[Matt Fleming/@B5Qphotos]

So around halftime or right before halftime I wrote this parody post thingy calling Josh Gattis ‘The Greatest OC in Michigan Football history’ largely because writing parody posts has generally been my way to cope with bullshit from the Michigan fan base, even going back to my days as a part time writer for Maize n Brew.*

Its purpose was in the most marginal of ways intended to make a funny, but also something of a middle finger to the people in our so beloved Wolverine Nation who believe that the spread is inherently the greatest form of offensive production. How fitting it would be that Wisconsin took us to the woodshed with the very type of offense that so many spread zealots despise, much in the same way they did in 2010.

My general experience here on mgoblog, like many of you, has been for the most part negative. The community here is quick to overreact, and while that is understandably the way of things in following a sports team on the internet, it is also dominated by idiots whose avatars invoke little confidence in their position as reliable arbiters of leading the discussion. The worst offenders are these mooks:

Look at those. That’s mgoblog these days.

I would not be surprised if those guys were actually Buckeye trolls who have been lying in the weeds. Seriously? ‘Even you Brutus’?

The reason why I’m writing this thing now is to appeal to the few good actors in the mgoblog community and indeed the Michigan fan community at large. I wrote a parody post that surely got a bunch of dislikes, and I have no doubt that this post will get its fair amount of dislikes. I might be nuking my mgoblog account by doing this. LSA or one of Brian’s many trusted moderators could make the decision that this bit is not worthy of staying on the blog. I’ll have a giant -9999 next to my name. Honestly I don’t even care right now. This isn’t for them. It isn’t for the mooks. It’s for the people who still want to think rationally about this football program and where we go from here.

So despite that my general inclination when faced with a loss is to parody and troll the members of this fan base who very much justly deserve it, I am going to approach the next several hundred words in all seriousness.

For those of you stuck in the BPONE: The Black Pit of Negative Expectations is a thing in our fan base that somehow we attribute as something entirely unique to us. We watch these games as well as the rest of college football and we wonder why we aren’t Clemson or Alabama or Ohio State any other number of college football teams that get good things said about them on ESPN College Gameday. But we also go ahead and ignore the context that sets a lot of those things up.

Dabo Swinney had something like six years of futility before his program really broke through, and even then it had to scrap its way to its first title game. Nick Saban had Alabama in a pretty good spot before the BCS computers in 2011 completely nuked or unraveled the college football paradigm by having a rematch with LSU that set the Crimson Tide on their current trajectory that they are on today and likely will be on until the day Saban retires. It was solidified in the thrashing of Notre Dame the following year.

Urban Meyer sacrificed a goat every year in some Satanic ritual that has allowed Ohio State to evade every single bit of poor luck outside of getting pantsed by Kirk Ferentz or a Purdue team inspired by Trent Tyler, from which no amount of Satanic worship could protect them. He got the benefit of a dubious fourth-down call and bad game plans by Michigan’s defensive staff in some years, poor quarterback play by a Wolverine in others. As a result the narrative has solidified that Ohio State is grossly ahead of us in terms of talent and everything that a fan base could want.

The answer is not to nuke everything and risk becoming Tennessee, who looked at Phil Fulmer and asked ‘what have you done for me lately?’ and now regularly spread their cheeks to teams with no business beating them. We’ve already come close to doing that a couple times, and damn near tried our hardest in 2007.

We overreacted to Appalachian State and Oregon and pretty much shoved Lloyd Carr out the door, to our detriment. Let me repeat that: TO OUR DETRIMENT. (You can be a Lloyd hater all day and say that he should have won a lot more than he did, but the fact that he was able to do so well with what today would be considered a shoe-string budget, and do it all cleanly, it pretty damn impressive.) So as a result we gambled on guys we had no business gambling on and paid the price for stupidity. Rodriguez and Hoke were both massive gambles in hindsight, whether you love Rodriguez (you know who you are) and hate Hoke, or vice versa.

Harbaugh is not in that same category. This is a guy with a track record of success who fits this program better than anyone since Carr. He has made us relevant in the conference, relevant nationally, and has not won all the things all of the time because of reasons. What are those reasons? Go ahead, tell us, you mini Finebaums.

The reasons for Harbaugh's struggles are not clear and cut, and moreso exist because of the nature of college football. Harbaugh is fighting against the momentum he should have had in year two, wherein if for a few bounces his record looks a lot better than it does currently and that carries the program forward after tough games.

