College Football Nerds here to own one we got wrong
One of the hallmarks of our show is being brutally honest, often to the detriment of our own growth, but also taking Ls when we should.
Last year we introduced a narrative around the PSU/Michigan game that we took a lot of heat for from Michigan fans. And most of the heat was fair. Some of it wasn't. And in later videos we got things wrong, including our PSU video this week.
At the time, we were trying to discuss how that game was closer than many wanted to admit, and mentioned that PSU led at the half. That's not technically correct, as PSU retook the lead the first drive of the 2nd half. But we stand by the spirit of that point (which only comes from memory of watching, and not reading off a box score) even though it's semantically incorrect. Josh was referencing that alleged error, which was brought up a ton last year, but we both lost the narrative a bit as to how narrow the accuracy of that point was.
Where we erred is in stretching that point to suggest that Penn State was competitive due to having a lead, particularly on offense. Penn State's defense kept them in the game and eventually wore down by a larger and more physical Michigan offense. But PSU's offense was entirely inept vs the Michigan defense. That was a game of inevitability where Michigan was always going to win. I'm not sure if we've always had that wrong, or if the facts of the game got twisted due to all the pushback, but, regardless, we didn't remember it correctly now and the error is obvious on rewatch. Any factoid of "Penn State led in the 2nd half" is itself an anomaly, and not useful in evaluating the teams.
One of our concerns for Michigan has always been the sustainability of reliance on big rushing plays as a method of scoring. We were open critics of Gattis, and when he was running the show, UM scored on big plays but it wasn't something that scaled against elite defenses. That concern carried into 2022. Especially when you consider Michigan isn't a good red zone offense (60th in 2021, 42nd in 22 in red zone TD%).
So looking at the Penn State game last year, we were overly influenced by the idea that UM's scoring vs PSU on big plays was more a 'one off' than earned. When in reality, it was PSU's big plays that were more 'fluky' than Michigan's were (we saw this later with Michigan's consistent ability to hit them vs Ohio State and later vs TCU). Michigan driving the ball well, scoring on big plays, and sometimes settling for field goals in the red zone was just who they were week in and week out.
So we want to take the L where Michigan fans are most concentrated on the internet. We'll take the L in future videos as well for non-Michigan fans to see. It's really a mistake to say the PSU-UM game was competitive, or especially to say that the teams were closer than the score indicated (if anything, it's the opposite).
We cover a ton of teams, and make mistakes. But we don't agree with the idea that we don't watch a ton of B10 football because we do. We do not post a preview without watching as much film of that team as we can, and did watch that game live. But that doesn't mean we always see what we should, especially when we have multiple live games on TV at once. So when we get something wrong, we want to own it as well.
August 22nd, 2023 at 3:40 PM ^
Also, Michigan just tried that with RichRod.
Not that it couldn't work. Or that it shouldn't have worked. But man... it did not work.
August 22nd, 2023 at 10:24 PM ^
The RichRod experiment was nothing compared to the Freeze Factor - though it contributes to the evidence of just how colossally dumb this idea is.
It's hilarious to me that anyone would actually posit that Hugh Freeze was ever a better choice for Michigan's coach than Jim Harbaugh. Try to say that with a straight face.
You're certainly not the only folks who were calling for Jim's head - but sheesh.
Harbaugh - UM star who literally grew up around Michigan's program, lengthy NFL career, successful coach at every stop, one of...2? modern coaches who have been successful at college and NFL, brought academics-first Stanford to prominence....had ONE bad year during Covid. Super Bowl, NFC Championship, NY6 Bowls, CFP (post your article). Swiftly turned 2 moribund squads to top level of sport (Stanford/49ers) - with particular emphasis on Stanford that had FAR less talent than Michigan. Can be a little weird and mercurial.
Freeze - 5 scandal-plagued years as P5 coach, sandwiched by a few years at lower levels. Long-time high school coach at a southern Christian school, entire career spent in south, got busted for multiple severe NCAA infractions including frequent calls to escorts (despite being outspokenly religious) using school phone, multiple accusations of sexual misconduct/harassment, 2 year bowl ban, 33 games vacated and (I think) 2 year NCAA suspension from coaching. Hypocritical low-life cheater.
Writing this, I'm even more incredulous. I get that you guys were being provocative, but c'mon.
Oh, I forgot. Freeze beat 'bama twice, so it's all cool.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:17 PM ^
"I was SO wrong about this" -
How much time do you have? :D
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:38 PM ^
It is my right as an American to be both wrong and confident about it, dammit.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:07 PM ^
Who the hell do you think you are, being all accountable and owning your mistakes? This is the internet, there is no room for this type of human behavior.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:12 PM ^
What is this...taking the L. Its the 2020's ....No one admits anything and no one takes an L.
