“Gamesmanship” with Harbaugh. Wasting time, or legit strategy?

So, after this loss, I’m starting to sour on this program’s little idiosyncrasies. I won’t go over all of them, but one I will discuss is the meta gaming Michigan tries to do that never seems to work.

Whether it is not releasing a depth, dressing Runyan for the Army game and have him out there pregame even though Warriner even said it was mostly for gamesmanship, or this week With our RB. There were tons of reports in the 247 boards and on some Facebook groups that Charbonnet was injured. Everyone connected to the program denied it with Isiah Hole (I think it was him)even saying “any injury rumors are completely unfounded”. Charbonnet opens the game and all the mouthpieces start proclaiming “see, he’s 100% healthy” only for the game to play out and you see that he started the first play, merely to get Wisconsin to think about him, and then play him only less than 10 plays and run him twice. No doubt he was hurt.

Do other programs do this? I don’t think they do. I think most coaches think “one player playing or not won’t make or break our game plan, so let’s just go out and play” and yet we seem to get into this weird misdirection of information like it makes a difference if our QB can’t see wide open receivers or we can’t hold onto the ball.

Even MGOBLOG gets in on it. I won’t get into details but one time I made very legit, coherent, non abusive criticism of a Michigan media personality and was asked to stop via direct message because it could ruin their ability to get future access to elements of the program. No blame to MGoBlog, but the program for threatening it.