Michigan Football ... A Historical Perspective
Personally I have been attending football games at Michigan Stadium since 1960. That was during the Bump Elliott era as head coach. Bump had a mediocre career record 51 - 44 - 2 over 10 years with one B10 championship and a Rose Bowl victory. Of course Bo arrived in 1969 and the rest is probably common knowledge for all Uof M fans.
So here we are, midway through Coach Rich Rod's third season and we are still on the edge of a possible 3rd consecutive losing season. So when did this last occur ??? The answer is NEVER. In over 100 plus years of playing football, the University of Michigan has never ever had 3 losing seasons in a row ... EVER !
In 2.5 seasons we have beaten Indiana twice and Minnesota & Wisconsin once. We are winless against the 7 other Big Ten teams during Rich Rod's tenure. We have all time winning records against all B10 teams and no series is even close .... as shown below:
| Illinois | 66 | 23 | 2 |
| Indiana | 52 | 9 | 0 |
| Iowa | 49 | 12 | 4 |
| MSU | 67 | 32 | 5 |
| OSU | 57 | 43 | 6 |
| Minnesota | 70 | 24 | 3 |
| Northwestern | 52 | 15 | 2 |
| Penn State | 10 | 6 | 0 |
| Purdue | 41 | 14 | 0 |
| Wisconsin | 49 | 13 | 1 |
Bottom line ... this is bad, real efffing BAD ... shit, it is on the brink of unthinkable. This is the worst 3 year stretch since the 1934 - 1936 era when Coach Harry Kipke went 6 - 18 that included 0 - 5 and 0 - 6 conference records in 1934 & 1936 respectively. So - was Coach Kipke under a lot of "old school" heat ??? Probably not ... WHY ? Because in the 4 years previous to 1934 ... Kipke's Michigan teams were 31 - 1 - 3 !!!
I was not thrilled when Rich Rod was announced as Head Coach. I liked the pro-style approach, I even kidded that instead of throwing a football during tailgates we would just run around, but as my boys told me ... who cares "We just want to win". Even Bo never really ran a pro-style offense - hell for a while I think Bo thought he could win a game without running an offensive play !!! So I relented and jumped on board ...
So where does all this looking backwards lead us ? At Michigan the past is THE standard by which ALL coaches and teams are judged. Yes, Rich Rod's offense is explosive ... were Bo's teams explosive ? ... rarely - yet Bo resurrected the winning spirit and tradition at Michigan. Football teams judge by a simple metric - Wins and Losses and absolutely nothing else !
We all know that excuses and statistics are for losers ... and I for one am getting very weary of making excuses and examining statistics (as I did for this) !!! ATTENTION Coach ... its now or never !
Go Blue !
November 4th, 2010 at 10:45 PM ^
That Michigan football has never had three consecutive losing seasons.
(I'm a little chagrined)
November 5th, 2010 at 10:59 AM ^
whether you want fire RichRod or not you have to admit these past 2.5 years have been very challenging to say the least
November 4th, 2010 at 10:52 PM ^
Hey.....you aren't friends with Dr. Steve by any chance are you?
November 4th, 2010 at 10:55 PM ^
I keep seeing a +1 right after you post. It's weird. You know giving yourself a point doesn't give you any points right? Either that, or you have a crazed MGoStalker, which isn't out of the realm of possibility.
November 4th, 2010 at 11:09 PM ^
November 4th, 2010 at 11:15 PM ^
Has Dr. Steve been back after that shellacking he took?
November 4th, 2010 at 10:59 PM ^
For what it's worth, I don't think that Michigan will have a losing season this year so the "three consecutive season" streak will remain intact.
However, I hear what you're saying. The bottom line just hasn't been sufficient and hopefully that gets resolved in the offseason.
November 4th, 2010 at 11:14 PM ^
would do nicely....I"ll settle for 2.
November 4th, 2010 at 11:02 PM ^
You beat your dead horse and I'll beat mine. Here it is:
MGoBlog readers who see an attack on Lloyd Carr's reputation at every turn (no names ... you could guess them without trouble) refuse to acknowledge the possibility that the universe where Lloyd is coaching in '08 isn't particularly pretty. Maybe not Rodriguez-ugly, but bad enough that the howling (directed at Carr) would have been deafening. I'm thinking "first losing season since that late '60s." That's right -- a losing season just like our buddy RichRod.
Argue all you want about Mallet, Mr. Plow, Mario, and Adrian. That's yet another universe.
I believe that the program's trajectory was looking ugly after that great Florida win regardless of who was at the controls. Unfortunately for RichRod, the short and limited memories of most Michigan fans couldn't go back as far as Appy State and Oregon, so they couldn't see the big picture.
