Carr: U-M will compete in B1G with consistent defense, bigger players
"The biggest thing (is) you can't be changing defenses every year," Carr said on the Sports Pen on ESPN 970-AM. "The players need to learn a system, and you can't learn a system if you're changing every year. (Defensive coordinator Greg Mattison's) brought in the 4-3 defense, and I think we've got to recruit some bigger players."
Rodriguez's offensive and defensive systems were predicated on smaller, quicker players. Many questioned the wisdom of using those players in the Big Ten, where tradition (and weather) generally dictates the use of bigger, stronger players.
"We've been a very, very small team for the last three years," Carr said. "In this conference, to play championship football, you need big people because you're gonna play against big people almost every single week. And when you're a much smaller team, you're gonna wear down, you're gonna get beat up, and you're not gonna be able to finish a season.
"In this conference, it's at the end of the season that you have to be strong if you're going to do the types of things and have the kind of seasons that we've always aspired to have here."
Click here to read the full article: http://www.mlive.com/wolverines/index.ssf/2011/05/lloyd_carr_on_espn_97…
No offense, but I went to every Michigan home game this year and never had to wear a sweatshirt. Moreover, you are every bit as likely to get "slog and mud" in the Pac since Northern California, Oregon, and Washington are the rainiest areas in the country. In regards to cold, they play a ton of night games out there in the low 40s. I'll take the 55 degree sunny noon games in the big house any day. Sure, maybe there is a bad game of weather here and there when a cold front hits the midwest, but let's not pretend that they play college football in February / March where midwest weather would actually favor a big / downhill running team.
Our Big 10 schedule last year......
Indiana (cupcake, but due to our defensive futility, it seemed like a war)
Michigan State (good team....unless you're in the SEC)
Iowa (ended up being pretty mediocre. See Indiana)
Bye week
Penn State (With two weeks rest, we got dominated by a very weak Penn State team)
Illinois (See Indiana)
Purdue (See Indiana)
Wisconsin (good team)
Ohio State (good team)
My point is that the Big 10 "gauntlet" has 2-3 challenges each year if you're a top flight team. Let's not pretend that it's harder than it really is. The Pac has it's share of powerhouses, mids, and cupcakes just like the Big 10.....we just don't see them as much, except for when they grind us up in the major bowl games.
I don't believe Lloyd was speaking to the quality of the opponents as much as he was speaking to their size and how teams that employ schemes with smaller players will eventually get worn down over the course of the Big Ten season.
Not a literal description of weather conditions. Besides, "slog" is not weather related. It means:
"A spell of difficult, tiring work or traveling."
This was a comment on the physical, bruising nature of Big 10 football, particularly in comparison to Pac-10 football.
Really wish I could plus you for this....my thoughts almost exactly.
Amazing how a group of what I'm assuming are mostly adults can't disagree agreeably.
Rich Rod's speed strategy could have worked but when half of your four and five star recruits bolt after one year and pretty much every secondary player you've ever recruited leaves you're going to be left with some gaping holes in your team.
The effect of this could be diminished with solid coaching and schemes but since RR was an offensive guy it wasn't coming from him and his defensive coordinators were flat out bad. You get left with a bunch of raw players and what that turns into is the abomination of a defense like we had last year.
It's unfair and invalid to argue that Shafer and Robinson are awful Defensive Coordinators based on their time in Ann Arbor as the following facts confound the analysis:
<br>
<br>(1) their head coach strong-armed them into running defense's with which they were unfamiliar and apparently unconfident and of which they couldn't then be good teachers (blah something something blah round hole square peg Rich's idea blah), and
<br>
<br>(2) a confluence of horrors led to such a legendary bolus of attrition that the Michigan Roster of Scholarship Defensive Players contracted to a range between the high-twenties and thirty-seven, far less than the mathophilic 85/2=42.5.
Shafer would have been a very good DC. However, the coach and defensive coaches would not let him run the defense. It may have been a different story if RR would have hired Shafer right away and let him hire his own coaches, and let Shafer run the defense. I'm not saying we would have finished .500 with the awful offense in '08 but the defense would have played much better and Shafer would know the defense was in need of players after the '08 season.
"You can only win in this league with stretch left runs on 1st and 2nd down, and prevent defense when protecting a lead in the 4th quarter against good teams that are moving the ball on you," then I think we could question his sanity.