(Well done...and I too think your content is top notch).
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:29 PM ^
Mad respect guys. I remember making a comment on a video posted recently on this site saying that your analysis after the Penn State game. Props to owning up.
If I may offer some constructive criticism, you may want to further evaluate your "M's run game is all about the big play narrative." This is likely more of a function of how D's play them as opposed to their game. Early in the year, Iowa played them straight up and got just murdered up and down the field for 5-6 yards a pop. After that game, teams started crashing safeties to the LOS, resulting in shorter down-to-down plays, but big plays when they were broken. This was most obvious in Illinois, OSU and Penn State games.
Keep doing what you're doin fellas.
Cheers
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:56 PM ^
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:05 PM ^
Just a quick digression; I remember after that Iowa game Brian being in absolute shock about Iowa's strategy, and mocking it as absurd. And I kept wanting to say, "but ... but ... it kept them in a game they had no business being in and they were only down by one score late in the fourth quarter!"
I think Brian somehow wanted them to go all out to stop our running game, but ... as Ohio State found out, that way is death. Instead, they suffered a lot of 5-10 yard runs, but didn't allow us quick strikes, and over time ... they hung in the game.
I thought Brian's post-game analysis was a little bewildering, to be honest. I know what he was saying, but ... in fact Iowa's strategy did exactly what they wanted it to, even though it looked like it was failing.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:18 PM ^
One of the issues here is that you can never really say what would have happened had a team taken a different approach. It may be that a more aggressive defense would have shut down Michigan entirely and created better field position during the game. It may also be that it adds a couple explosive TD runs and loses them the game. It's pure opinion on which is true.
I will say that, philosophically, we've found that aggressive defense works against limited offenses, while conservative defense works against high-end offenses. And when I say "limited", read that as "big play potential," especially in the passing game. Georgia has made a lot of hay the last couple of years by playing lock down defense, but the few times they have faced top passing attacks they've been pretty consistently torched. So in that vein, there's an argument that Iowa may have been smart in their approach if they were a bit overmatched overall.
All that said, the reason I actually agree with Brian is due to Iowa's offense. Iowa probably wasn't honest enough with how limited their offense was, and how unrealistic it was to score a minimally competent amount of points (generally 21 points is a competent outing). Bend-but-don't-break works well when you're trading their field goals for your TDs. It's not very viable when your offense needs to hold them to 10 points or less in order to win. Iowa's best, realistic shot to beat Michigan was to go all-out on stops defensively, and hope for the (unlikely but possible) outcome where you only have 1-2 dam bursts and the scoring stays very low.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:42 PM ^
You don't have to remind us of that fact after a few seasons of Don Brown.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:40 PM ^
To me, the difference is that the Iowa game was one of JJ's first games starting. I think it makes sense for Brian to expect the better strategy was to force JJ to prove he can win a game rather than try to play Michigan straight up. Either way Iowa was likely to lose, but forcing an unproven JJ to beat them would at least add more uncertainty into the equation.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:31 PM ^
Is this real? If so, awesome!
Now we just gotta get the Solid Verbal guys on here too.
Would be cool to figure out how to more systematically connect this community with the various podcasters out there...
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:32 PM ^
Nice own-up/retraction correction. Love your podcasts/youtubes.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:34 PM ^
"which only comes from memory of watching, and not reading off a box score)"
I am not familiar with your work or show, but if you are producing content for consumption, why would you not check what you say against easily available info?
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:44 PM ^
Oh our entire show and analysis revolves around numbers. What we're saying there is that our impressions were formed from actually watching the game. Not merely pretending to be informed when we just did a box score drive by.
We're often accused of /just/ looking at stats because we focus so much on them. But we watch more ball than anyone who doesnt have access to an all 22.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:42 PM ^
I really appreciate this post, and the integrity shown. Perhaps this was the intention, but you've definitely won a fan and I will follow future videos a lot closer. Recognizing something and taking accountability for it is incredibly difficult and incredibly refreshing to see. Obviously our bias also makes us see things differently from time to time, and it's good to have checks from good faith actors.
Cheers!
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:44 PM ^
That game was strange. Michigan utterly dominated the first 21:30 but was only up 13-0. At that point, PSU only had 6 plays and 9 yards of offense.
The 3rd and 1 where Clifford ran inside the Michigan 5 changed things. PSU had the momentum after that until the mid third quarter.
Then Michigan took back over and dominated again.
The flow, however, was up in the air until the second quarter. PSU did a great job making Michigan settle for field goals and had some big, big plays to keep themselves in the game.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:46 PM ^
This is Michigan, please use the term "mea culpa" instead of "own one we got wrong".