- - -
As usual, this isn't intended as an excuse for all (or even half) of RichRod's troubles. It would be pleasant, though, if people would acknowledge that his hand of cards in '08 wasn't quite the same as, say, Lloyd's hand in '95. A hint to Carr's most vigorous defenders: You could do that and I wouldn't think any less of you. I'd still agree with most of your (negative) points on RichRod. Give it a try.
November 5th, 2010 at 1:11 AM ^
Coaching is the only difference between JT Floyd and Charles Woodson. Saying anything different is nothing but lawyer talk from excuse making losers. I don't care if we have the worst defensive roster in the conference (and I don't believe they do no matter what facts you present to the contrary), the coach shouldn't allow them to be THIS bad.
/This is honestly how these people view things and nothing you say at this point will change their mind.
November 5th, 2010 at 1:49 AM ^
Agree
November 5th, 2010 at 3:28 AM ^
You really should get off the purple stuff. Yes JT Floyd is not Charles Woodson, but we've had a lot of other DBs through out the years that weren't CW, and our D sure has not been this bad. Not having depth at DB is coaching, not developing the talent we've had this year is coaching, driving players away from our program is coaching, recruiting guys that cannot get in is coaching, switching to an ineffective 3-3-5 defensive scheme in the big ten is coaching, hiring a coach who ran Syracuse into the ground is coaching. Coaching is a lot more than offensive yards per game.
November 5th, 2010 at 7:59 AM ^
"Not having depth at DB is coaching ..."
Not if the guy before you recruited 0 (ZERO) CBs in '06 ... no 5th-year seniors this year or true seniors last year, eh?
"... not developing the talent we've had this year is coaching ..."
True freshmen? Please ...
"... driving players away from our program is coaching ..."
Yawn. Evidence, please? Where are the stars he DROVE AWAY?
"... recruiting guys that cannot get in is coaching ..."
Fair enough. You're 1 for 4 at this point.
"... switching to an ineffective 3-3-5 defensive scheme in the big ten is coaching ..."
1 for 5. There's nothing inherently wrong with the scheme. (Aside: This person strikes me as a typical RichRod critic. He has everything he needs to hit RichRod between the eyes and instead he completely whiffs.)
"... hiring a coach who ran Syracuse into the ground is coaching ..."
At least somewhat fair ... I'll give you half a point. 1.5 of 6, for a score of 25%. Fail.
November 5th, 2010 at 9:14 AM ^
Combined you gave him .5 for the last two points. In actuality I think put those two points together and you get a big reason our record is what it is. Hire a guy that drove Cuse into the ground and force him to run a 3-3-5 without having any experience in doing so, and force your own position coaches upon him. That is a huge point right there.
November 5th, 2010 at 9:23 AM ^
"... force him to run a 3-3-5 without having any experience in doing so, and force your own position coaches upon him ..."
Ah, but that's not what he *said*. :) I'd give you 2 of 2, by the way.
November 5th, 2010 at 12:21 PM ^
"Not having depth at DB is coaching ..."
Not if the guy before you recruited 0 (ZERO) CBs in '06 ... no 5th-year seniors this year or true seniors last year, eh
Seeing how we are in 2010, your 2006 excuse is a bit tired. There have been 4 recruiting classes since then, 2.5 of which have been Rich Rods. I'm not blaming RR for Woolfolk or Flloyd injuries, but come on man, look ahead a bit. Recruit a bit harder at DB, not more wide receivers.
"... not developing the talent we've had this year is coaching ..."
True freshmen? Please ...
True freshmen or not, have they improved at all? Has anybody improved on defense throughout the year?
"... driving players away from our program is coaching ..."
Yawn. Evidence, please? Where are the stars he DROVE AWAY?
Have you not been following what has been going on with our team the last few years? At first the excuse was they were Lloyds players who didn't buy in, then after plenty of his own recruits left, then the excuse was they weren't going to be any good anyway. We don't need a team of stars on our D to be better than 117th in the nation in passing yards allowed, or 106th in total yards allowed.
"... switching to an ineffective 3-3-5 defensive scheme in the big ten is coaching ..."
1 for 5. There's nothing inherently wrong with the scheme. (Aside: This person strikes me as a typical RichRod critic. He has everything he needs to hit RichRod between the eyes and instead he completely whiffs.)
There is nothing inherently wrong with a 3-3-5 system except nobody with a good D in the big ten is running it.
November 5th, 2010 at 2:41 PM ^
We have lost a fair number of DB recruits through transfer, suspension or not being admitted to the school. I think that's an unfair accusation that RR hasn't tried to bring in DBs. They just haven't stayed.
Plus it looks like he's trying hard as hell to get more DBs in this recruiting class.
