fksljj

September 14th, 2017 at 11:30 PM ^

And by the way. I am by no means a Speight defender. I've been ant-Speight since the Minnesota halloween game in '15. Go back and rewatch his first drive. Total disaster and it's carried on through all the way until now. But that's not the point. The point is that Harbaugh has made his choice and we all have to deal with it.

EGD

September 15th, 2017 at 10:26 AM ^

Wow, it's a metaphysical grammar challenge.  

I usually go by the rule that if you can count them, it's "fewer," and if you can't count them it's "less."  

Can negative mgopoints be counted?  

Squash34

September 15th, 2017 at 8:17 AM ^

Let's be real, the whole offense fucked up that game. Despite the deep ball misses, he actually made a few game winning throws late. The WRs dropped, or allowed true freshman to rip them out of their hands for an int.
Basically, the Iowa game was the worst game for several offensive player, and I believe speight gets more blame than he should for that game.

TrueBlue2003

September 15th, 2017 at 5:33 PM ^

by Deveon was responsible for, at most, two of those points (a safety), but it's up to Wilton not to give the them a pick six. That's how game management works. You don't have to force it. 

The LB was coming straight at him so it wasn't a blindside play that he couldn't see.  Plenty of the blame is on him for throwing that with the guy that close and bearing down on him.  Should have easily seen that guy coming up the gut and dorfed it into the turf where Deveon was standing (not blocking).  It was a terrible decision to try to make that throw.

There's only 4 min left in the second quarter and your defense has given up zero points, totally dominating the opposing offense.    Take the safety or throw it way away instead of risking the pick six in your own endzone.

ColeIsCorky

September 15th, 2017 at 7:56 AM ^

Yeah, that OL might have something to do with those losses. And dropped passes on important 3rd down conversions.

The QB gets the blame in losses. Speight made mistakes, sometimes really bad ones, but so did the receivers and OL in all of those games. And perhaps a ref or two as well...

I will say this. Speight is an incredibly intelligent quarterback. His mistakes are all mechanics related, something that can be fixed. Read the UFRs if you don't believe me. I would rather have an intelligent QB who doesn't get rattled than a redshirt freshman QB who doesn't have control yet of the offense and has no experience

Kevin13

September 15th, 2017 at 12:22 PM ^

teams really stack the box against us, because they don't fear our passing game and most of that falls on the QB. Teams will challenge us to beat them passing rather then with our running game.

Speight is the QB and will be all year, unless he gets hurt. I think everyone needs to just hope he improves and we keep winning. I think we have some young talent at QB, that is just not ready yet and hopefully in the future they will be and we will see a huge uptick in our QB play, which will benefit the entire offense.

JonnyHintz

September 15th, 2017 at 2:56 PM ^

Stacking the box has little to no effect on teams that run heavy sets the way Michigan does.

Sure, you can put 8 or 9 guys in the box on Michigan. That isn't a good excuse while Michigan is running two TE sets with a fullback. That's 8 blockers plus a power back. That's not an advantage for the defense if the offense is competent at run blocking. Hell, they just mentioned that exact fact on the Air Force preview.

Kevin13

September 15th, 2017 at 12:22 PM ^

teams really stack the box against us, because they don't fear our passing game and most of that falls on the QB. Teams will challenge us to beat them passing rather then with our running game.

Speight is the QB and will be all year, unless he gets hurt. I think everyone needs to just hope he improves and we keep winning. I think we have some young talent at QB, that is just not ready yet and hopefully in the future they will be and we will see a huge uptick in our QB play, which will benefit the entire offense.

YoOoBoMoLloRoHo

September 15th, 2017 at 12:47 PM ^

is the deep pass. Iowa completely sold out with 8 in the box and slant defenses to stop the run. Speight had 4 "easy" opportunities to apply the constraint effectively - he badly missed all 4. PSU torched Iowa the week prior with the McSorley "arm punts" because he simply connected on those constraint throws.

