his ability to develop QBs.  No, what happened was Michigan’s receivers got worse as a couple multi-year starters in Butt, Darboh, and Chesson wound up on NFL rosters and were replaced with players who simply didn’t produce at the same level (McDoom, Crawford, Perry compared to expectations) or were young and still developing into college receivers (basically everyone else), and that coupled with wonky playcalling and an historically bad pass-blocking outfit led to them running for their lives more often than not.  Now, that doesn’t absolve the position completely, as there absolutely were plays to be made that weren’t thrown well.

But Michigan was one of the youngest teams in the country last year, and this year they’re 37th, or about 100 places up.  The loss of Cole will be felt on the line and I think Speight is a better QB that people give him credit for, but otherwise the bulk of last year’s team is back along with a couple of exciting new additions, and it’s reasonable to expect that familiarity along with maturation is a recipe for improvements across the offense but most especially at quarterback.  And by all accounts the playcalling aspects have been streamlined, both in terms of who calls the plays (it’s Jim Harbaugh) and the number of voices heard from (basically McElwain and Hamilton to varying degrees).  So it’s safe to say Michigan should be better on offense simply because everyone got a little older and, you hope, a little more acclimated to playing football at the collegiate level.

Best:  Don’t Count Out Peters

I don’t really have a catchy title for this section or some great insights, but I’ve seen a number of people throw dirt on Peters’s chances at starting as long as Patterson is here, and I just don’t get where that’s coming from.  Shea Patterson is a very talented quarterback, and there’s a good chance that he’ll get much better coaching at the position than he got playing for Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss.  Furthermore, the extremely pass-dependent offense Freeze ran there (in the 6 full games Patterson played last year, Ole Miss only ran for more than 4 yards a carry once) will be markedly different than the one he’ll see at Michigan, which will ask far less of him.

On one hand, the top-line stats for Patterson at Ole Miss last year are a bit misleading; he put up great numbers against South Alabama and UT-Martin (918 yards, 76% completion, 9:1 TD:INT, 12 ypa) and perfectly adequate numbers against the P5 defenses he saw (1341 yards, 58% completion, 8:8 TD:INT, 7.4 ypa).  It’s an undeniable sad state of affairs for Michigan fans that those latter numbers are still demonstrably better than the combined totals for Michigan’s QBs last year (2226 yards, 53% completion, 9:10 TD:INT, 6.4 ypa), though “better than 2017” is less a bar to clear than a stick you try not to trip on.  The offense will be better simply because it couldn’t be much worse throwing the ball, but those latter numbers don’t portend the major uptick most are hoping for.

On the other hand, Patterson also faced a downright murderer’s row of pass defenses before he got hurt; Auburn (1), Alabama (5), Vandy (17), LSU (20), and even Cal (66) would be a gauntlet for any QB in any system, and Ole Miss’s offense last year put an immense amount of pressure on it’s QBs to Just Make Plays™ without the benefit of a competent run game or pass blocking.  While he’ll run into equally-tough pass defenses this year (OSU, MSU, PSU, ND, and Wisconsin were all top-40 pass defenses last year and should be reasonably similar this year), he should still find it easier sledding with a more complete offense around him.  And he should light it up against the mediocre-to-bad pass defenses on the schedule, something you might have deduced from the stats last year Michigan definitely did not.

But “Rich Man’s Tate Forcier” was the moniker bestowed on Patterson when he arrived on campus, and that seems to be a fitting comparison in recent Michigan lore.  He’s shifty, he’s got solid mechanics and a good arm, and plays like a guy who trusts implicitly his ability to get the ball where it needs to go.  When he’s right, it’s a thing of beauty; when he’s wrong, it’s…not.  And my guess is that that gunslinger mentality will lead to some rough games having him “play through it” might not be the best option, especially with a pretty good QB right behind him.

That bowl game against South Carolina did more to hurt the perception of Peters than really any other player last year, with the possible exception of Josh Metellus dropping that pick against OSU.  Here was a guy coming off a semi-serious concussion against Wisconsin, apparently getting cleared to join the team only a week or so before the game, who had a bad game against a good defense that shut down the running game and, toward the end, was rag-dolling his protection at times.  He didn’t play well, but before getting hurt against Wisconsin he had shown himself to be more than capable of leading the team and putting up decent numbers (don’t get me started about that 9/18 game against Maryland where apparently PIs were just turned off and Maryland was head-hunting pretty early on).  If Patterson struggles, I’d be fine with Peters getting some snaps and even a start, and not as an indictment on Patterson but simply an acknowledgement that Peters is a good option to run the team.