November 5th, 2010 at 8:57 AM ^
Woodson was the Mr. Football of the State of Ohio. Coaching is not the difference between Woodson and any other player on the football team today. Or in many many other years.
While I've always taken an approach that talent is not the whole story, it's ahh like a big part of it.
and by your logic, if Lloyd's staff had the coaching skill to completely product Woodson, why didn't we have a Heismen trophy winner on defense like every 3-4 years?
Or even any DB's that could leave in their Junior year of college and end up starting at their position in the NFL?
This entire blog has gone off the tracks
November 5th, 2010 at 2:36 PM ^
PurpleStuff, it's disappointing to see you resort to straw-man arguments. You know that the problems go deeper than this. We don't just have a lack of upperclass talent in the secondary; we have a lack of underclass talent as well. And that is on this staff. Two of their 2009 recruits (Turner and Emilien) transferred out, even though playing time seemed available. That raises questions. At some point, the massive attrition is on the staff. You can't just argue that they've had "bad luck" in losing huge numbers of players to transfers. Then to make matters worse, two of their 2010 recruits (Dorsey and Witty) failed to qualify academically (as did a LB recruit, Rogers). Was it necessary to recruit these guys? Were there no academically-qualified players available? Recruiting guys like that is a gamble. It blew up in our faces.
On top of all that, our staff made the decision in fall camp not to move anyone from offense to the secondary, even though we have more depth at WR/slot than we know what to do with. Why? Were they content with what they had at DB? It seems hard to believe in retrospect.
Going forward, is it likely that our talent level is going to appreciate considerably? Our recruiting class rankings have dropped each year RR has been here. He's recruited well in the state of Florida, but not so well elsewhere.
And of course there are all the issues that have been discussed ad nauseum here: RR's devotion to the 3-3-5, the questionable position coaching in the secondary, and the staff's tendency to go for midseason quick fixes that backfire. It's hard to look at the total picture and not conclude that this staff is in over its head defensively - and it's hard to be confident that RR knows how to hire the right guys to fix the problems.
November 5th, 2010 at 2:34 PM ^
I believe that the program's trajectory was looking ugly after that great Florida win regardless of who was at the controls.
Here's the problem I have with this: no one was making this argument entering the 2008 season. The consensus was that '08 would be a rebuilding season by traditional standards (meaning a December bowl game) and then we'd be fine after that. Brian predicted that 7-5 would be the most likely outcome that year, and most agreed.
Only after the program crashed and burned did it become "conventional wisdom" that Carr left behind a sinking ship. And even then, that argument is problematic because RR is not working with Carr's staff, nor is he running anything resembling Carr's offensive and defensive schemes. He fired Carr's entire staff (save Jackson) and went in an entirely new direction on both offense and defense, even though the players he inherited weren't necessarily recruited for his schemes. There is no way of knowing whether Carr could have kept it going based on what's happened since, because RR tore down his program and tried to rebuild. He took a calculated risk, thinking he could quickly rebuild, WVU-style. But without Jeff Casteel to run the defense, things have gone a lot worse than expected. And it's not clear that he can get Casteel, or someone like him, to clean up the defensive mess.
November 4th, 2010 at 11:05 PM ^
I open these threads thinking the worst and they're worse.
November 5th, 2010 at 12:26 AM ^
I am u.
November 4th, 2010 at 11:13 PM ^
Your point about never having 3 losing seasons in a row is very well taken, sir. But conveniently leaving out the fact that Kipke went 4-4 in both 1935 and 1937 clouds the picture slightly. I like your historical perspective... and again, your point is well-taken.... but let's tell the whole story. If Michigan is able to finish 6-6 or better this year, and we have every reason to believe we'd improve on that next year, then Rich Rod's first 4 years would really end up not looking last Kipke's last 4 at all.
November 5th, 2010 at 3:30 AM ^
What's looking up, the fact that if we go 6-6 this year we improved by beating Purdont? Is that really improvement?
November 5th, 2010 at 10:11 AM ^
It's just simple numbers. And if we get to 6-6, we get to a bowl game. So yes, it's improvement. Not as much as any of us would like, of course, but it's there. But feel free to spin it any negative-Nancy way you want. I prefer a more positive approach.
November 5th, 2010 at 2:47 PM ^
If we finish 6-6, that would mean we went 2-6 in conference play - the same record we posted in the apocalyptically-bad 2008 season. That's not progress. If you had told someone, after the 2008 fiasco, that we'd go 1-7 and 2-6 in conference play the next two years, think they'd have taken it?
November 4th, 2010 at 11:15 PM ^
Oh come on now!