OSU is more murky because the WRs never created downfield separation. The OL also didn't force OSU to bring too many into the box. Still, there were yards to be had with sharper QB play (and that could have been the injury impact).

JonnyHintz

September 15th, 2017 at 3:00 PM ^

Nobody is saying Speight was perfect. But to put the blame on him for the losses is a bit much. Give him a competent running game in the three losses, they're likely wins. Hell, more than half the fan base would argue we DID beat Ohio State (just didn't beat the refs).

Michigan lost three games by a combined 5 points. The running game failed to reach 100 yards in all three. Michigan had a chance to chew out the clock for the win in two of the losses but the running game couldn't get a first down.

Speight isn't perfect at QB. But with an elite defense and a competent running game, he's definitely good enough to win a B1G championship with, and challenge for a national title.

TrueBlue2003

September 15th, 2017 at 5:44 PM ^

I was merely responding to the comment about Dilfer's defense and argued that ours was on that uber-elite level too.

Totally agree that if our run game was better, Wilton wouldn't have had to do much of anything last year.  He did have to do something against OSU, and he led a couple scoring drives.  Unfortunately he offset them the other way.  So net-net, I'm not sure where that sits between bad and mediocre, but we do know it wasn't enough given the running game struggles, poor officiating, etc.

One thing is for sure, the defense was incredible and could not have been expected to be any better.

1VaBlue1

September 15th, 2017 at 8:08 AM ^

That's the thing about a mediocre QB - sometimes they win, sometimes they lose.  With a great defense, like Michigan's, sometimes that mediocre QB will win a tough game, sometimes he'll lose one.

Buts its never just on one player alone.  If the OL holds up a little better, or a WR gets a little more open...

Speight is a mediocre QB.  He's going to win some big games, and lose some.  Tom Brady loses big games, too - not as many, perhaps.  But he still loses them on occasion.  The best QB on the team is mediocre, right now.  Why is it so hard to deal with that?

bcnihao

September 15th, 2017 at 8:31 AM ^

I think the expectation is that a RS Jr. QB would have pretty good mechanics by now.  That's what makes those overthrows so frustrating, and that's also what doesn't inspire confidence for better performance later.  If mechanical problems either didn't get ironed out previously, or they were corrected but cropped back up during the season, then it doesn't seem realistic to think he'll be consistent with them later.  Of course, I'd love it if he did consistently display good mechanical command of his throws.

stephenrjking

September 15th, 2017 at 12:34 AM ^

This is sort of true and sort of not.

The game has changed since Dilfer and Johnson won Super Bowls, both in the NFL and in college. 

Transcendent QBs can win titles. It's true in the NFL and it's true in college.

It is also true that teams have won in college without transendent QBs. Alabama is an example.

But there's a problem with this conventional wisdom: Bama's QBs aren't as bad as we think. Just spare parts? Not so fast.

Bama's last two national title winning QBs:

2012 AJ McCarron: 211-314 67.2% 2933 yards 9.3 Y/A 30 TD 3 INT

2015 Jake Coker: 263-393 66.9% 3110 yards 7.9 Y/A 21 TD 8 INT

That's... pretty good, actually.

And:

2016 Wilton Speight: 204-331 61.6% 2538 yards 7.7 Y/A 18 TD 7 INT

I don't think it's an outrageous idea that Speight could improve modestly to a level similar to those two Bama QBs. But it will take improvement.

BTW, Jalen Hurts posted a 240-382 62.8% 2780 yards 7.3 Y/A 23 TD 9 INT season, similar but slightly better than Speight, and almost won the title. But he also ran for 954 yards.

jabberwock

September 15th, 2017 at 12:55 AM ^

I don't think anyone expects Wilton to be a heisman finalist.  Thats not needed, hell with this defense michigan could win a national championship just by minimizing errors and following the #1 rule of game-managing QBs . . . don't give the other team free points.

I love Speights command of the offense, but man, that footwork/late/high pass issue keeps creeping up like a linebacker about to blitz.