Occasionally coaches are going to have stinkers unless they have championships already on their belt and can plow forward with built-up momentum, or if thanks to the teams who face them just roll over from sheer intimidation. You want to criticize coaches when they don't make changes, and when they do make changes and it doesn't work you want to hold their feet to the fire for that too.

So if you’re calling for Harbaugh to be fired, that is not rational. And frankly, you’re kind of an idiot and probably one of the mooks that I posted a picture of up above. You are ignoring the potential that we as a program have for completely imploding beyond repair the way that we were on the cusp of doing in 2014 until Harbaugh and Jake Rudock rescued us pretty much single-handedly. You are ignoring the fleeting and unpredictable nature of college football and are wrapped up too much in your own fantasy world where Michigan is a NCAA 13 Dynasty where you can manipulate the stats and skills of rosters and even shape the entire landscape of college football on a whim.

This isn’t to say that Harbaugh has not made mistakes or is incapable of making mistakes. He is not unlike other coaches. He’s been lucky at times and unlucky. The tips of the scales have been largely against Michigan over the past decade and a half, much like they were against Ohio State throughout much of the 90s when John Cooper could not beat Michigan no matter how hard he tried.

I get the hand wringing and how a lot of you feel that sooner or later things have to change for the better or else this program is doomed to irrelevance for the foreseeable future. But if you really want to doom the program, go ahead and roll the dice again and again and keep hitting that reset button.

There is only one rational takeaway from this Wisconsin game. And that is this: Josh Gattis must be relieved of play-calling duties.

This is not an overreaction. This is not failing to give a guy a chance. This is in fact the most reasonable thing I can muster given everything we have seen. This is not Harbaugh’s first season; it is his fifth. For the good of the program, for the good of the season, and indeed for the good of Harbaugh’s career, he cannot let Gattis continue to spearhead the game plans or call plays on game day. The man is simply not ready.

I hate saying that. I like Gattis. He seems like a good guy and when I watch youtube clips where he’s giving interviews he sounds like a guy who knows his stuff. But I thought the same thing about Al Borges. Yet Borges was a guy who actually had a track record, and somehow in the world of being a college football fan - and indeed being a Michigan fan especially - having a track record of anything other than sheer unadulterated awesome means that you never deserve the benefit of the doubt. Gattis is a guy who has done literally nothing to justify the amount of slack he is being cut by the people running this blog or the most vocal people in the mgoblog community.

Gattis appeared to get the great benefit of the doubt largely, it seems, because he represented the opportunity that so many people in this fan base want: to become Oklahoma, Clemson, or Ohio State. He was young and a so-called “brilliant mind.” He sat in the same rooms as Joe Moorehead and Nick Saban. Okay, and? What has he done to deserve so much adulation other than subscribe to an offensive style and philosophy that spread zealots consider modern without first asking if it would actually work?

Harbaugh, on the other hand, as an incredible track record and has more than earned the benefit of the doubt here. The right thing to do, and I hope it happens, is for Harbaugh - a veteran coach - to take back control and return us to the offense that he gave us from 2015-2018 that might have seemed boring to you but was actually pretty effective for the most part. It will probably not win against Ohio State without a Herculean effort by the defense, but that’s not the point. This is not about winning the conference now. It’s about salvaging the rest of the season or letting the whole thing burn.

Michigan has what is purported to be its best offensive line under Harbaugh. It has a senior quarterback. It has 3 NFL caliber wide receivers, two of which at the very least will go to the NFL draft regardless of how Michigan performs for the remainder of the season. It has a running back in Zach Charbonnet who in last year's offense potentially averages 150 to 200 yards a game.

If you stick with Gattis's playcalling, we are not beating Penn State, Michigan State, Iowa, Maryland, or OSU. That’s 6-6. If Harbaugh goes back to what worked in 2018, we can possibly get to 7-5 or 8-4. That might not sound like an exciting prospect, but right now, I will take it. Right now I will take that over the prospect of going 6-6 or worse, either of which would be an utter disaster given the roster we had coming into the season and the fact that it’s Harbaugh’s 5th season here.

No one, including myself, would be happy with 7-5 or 8-4. I have a hard time believing that with any decision the coaching staff makes right now the light immediately goes on and we can power our way to 9 or 10 wins. We're not looking at that. We are faced with a choice to either stick with this or revert back to what worked last year. Which one makes more noise in the Big Ten? Which one feels like 2014?

Let me reiterate this: if you’re looking for rational reasons why we suck, look at the new ingredient. What changed from last year to this year? We went out and hired a position coach from Alabama and gave him the keys to the car and fired up the neon lights and cranked the radio. Some people can at least admit that Harbaugh tried to swing for the fences and it hasn’t worked out.