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:59 PM ^
As a lawyer at a big firm, who works with multiple Michigan grads, this is the most "Michigan" post ever lol
August 22nd, 2023 at 2:45 PM ^
Sounds like you need to read more of the blog - we have tons of great candidates for "most Michigan post ever"!
I do have to say this is the most surprising post I've seen in a long time. Props to you guys and I'll be watching more of your videos in the future.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:10 PM ^
Because here at Michigan, vae victis; a rather apropos term for this particular thread.
August 22nd, 2023 at 2:43 PM ^
*pushes up glasses*
To be more proper, common latin phrases such as apropos should not be italicized. It should be reserved for more uncommon phrases, or if you were to use the original French.
August 22nd, 2023 at 11:21 PM ^
Indeed. In this instance, however, the italicization was for emphasis. I get how that wasn't clear though.
August 23rd, 2023 at 9:00 AM ^
You guys are taking the nerdiness too far.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:48 PM ^
Co-host here, and I'll add a bit behind the curtain as to how last year went. We had a new partner last year and agreed to do a weekly live show they could simulcast. We really stretched ourselves thin doing that live show, because it meant we had to watch literally everything we could live all at once, all day, in order to talk about the day's events by that evening. I would have 3-5 games up at a time, and then try to base my comments live off what I saw, but it's really hard to truly follow a game doing that. After talking it over a lot during the offseason, we both agreed that our analysis was a lot shallower as a result. That really cut against our goal of quality analysis, so we informed our partner over the summer that we will no longer do weekly live shows. Going forward, we're going to return to recording on Sunday/Monday with an eye towards a few games that we can really focus on. We'll probably do occasional live shows to field questions, but moving away from a weekly recap show really frees us up to have the deeper, narrower focus that made our channel successful in the first place.
That said, we are of course going to keep watching a smattering of games around college football. And we will at least re-watch essentially every game from every top team. We do this because one of our key differentiators is in being able to compare between top teams and conferences in a critical way as needed to rank/project for the playoffs and marquee matchups. You can only do this if you know enough about different teams to see where a supposed strength is a relative weakness (and keep the perspective to know when success is due to opponent quality more than individual strength). Sometimes we may be wrong in our views, but I really don't think we're biased. In particular (as with our views on Michigan's explosive run game) we tend to be pretty stubborn, but that's because experience has shown us that stubborn views are accurate more often than not - there's a reason why using prior years' data in models increases ATS accuracy. But that's also why we don't use prior years' data in our modeling, as a check to our own stubborn predilections. And stubborness isn't bias. Further, there are times where we won't apologize because we were "wrong" in predicting an outcome, but we weren't necessarily wrong in how we read a team as to that outcome. Football is a game with a funny shaped ball played by 18-22 year old kids. There are some games where a team just doesn't show up, which victorious fans rarely want to admit (Miami fans were way too quick to write off our ongoing concerns as "idiotic" when they unexpectedly blew out Notre Dame in 2017, for example). And there are others where a team just gets all the breaks, which is just part of the game (Michigan's loss to TCU falls in that bucket - we aren't going to apologize to TCU fans for picking UM to win handily).
In this case, we took the feedback to heart and both went back and tried to rewatch the long version of the UM-PSU game. After watching, which was revealing in a way rewatching highlights had not been, we agreed we were just objectively wrong in our heads on how that game went and the feedback on us was fair. I noted the above to emphasize that this is in line with other concerns we had from last year and are working to correct in our methodologies. But also know that it doesn't mean we're going to be any less critical of Michigan, who we're holding to that NCG standard ;)
One last note - we are beginning to hint at a major product release slated for a few weeks from now. It's the kind of thing this community will likely love, so we'd love it if you guys keep an eye out for it and tell us what you think. Keep in mind it's the product of just two people, so the scope is intentionally limited and the roll-out will be a bit gradual. But the goal is to put out some tools for the analytical fan that don't really exist in the market yet.
August 22nd, 2023 at 12:54 PM ^
I don't think last year's contest has much predictive value when it comes to this year's game, anyway.
Among Michigan, PSU, and OSU, the teams are close enough in ability that whoever executes the best and makes the least mistakes will win these games.