But he's just said something that should be painfully, depressingly obvious at this point: you're not going to stop Wisconsin or OSU with little guys who don't really know where they should be, and can't really make a tackle when they are. Like it or not, that's the defense we ran the last two years.
No offense intended to Martin, van Bergen and the other guys who put a lot of effort in over the past couple years, but those defenses were beyond awful, beyond incompetent and beyond embarrassing. Carr is just stating the obvious: we need more size, more strength and a better, more consistent scheme on defense, if we want to compete for the Big 10 championship.
if you were ONLY talking about the defense. However, if you listen to Carr speak, he wasn't just referring to the defense. He started talking about changing defenses, and then went on to BROADLY, GENERALLY talk about the lack of size.
No one really is going to argue about the defense, but the problem is an offense that did work at times, and probably would have worked even better if there hadn't been enormous pressure to be perfect because they knew the defense would give up 30+ points every game. Are you now going to remove that offense and replace it with zone left plays and other predictable playcalling with an immobile QB and an O-Line that can't block elite D-Lines? Cuz that's exactly what we had under the last 5 (or more years) under Carr. Or, are we going to see a hybrid system like the one we saw in Carr's final game?
It would have been a lot better if Carr was only talking about the defense, but I don't think that's the case.
**Gittleson turns on pizza ovens**
While I ADORE your avatar, it seems like a lot of the things you post lately are references to inside jokes Im not a part of. That makes me jealous.
Who is renowned for shoveling pizza into ols as a nutrutional plan.
Carr's statements can be interpreted in two ways IMO. Either he was itching to make these comments during the last three years but held back in deferance to the current regime, in which case he should be commended for his restraint, or he was actively involved from within to try to undermine the program, which is obviously negative. No one will really know for sure unless someone high up (like Martin) releases a tell all memoir about what actually happened.
What really disturbs me about his comments, though, were all the assumptions he made. When he left, the B10 was moving towards spread QBs (Troy Smith, Michael Robinson, Pryor). He talks about smaller players wearing down when it was his teams that couldn't finish games in the fourth quarter. The one image that still stands out from the 2007 season was not the first game, or Oregon, or Florida (where they completely ditched the offense they'd been running for a pass spread), but the last offensive series against OSU, where we saw a hopeless, tired, and beaten up offense wince onto the field with no chance of scoring. He talks about a consistent defense when it was he who change defenses when Hermann "left" and then saw that defense implode against the spread and better pro-style teams like USC.
Completely changing systems probably wasn't the best idea, but having more speed at the skill positions and a somewhat mobile QB is probably better than completely going back to what didn't work.
I really hope Hoke can take some positive lessons here. We really can't see him fail.
And now we finally know the secret to success.
2 slot receivers and 2 speed backs are smaller than 2 TE's and a Fullback or an HBack. 1 interior defensive lineman is smaller than 2 NTs like Watson and Branch with a 3rd DT posing as an end. If 2 of your LB's are converted DB's and you run 5 more DB's behind them you have a small backfield. If you have hybrid LB/DE's with 4 DB's behind them and your safety is Cato June you have a large backfield.
In some ways he's accurate, in other ways this seems to just be a rip on RR. To play the traditional style of play, yeah, you need big players near the end of the year to be successful. However, teams have been successful with smaller pplayers than Carr demands so not completely accurate.
And I still don't buy this whole Carr ruined Michigan with his poor recruiting classes, etc. Granted, they weren't the best in the nation and we had some players that didn't quite do what was expected, but if I remember, almost all the best players we've had over the last several years were still players from Carr's recruiting, so I just can't believe that argument.
If Carr rips Turdriguez? Turdriguez flopped and left the team in disarray. We don't know if all these MAC level players he brought in are gonna be any good, and his philosophy of "smaller and faster" lacked ONE major component: the "faster" part.
Turdriguez panicked during Year One, panicked after year one (firing Shafer) and just never got it going.
The WHOLE thing rests on him. He sucked ass while at Michigan and Michigan is going to spend a couple years paying for his failures.
and RR was correct too. Give me a team with both size AND speed.
I think people should let Brady run his offense before assuming it's going to be "Carr 2.0" in A2.