The offense sucks not because Harbaugh himself cannot coach. It sucks because a guy who has zero experience calling plays or in running an offense (at least spearheading it) at a major Power 5 football program was given more control and responsibility than either he could realistically handle or was beyond his level of competence. Gattis promised us liftoff almost immediately and now looks like the biggest coaching hype bust in the nation. This was hardly the year for growing pains.

If Harbaugh does not want Gattis to morph into a GERG-level hire that dooms his Michigan career, he must relieve the man of offensive control. I don’t know if I want to suggest that Harbaugh create headlines by terminating Josh Gattis after three games, but it might be more amenable to simply regulate him to a minor coaching role and then part ways with him after the season. Again, for Harbaugh’s sake, and for the sake of our collective sanity, I sincerely hope this happens.

On Don Brown. The idiots are really out in force here. Wisconsin dominates time of possession by a five-to-one ratio and you expect this defense with few if any actual stars to hold them to 2016 numbers. Give me a f**king break. The fact that this was 35-14 and not 70-14 is frankly amazing. Wisconsin piled on the points against Nebraska in the 2012 conference championship and I absolutely thought we were in for a similar outing. Don Brown is hardly infallible but again his overall body of work at this program suggests that we are better off having him than kicking him to the curb and starting over.

Bud Foster has suffered humiliating box scores at Virginia Tech and at least that fan base has the collective mental wherewithal to realize that being good 85-90 percent of the time is better than being good barely 10 percent of the time. I know the sequence of Mattison, Durkin, and Brown has lulled some of us into a feeling that defense as a whole might be kind of easy to coach, but I for one will never forget the days of Greg Robinson and the harpooning that we did to our defense in the Rich Rodriguez years.

I’m not saying you should trust Don Brown when you place your bets on whether Michigan will cover the spread, but this guy has generally lived up to the billing and consistently given Michigan top ten defenses in spite of the occasional flop that even the best defenses inevitably face. You want to nuke that and hope we don’t end up like Illinois, go right ahead, I won’t be joining you.

On quarterbacks and turnovers. Even Tom Brady fumbles or throws an interception. Honestly I’m not as interested in railing against whatever decision Harbaugh makes in regards to who starts next week against Rutgers.

To me that’s not the issue. The issue is not screaming why aren’t the coaches doing their jobs by coaching the turnover bug out of players, it’s putting faith in an offensive coordinator who has never done it before and might not (and probably doesn’t) have any clue what he’s doing. Those things trickle down to player confidence.

And if I - a guy who defended Borges and Nuss and Pep Hamilton until the train had long since left the station - have no confidence in Josh Gattis, how much do you think the players have? The path forward, in my opinion, is pretty clear. Go back to down-G, attempt a power running game, and try to set up play action. I know a lot of you want the good feels that come from watching a Baker Mayfield type of season, but right now it’s not happening. So bring on the manball. We know it works with Ruiz, Onwenu, and Bredesen. We know Harbaugh’s pretty good at it unlike previous Michigan coaches.

Please, leave the bullshit at the door. I know I just wrote 2,400 words and whatnot, but if you’re planning to log in just to scream “What game were YOU watching!?!?” and tell me to f**k off like so many of you inevitably do, just know that I won’t be caring. I frankly don’t give two shits if you want to debate the finer points or the subtle nuances of this post and continue to defend Gattis because he’s young and deep down you’re either a secret Buckeye or have some inherent hatred of Harbaugh because of his record against the arch nemesis.

And as I said, if this post ends up nuking my mgoblog account and sending my ass to Bolivia because I didn’t write a thing that Brian or Ace or Seth automatically agree with or doesn’t command the denizens of upvotes that correct takes obviously always do, then so be it. I wrote this for people who are generally concerned with the direction of the program and are wondering what an at-least semi-rational take would be.

*Yes. If you didn’t know, I used to write for Maize n Brew. The experience, like that of many blogger’s, was not particularly fun, especially because of internal political stuff that stemmed from me being a Hoke optimist following 2012 because he won a Sugar Bowl and Borges had crafted an offense with Denard Robinson that managed to somehow win 11 games. The people at the helm there now are different, thankfully, but I’ve had no desire to go back to an unpaid job where you have to come up with thousands of words and get tons of pushback over sticking points and rarely see appreciation. I’m sure the writers here on mgoblog can relate to a certain degree. I have mad respect for them, even if I don’t always agree with their pining for the spread.