Worst:  Everyone is Terrible (But Also Good at Football – Except Maryland)

 

As a person with limited free time, I tried to write this diary in pieces, hacking away at it for 15-30 minutes a night every couple of days.  On the one hand that provides me with some time to really think about topics and craft a semi-coherent point, but at the same time it also allows the news cycle to chug along.  So to put this into perspective, I started this column a couple days after we all learned that DJ Durkin’s Maryland was pretty horrific, a place where killing a kid to prove a point about toughness was but the culmination of a string of personal abuses and attacks by men paid absurd about of money to “mold” teenagers into both football players and, per the brochure, human beings.  This was a couple of weeks after we learned Urban Meyer repeatedly made excuses for, covered up, and overall condoned a serial domestic abuser across multiple jobs on his staff because he’s the grandson of a guy who gave him a job.  That same week, we learned officially that Mark Dantonio welcomed back 18th-year senior Jon Reschke because he needed depth at lineback…er, because Reschke was sorry for calling a former teammate the N-word because said guy apparently hooked up with his girlfriend.  But it’s cool because a guy who got caught driving with a suspended license 7 times said it was cool, and anyway the second-highest paid coach in the state asked over 100 college students on his team if it was okay and they “unanimously” agreed. 

I long ago accepted the fact that college sports are just unpaid minor leagues for pro sports, a place for schools to make millions off the health and well-being of largely impressionable teenagers who love to play a sport and are good enough at it that they might have a chance to one day get paid money to do it professionally.  These athletes aren’t naïve by any means, but they are at a disadvantage in the great shell game run by the NCAA, and so are at the whims of the (always) rich, (usually) older, (usually) white men who run these sports.  And, as we’ve seen really for decades but seems to have come to a head in the past couple of years after the systemic sexual assaults cases we’ve seen at PSU, Baylor, and MSU, if you aren’t in that club nobody in power really cares about you. 

Nobody at Maryland seemed to really care that Jordan McNair wasn’t able to stand during his workout, with little to no medical treatment provided to him and what was described as a “ball of testosterone” screaming at two teammates to “[d]rag his ass across the field!”  They cared a bit more after he died, but it wasn’t until 2 months later, when reporters dug into the cesspool that is Maryland football, that people in power started to look into how a 19-year-old kid died practicing football at your goddamn school. 

Zach Smith had numerous run-ins with police spanning nearly a decade relating to his relationship with his ex-wife, including multiple physical assaults with children present and at least one time when Courtney Smith was pregnant.  He sent a dick pic while visiting the White House, ordered thousands of dollars of sex toys delivered to his office, photographed himself having sex with another member of the OSU staff, and lord knows what else while, and this is the weirdest part, being pretty terrible at his job.  And yet, he kept his job because his grandfather did his boss a solid, and that boss, Urban Meyer, is such an immoral, mentally incapacitated individual that he’d possibly break the law to keep him in the fold.  And even after receiving a punishment less severe than a bunch of UNC players got for selling shoes they received from their school for free, he wouldn’t even apologize to the victim of Smith’s violence until days later, after pointedly not doing so during his first press conference and (likely) only doing so after basically the entire world called him out on it.

MSU and PSU ignored decades of sexual abuses to occur under their watch, and nobody really cared because the victims were children and young adults, not even cogs in the great money-making machine.  Penn State was sorta punished, at least temporarily, and MSU had to pay out a lot of money but is still trying to white-wash their responsibilities and let a failed former Governor snipe away at the victims.   Mark Dantonio recruited a known sex offender onto his team, then almost regretfully had to boot him from the team when he attacked another victim. 

I’m listing all of these offenses not because I believe Michigan is morally superior to anyone; while I have my doubts that something systemic like Larry Nassar would occur at Michigan because that took a particularly unique combination of contempt for the health and well-being of others, I’m not foolish enough to believe that mishandling of sexual assaults or the health of athletes is a uniquely “not us” problem.  But thus far in Michigan’s history, they’ve largely steered clear of that, and the couple of times they did sway (mostly notably with Gibbons), they remedied it reasonably quickly and were publicly excoriated for it. 

