Weather, people, the weather

Submitted by Communist Football on

I'm seeing a lot of commentary on the Purdue game (defense was awesome! offense was horrible!) that doesn't seem to take into account the principal factor in the game: a driving rain on a grass field, which made the ball and grass very slick, and caused many unforced turnovers.

I'm glad we won: but let's not read more into this game than we should.

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akblue

November 14th, 2010 at 11:49 AM ^

Why rain on the parade?

Michigan has a young defense that held together in tough weather conditions. The poor footing goes both ways (and yes, the weather effected the offensive output of both teams). In the end, our Team won.

The upside-- W + one more game of experience for our young defense. (Not to mention healing time for Martin and others.)

Joined: 06/30/2008

MGoPoints: 479

jmblue

November 14th, 2010 at 2:01 PM ^

The weather was indeed terrible.  But here's the thing that is a little bothersome.  We gained 395 yards of offense.  When you gain that many, you should score more than 20 offensive points.  With five minutes to go in the game, we had about 350 yards and 13 offensive points.  It's not like the weather was preventing us from moving the ball; we still gained 21 first downs.  It was more that - as in many of our other Big Ten games - we weren't finishing drives.  That's been an issue even on days with good weather. 

My concern with Magee is that he doesn't fully trust Denard in the passing game.  He tends to revert into a DeBord-like tendency to go extremely run-heavy in early downs.  The idea is that this is supposed to "protect" your QB by either moving the chains on the ground or setting up manageable third downs.  But in practice, we almost always come to a set of downs in which the D stops us on the first two downs, and then Denard - who hasn't thrown enough to get into a rhythm - suddenly has to convert a 3rd and long, against a D that expects it.   No matter how talented you are offensively, when you get very predictable, you become easier to stop.  In the second half, Purdue's safeties were cheating up to the line of scrimmage on every early down, daring us to throw.  We were afraid to do so.

Magee has to mix things up more on early downs to keep the D on its heels. He did this against Illinois with great success.  Then he went away from it yesterday.  Denard's two INTs came on a 2nd and goal from the 16 and a 3rd and 19 - obvious passing situations.   

Joined: 11/07/2008

MGoPoints: 102766