Now, maybe there's a mismatch somewhere in these games, e.g. Michigan's lines vs Penn State's, but we probably won't know that until the games are played.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:02 PM ^
Good on you guys for owning it, and also for joining the board. Hope to see you on the regular here and keep the good stuff coming.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:04 PM ^
I really think we would solve A LOT of our Redzone issues if we threw the ball across the goal line!!! Hoping that was a Wiess Quirk and the Moore will be willing to call some throw the ball into the actual endzone plays.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:15 PM ^
I think some of the big plays that you see out of us has to do with how defenses play us. Since we run exceptionally well, they inevitably commit more to the run and line of scrimmage and tend to keep less safety help back. That helps the defenses keep the runs down on most plays, but when they bust or when we get exceptional blocking, there is no one there to cover the mistake so it’s a TD.
That is essentially what happened to OSU. They couldn’t defend the run without committing extra guys, and so when we picked everything up, Edwards was gone. Twice. You can’t just say that without all the big plays, OSU wins. The big plays were a direct result of OSU not being able to stop the run with regular personal. They tried playing it straight for a drive and got gashed repeatedly so they had to gamble.
I can’t remember if PSU was the same, but I think there were similar elements at play - if not that extreme.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:20 PM ^
I really respect that you guys seem to be doing this out of love for the game and generally enjoy what you do. I understand that you can't be Joel Klatt with a giant team of producers helping him to do loads of research, but I wonder if there is a very minor Linus Tech Tips type of controversy where there's just a lot of pressure to produce content quickly and quality control takes a hit. A majority of the points discussed in the Michigan preview, for example, had been written about on this site and other places well before. I'm the type of fan that enjoys content that goes deep and teaches me stuff or sees things I don't, so generally prefer less content that is more deeply explored. I also understand that is not easy to do in a world where food costs money so I don't know if there's a viable solution, but thought it would be worth sharing the perspective at least.
EDIT: wrote this before I saw cfbnerds latest post which addresses this very concern. Thanks!
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:31 PM ^
If anyone can appreciate a Linus Tech Tips reference it's us. But that dude seemed to be having a mental and life breakdown over the pressure, we were merely tired :)
But we're certainly taking a different approach this year where the content is going to be more the style we prefer, even if it hurts us with the algorithm.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:39 PM ^
I bet it'll be good for you in the long term. Plus you can still use algorithm baiting titles and just have even better content. There's a guitar Youtuber named Ichika Nito who is a master at ridiculous titles like "When you have no girlfriend" but the content is just an insane 60 second guitar riff played at the highest skill level imaginable.
"Defensive Coordinators HATE him"
"You won't BELIEVE his YPA!"
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:34 PM ^
College Football Nerds? Never heard of em.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:34 PM ^
This is like the most reasonable and level headed thing I've ever read on the internet.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:35 PM ^
Bravo, cfbnerds! Thanks for coming by, and your hewing away from standard media approaches to critique is very welcome.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:43 PM ^
I still haven't forgiven ya'll for the Rod Moore hate at the start of last season.
August 22nd, 2023 at 1:53 PM ^
Your usage of ‘semantically incorrect’ was semantically incorrect. Maybe you meant pedantically incorrect?
August 22nd, 2023 at 2:09 PM ^
1) Not necessarily - a lot of it hinged on the meaning of "at the half," which is indeed semantics.
2) Your honor, I would like to enter Exhibit B into the record.
August 22nd, 2023 at 4:11 PM ^
Fair enough
August 22nd, 2023 at 2:12 PM ^
I see my partner in crime already responded
August 22nd, 2023 at 2:16 PM ^
This stirred up a lively offline debate between us on the exact meaning of semantics and pedantics, so I've never felt more a part of the Michigan fan experience. ;p
August 22nd, 2023 at 4:11 PM ^
Sounds like it was an interesting semantic debate.
I suppose if you think there are alternate reasonable interpretations of "at the half," then it would be a semantic issue. That doesn't seem like it was the case here as you did use it to mean "as the half came to a close," which I think everyone understands it to mean.
I took the issue to be a pedantic one. The lead was just after half, not at half. But the meaning of your original argument wasn't changed by misremembering "just after half" as "at the half," so anyone making that point is being a pedantic pedant, which is redundant.
I think the confusion is often this: a common pedantic argument revolves around very slight meaning differences between what you wanted to say and what you actually said, but the differences have no real impact on the overall meaning.
Semantic arguments focus on disagreements over what words actually mean. If the semantic debate has no real impact on the argument's outcome, it's probably pedantic as well.
In short, my semantic original post about the use of the word semantic was both semantic and pedantic in nature.
August 22nd, 2023 at 2:24 PM ^
This is an awesome gesture and very appreciated.
August 22nd, 2023 at 2:56 PM ^
I like this post because you now agree with me :)
August 22nd, 2023 at 5:01 PM ^
Confirmation Bias is real?
August 22nd, 2023 at 5:12 PM ^
I like watching the CFB Nerds videos on Michigan. No one is going to be perfect. Looking forward to more vids to come.