UM/MSU Rivals Previews

Nice work.

Nice work. If Rivals could respond, though, they'd probably say that, yeah even though Michigan has more returning production on the offensive side of the football, what's returning was the worst in the Big Ten last year. Personally, I'd still take our offensive situation than MSU's, which has more unknowns, but anyway, that's probably what Rivals is thinking. Well done, though.

if we assume two teams are nearly equal in other departments, the team starting a freshman QB should lower its expectations by a letter grade, or a few wins, or whatever. There are mitigating circumstances in Michigan's case to be sure, e.g. the supposed perfect match between Tate's skill set and Rodriguez's system, the end of season improvement in OL play, etc... All that said, I wouldn't expect an impartial observer to see beyond the words: 18 years old.

But still, I bet we score a heap more TDs than Sparty this year.

This interesting, but since MSU relied so much on Ringer, your running back comparison is practically meaningless. I mean, I'd love to believe that their RBs are worthless, but they never even got a chance to accumulate stats.

Nice post. Also, I can't believe Carlos Brown and Kevin Grady have 1248 career rushing yards between them. When did they get them?

Sparty played much better than their talent level when they had Stanton, then Hoyer at QB. Rivals must think Cousins or Nichol can carry on in the same manner. True freshmen may be the liability, at least in the beginning.

I live here in Chicago, and follow HS football pretty closely. Anderson was a good, not great, HS player at Barrington. This HS traditionally places their best players at Illinois, Iowa, or Wisconsin. He received offers from none of those, MSU being his best choice.

I'd take Brandon Minor and Carlos Brown any day over Anderson.

If Forcier/Robinson combo is somewhat serviceable at QB, we will be able to beat MSU. Talent is there.

Good analysis.

That was a good overview. Just shows you don't have to dig terribly deep to get highly useful information.

"I would like to note that I did not include any offenseive line statistics as they are exceptionally difficult to come across, however I will mention that the offensive line was the "biggest problem" for both teams in the Rivals analyses, thus we can conclude that this area is roughly a draw."

Michigan's offensive line outgained Michigan State's last year (3.91ypc to 3.31ypc, and 147ypg to 130ypg) and gave up fewer sacks (1.83pg to 1.85pg). Meanwhile, Michigan's line returns all 5 starters, while State's lost 2. It may be a bit harsh to Michigan to say their offensive line, which was better by any reasonable measure last year, won't widen the gap even more this year.

Good post.

I'm interested in seeing how the WRs work out this year, since MSU benefited quite a bit last year from their dominant running game setting up play action and safeties cheating up to the line. At the same time, UM had two below-average QBs supported by a mediocre running game (at least until MINOR RAGE started to kick in). I like Dell, but beyond him I'm not sure MSU's WR corp is going to scare anyone this year.

As for the RBs, I agree with the earlier posters that the loss of Ringer kind of skews the numbers here a bit. If you looked at last year's RBs before Hart left, you'll see a similar drop off in carries, yardage, etc.

I didn't check anything else, but that 2.0 number jumped out at me... unless I'm missing something, that should be 3.25 per carry (325 yards over 100 carries). Still not nearly as good as our RBs, but slightly better than it looks.

Anyway, nice work on putting all this together. I'm feeling like Cartman in that South Park episode about the Wii... I'm strongly considering freezing myself for the next two months so I don't have to wait any longer for football!

I think that we should probably account for turnovers in the comparison too. If the offense can stop turning the ball over, we'll perform better than a C.

But I'm not sure I agree with your reasoning. The players that are coming back had different roles in their previous seasons than they will have in 2009. Past performance, in this case, can be a very poor indicator of future results.

I will ask a totally subjective question: If you could pick any of the MSU players on offense, on the condition that they must start, who do you take?

For me it is a very short list:

Maybe an O-lineman (but I don't know about linemen enough to tell you who or where he'd start).

Think about it. I like our TB better. Their QBs are noobs too. The WRs (with the exception of maybe Dell) aren't nearly as athletic as ours. Their TEs wouldn't fit in our offense very well, and Koger is suited to RR's offense. That leaves the line.

I like the post, it's well thought out and well researched.

The chart included, however, runs over the right-side MGoBlog sidebar in a normal-width browser window. This could be done better.

We weren’t productive on offense because of turnovers and poor QB play. If our quarterback can stay away from costing us games and we limit our turnovers we will be near the top of the conference; anything less we will back were we were last year regardless of stats. It was still a very informative post and good food for thought. Thanks young sir.

Zoltan disagrees with the special teams comparison.

They finished 24th in both polls last year (http://sports.espn.go.com/ncf/rankingsindex). I would think 31 would be a disappointment for a program with such a bright future as the Spartans. I realize they have a new qb but many Spartan fans think this will be addition by subtraction. I think if I was a Spartan fan I would be looking forward to at least breaking into the top 25 for the second straight year. Of course doing that would mean UM is pretty much a must win game. It might be interesting with the pressure clearly on Sparty this year.

Nice job on the post, stats, and analysis. I think its tough to give a letter grade on any offense pre-season. I'm a homer, but I think M will surprise a lot of people next year with their offense.