This post has basically been recycled and regurgitated by people here for the better part of 2 years. We all know that the last couple of years have sucked, and nobody is happy about it. But stop creating posts where you say "It's now or never for RR." Really Sherlock, I didn't know that. You should totally send him an e-mail about this, maybe CC David Brandon just to be sure that the right eyes read it. Otherwise, I'm sure both of them would have never noticed this and just kept keeping on.
I'm really not trying to be a d*ck here, but I'm tired of this crap. As I've said before, I only get about 3 months of college football a year, and about 9 months of people spouting off about "making a change" and "getting back to Michigan football." Let me enjoy them, warts and all. I should probably just stop reading these posts, but I just get sucked in because I am a masochist or something.
Argh!
November 5th, 2010 at 12:03 AM ^
So where does all this looking backwards lead us ?
Looking backward will lead to nothing except poor decisions.
I keep hearing about what RR's record is vs the B10 and every time I laugh. If we went 12-0 this year, RR's B10 record still would suck. What UM did last year and the year before ... and, frankly, the statistical fact that we lost to PSU last week ... is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is UM's future.
It is just like buying a stock at $50 and watching it go to $25. You can't do anything about the $25 decline. What you need to do is decide whether it is going to go up from $25 or not and work from there. If not, sell baby sell. But if you analyze the situation objectively and it makes a good investment at $25, you should hold on and catch the upside.
I don't know if UM's investment in RR is going to go up from here or not. What I do know is that what Bump Elliott did -- or Bo or LC or Yost -- is irrelevant to whether we should keep RR as our HC another year or not. The only thing that is relevant is how the football program is going to perform the remainder of this year and next year and every year thereafter. I trust Dave Brandon understands this and will make the best decision possible at the end of the season.
November 5th, 2010 at 2:20 AM ^
It is just like buying a stock at $50 and watching it go to $25. You can't do anything about the $25 decline.
I'm pretty sure losing out would trigger Brandon's stop-loss order. Hopefully getting to the Dallas Football Classic will be enough for him to hold though.
November 5th, 2010 at 10:51 AM ^
we are motor city bound
November 5th, 2010 at 2:42 PM ^
You can argue that the 2008 record is irrelevant. (Maybe it is, given that we actually beat two bowl-bound teams in conference play that year.) But 2009 and 2010 offer a window of insight as to how we might look in 2011. If three years have passed and we've shown no improvement, we can reasonably conclude that significant improvement next year is doubtful.
November 5th, 2010 at 12:15 AM ^
periously close to Gerry Faust status.
November 5th, 2010 at 12:54 AM ^
There is not an ounce of historical information that tells us that UM will go 5-7 this year.
I believe that is just your disgruntled yodeling.
November 5th, 2010 at 1:24 AM ^
If by looking up statistics, you mean historical W/L record how did you ever find out about the internet, let alone this blog? If that makes you weary, I'd love to watch you try to read a UFR post.
November 5th, 2010 at 9:44 AM ^
And could already tell what camp you are in.
November 5th, 2010 at 9:48 AM ^
you're one that always tells me to sit down at the big house
November 5th, 2010 at 12:49 PM ^
I am the first guy up in my section rooting for this team ... especially the Defense ! Also - I wouldn't give a shit if the entire stadium had no seats, I would rather stand the entire game anyway !
In all these year I have NEVER EVER booed MY team, the coaches, or any Michigan player ! Makes me sick when I hear our FG kicker get booed ... or the coach's decision to punt or whatever. That doesn't mean I agree with everything they do ... but I am a true Michigan fan that is there to root them on.
A fan that goes to every game I can (only missed the ND game this year) and in my ENTIRE life I have NEVER EVER left a game early ... and trust me there weren't very many of us left at the end of the Northwestern game in 2008, or the Oregon game in 2007.
I genuinely feel very lucky that I can go to the games. Its a 2 1/2 hour trip one way for me, but I'm there before 9a to tailgate for a noon start & at 10a for a 3:30 start. I read on this board about people coming for their one game and I know just how lucky I am. They love Michigan too ... yet they are forced to watch on TV.
So actually ... your intuition skills really suck.
Go Blue !
November 5th, 2010 at 2:32 PM ^
Don't be a jerk to this guy just because he's older than you. A lot of older fans have more passion and scream louder than some uninterested students who come late and leave early.
November 5th, 2010 at 3:03 PM ^
This thread could have been titled- Fire RR, The Historical Perspective.
Such fervor for this late in the week.. Bet you're really pissed on Saturday nights. Isn't Friday the day for unrealistic optimism and hope before being jolted back to reality on Saturday? We all know it's bad, but these fire RR dudes crack me up, because if I was pissed all week I'd have to seriously take a close look at my life.
Changes are coming. We will be better. I believe that. In the meantime I am gonna try and enjoy watching these kids play their best. Maybe even win a few the rest of the way.