And yet, this year Michigan will play all of these teams on the football field, and there’s a good chance they’ll lose to at least one of them (though not Maryland).  And it will suck if/when they do, because it’ll just be adding to the maddening crowd shouting down the victims of these offenses, the men and women who were hurt because somebody looked the other way or wanted to send a message.  This time next week, we might get a smattering of comments about Jordan McNair or Courtney Smith, but they’ll be in the context of how millionaires paid to run these student-athlete-composed teams handled these “distractions”.  It’s why I’m all for college athletes getting paid to play their sports and unionizing, to demand that the people making the money off their health look out for them a bit.  Because the NCAA is likely going to again clear $1B in revenue this year, and Jordan McNair, Courtney Smith, and untold others are going to suffer because of it.

Best:  The Defense Will Be Good and You Should Already Know That

It’s weird – I’ve probably spent a couple thousand words talking about the offensive line and the QB battle, and those two spots are probably the weakest/most unknown commodities on the team, and I’ll struggle to write more than a couple hundred words about last year’s top-10 defense that returns almost everybody and should only get better.  Like, here’s a highlight reel of them murdering teams last season, here’s Devin Bush destroying an innocent donut, here’s a glowing review of Rashan Gary as an NFL prospect, here’s a list of the top-20 players in the conference per PFF and a quarter of them being Michigan defenders, etc.  You get the point.

Don Brown turned a bunch of guys from cities you probably can’t pronounce properly without tearing out your tongue or smoking Marlboros since you were 2 into some of the best defenses in the country, so I’m inclined to believe that Michigan’s defense will be similarly stout this year and, one hopes, not worn down by the end of the year because the offense can’t stay on the field.  There’s definitely the talent there to be dominating, what with a couple of NFL draft picks on the line, another couple in the linebacking corps, and maybe the best secondary in the country behind them.  The 3rd- and 4th-string corners would be starters on at least half of the P5, they’ve got a 5* linebacker on the bench, and the defensive line could legitimately cycle through 8 guys without a significant drop in production.  In other words, the defense is a world-beater on paper and, one hopes, also on the field.  I’m sure I’ll have more to say as the season progresses, but it’s gotten to the point that I take it for granted Michigan will have a top-10/15 defense every year, and until further notice that’s the assumption I’m sticking to.

Worst:  The (need for a) Troll Hunter

One of the features I had hoped would have made the new site was the oft-mentioned “neg this poster into oblivion and then don’t let him post/make his posts invisible” button, as it would make it easier to not have to deal with the infestation of trolls, both real and concern, that show up every year around these parts.  And before you rush to the comments below to point out how YOU aren’t like that and how you are just telling the truth and not following the party line and blah blah blah, I’m not talking about you.  I mean, maybe I am, but probably not.  Because being negative isn’t a crime and it isn’t a sign of bad fandom; rarely are things as peachy as the parties would like it to appear, and there are absolutely real, structural concerns one can have about Michigan football as it relates to staff, recruiting, on-field success, whatever.  Hell, it wasn’t until Rich Rod was shown to be a horrible creep that I finally jumped off the “he could have worked at Michigan” bandwagon.  So I know all about holding unpopular opinions because that lizard part of your brain won’t completely shut off.

No, what I’m talking about is more malicious and, frankly, less authentic.  Without naming names because like Beetlejuice I worry they’ll return with the force of a strained fart, there is a contingent of the Michigan fanbase that exists seemingly only to complain about the current deficiencies of the recruits, players, coaches, etc.  It’s all absolutes written with the hyperbole key locked on, and it’s goal is to tear down someone or something because it isn’t meeting some subjective expectation in the moment.  It’s anger mixed with confusion and a sense of powerlessness, the reality that as a fan you basically have two options: accept and rationalize your team’s failings or stop following them.  But when you reject these two possibilities, you’re only recourse is the futile quest to have your voice heard above the din, and that inevitably leads to the lashing out you see online.

