The football team and the Fab 5
Let me begin by apologizing if the "reflections on where we are in the season" posts have reached the point of being stale...That said, while watching Saturday's game I was struck by what seemed to be Michigan's struggle with being on the road. The team (vets like Brandon Graham excepted) seemed to not know quite how to spark itself w/out the crowd cheering them along. It made me remember the freshman season of the Fab Five.
The ND game is probably a memory that a lot of us will enjoy for a long time. The Indiana game was three agonizing hours of thinking, "WTF?" Saturday was, for 55 minutes, just a dud...Though the analogy is imperfect, if for no other reason than the freshman Fab Five could beat *anyone* on a given day, the football team this year does remind me a lot of them. I think this season is going to leave us with both enough joy and enough let-downs to last four normal years.
The great news is that the team is on the up-swing. Last year left some reasonable people (though not me) wondering if Rodriguez would succeed at Michigan. Now it seems like the issue is not "if" but "when?"
October 6th, 2009 at 10:35 AM ^
hopefully tate doesn't call a timeout in a big game when we're out of them.
(my apologies, i still love c-webb)
October 6th, 2009 at 10:56 AM ^
The team is fun to watch. I actually think they're very well coached and prepped, btw RR, GERG, & Barwis. My expectations this season are and have always been for 7 - 5 / 8 - 4.
Because of:
* the depth issues,
* the 3rd DC in three years issues,
* the experience issues,
* the lack of raw talent issues,
It is unfair to expect too much. As long as guys are playing hard and improving, we'll be fine.
Re: the Fab Five: do you feel the team was well-coached? How do you think the Fab Five would have played under Beilein? My personal thoughts are that while it is fun to watch this team, just as it was fun to watch the Fab Five, the biggest difference is the coaching, both in B-Ball and Football. I kind of like the Fab Five swagger, but I think there was a lack of discipline and playing within yourself. This is almost always eventually exposed.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:22 AM ^
I agree that it's a different set of circumstances. The Fab Five was more talented than the football team is now but the football team is more disciplined. It's a flawed analogy, but I do think the two teams are similar in the sense that the best game they can play is very, very far away in quality from the worst game they have played/will play...The question of whether the Fab Five were well coached is an eternal mystery, I think. It's easy to see all their flaws but at the same time I wonder what coach would have made it to the finals that year with that team other than Steve Fisher. Letting the freshman do their thing had a sort of "crazy enough that it just might work" quality to it that I don't know a lot of coaches would have been comfortable with.
October 6th, 2009 at 11:29 AM ^
to me is that the fab 5 was one of the most talented teams in the country but we are not there yet. give us a couple years but we do not have the athletes to play with the top tier teams (Florida, Alabama, Texas) yet. I think we would keep it closer than expected because we are one of the mentally toughest michigan teams i can remember (im only 18 so thats not much).