Now, if it sounds like I’m coming across as the Feelings Cop, here to dispense internet justice about how one should feel, I won’t fully disagree.  Everyone is entitled to his/her own expressions of emotions.  But that doesn’t mean you are above ridicule for them, and that’s where I’m coming from.  So when John O’Korn gets raked over the coals for pointing out that the vocal minority of asshole Michigan fans are both “vocal” and “assholes”, that says a lot more about the people with the pitchforks than the player.  Because the biggest complaint people seem to have is that he didn’t beat OSU, and then got tired of being the whipping boy for that segment of the internet we all sorta don’t want to recognize as existing.  Or when a player commits to Michigan and a decent number of the comments (plus a chunk of the actual post) buries him as a proxy for disappointment about certain aspects of recruiting, it’s not beyond the pale to point out that shitting on a guy when he pledges to your school might be in bad taste.  That doesn’t mean you can’t be critical or must put on your blinders, just remember that you are talking about human beings who didn’t do anything wrong beyond not be who you wanted them to be. 

And so while I absolutely want to see real discussions around here about the state of Michigan athletics, I’m not holding out hope that they will somehow survive the deluge of bullshit that constantly percolates just below the surface.

Quick Hits:

Here are a couple of smaller points that I’d like to cram in here:

• Michigan should finally have a 1,000-yard back this year; Higdon was only 6 yards short last year and I don’t think they’ll set the first half of the year on fire with the type of ineffective runs they did in 2017.  That said, it’s imperative Higdon show more consistency running the ball (about 2/3 of this yards last year came against IU, Rutgers, and Minnesota), and I fully expect Chris Evans to emerge as a receiving threat out of the backfield to a degree we haven’t seen before.
• Before his unfortunate injury I’d have picked Tarik Black to emerge as the top receiver this year; he seemed like a great fit for Patterson and is a matchup nightmare.  With him out, my guess is DPJ and Nico Collins will get the lion’s share of the balls outside, but Zach Gentry will probably end up leading the team in yards per target because it’s hard to see any LB or undersized safety being able to slow him down.
• Depth inside on the defensive line is probably not going to be an issue early in the year; Notre Dame is the only team likely able to push Michigan around, and those big-time network games come with so many media timeouts and delays that even if ND went up-tempo at times they’d be hard-pressed to really run anyone down.  But the back half of the season features a bunch of not-fun teams that will absolutely tax guys like Solomon and Dwumfour.  This isn’t novel, but keeping people healthy will be essential for this defense to reach it’s peak.  The new rules regarding redshirts will hopefully help on this front, as it will mean guys can be cycled in during blowouts and less competitive games more freely.

Record

Looking at the schedule, Notre Dame is beginning to feel far more tractable as we keep hearing about issues throwing the ball and replacing a slew of performers on the line and in the backfield.  I said earlier I saw that as a win even before Brian Kelly brought chaos soccer balls into the fold, and nothing has changed that tune.  The next 5 games seems quite winnable, but I assume Nebraska or Northwestern trip Michigan up somehow.  So they’ll be 5-1 going into games against Wisconsin, @MSU, and home against PSU.  Go 2-1 here and take care of the carcasses of IU and Rutgers and Michigan is again heading into Columbus 9-2 with a chance to finally beat Buckeye Nation under Urban Meyer.  I want to believe, but right now I see that being any excruciatingly-close loss. 

The big variables for me are those three games against Wisconsin, MSU, and PSU.  Wisconsin seems like the most complete team of the group; playing them at home should help Michigan but I could see a repeat of the past couple years where both teams smash into each other for 3 quarters before someone breaks just enough.  I think MSU is the weakest of the group, as they rely immensely on Lewerke to keep that offense going and their point differential last year (+59 points) was somehow worse than Michigan’s (+83), and yet they won 2 more games.  To me, that smells of playing above your head, and a slight regression is in order.  PSU has recruited well and still has the best QB in the conference under center, but they lost a ton on offense and also saw Joe Moorhead, the architect of their elite offense these past two years, leave for Miss St.  I remember James Franklin’s PSU offenses before Moorhead arrived, and while I doubt he’ll be that bad it’s still an open question if they’ll be able to replicate that same level of performance.  If Michigan somehow sweeps this group, then all bets are off for the year.  But I’m pessimistic, and even if they manage to enter this stretch 6-0 it’s hard to see them emerging unscathed.

So there you have it; 9-3 regular season, a decent bowl game, and the possibility of great things with a few breaks.  And I’ll be honest, I’m leaning closer to 10-2 just because ND isn’t as scary and even now I’m struggling to worry about Northwestern.  Anyway, off to the races for 2018, and Go Blue!