Northwestern Snowflakes - The Offense

42 carries for 180 with a long of 30 against a pretty good run defense is fine.  It's not where we want.  But it's fine.  Before NW was selling out when we were running the clock, 36 for 160, which is a little shy of 5 ypc.  And we got 26 stolen from us.

Pass protection was a lot better.  Gaziano was mostly contained when we bothered to block him, which is promising.

The thing I am most concerned with is the lack of separation the WRs were getting.  Collins had a poor game mentally.

I think that Michigan may have a bit more zone read QB runs in the playbook, but they aren't taking it out of the bag yet. So many mesh handoffs this season, but until tonight Patterson almost never kept the ball.

We put up nearly 400 yards on a legitimately good defense.  Patterson was uncharacteristically inaccurate on some throws but stepped up in the big moments.  Pass protection was great.  Only complaint is they need to finish drives in the redzone.

This offense is slowly but surely becoming a good outfit.

Every series began with a higdon run up the gut. 2-9 every time. Had to pull some magic out of their ass every series 

1. Nico Collins is not a polished WR.  I’ve never seen him juke a guy and make him miss.  He not the type to catch bubble screens.  2.  Shea had is most inaccurate day so far.  He seemed really off until the 4th quarter.   3.  Still waaay too many 1 and  2 yard rushes.   4.  I have a feeling the UFR will be brutal for the online.

But we won, I’ll take it.  We have one more week to get right before the onslaught of Wiscy, MSU, PSU 

I liked the predictable 1 yard runs on first down late in the game. 

Patterson was very clutch. We lose that game with last year's QBs. That pass to Gentry to get 1st and goal was a freaking rocket. This was his game to win and he won it. 

Playcalling seemed pretty unimaginative at times. Damn near every 1st down was a Higdon run up the middle, and NQ keyed right in on it. 

Mason never got a carry inside the 10 and there were plenty of snaps there. I know they were stacking the box but I don't get that.

The refs were against MI’s offense again.  The holding call on Shea’s read option was absolute nonsense.  Hopefully Harbaugh gets on the B1G to stop this pattern from across the season.

RUBBISH!

is oliver martin hurt? i dont think i saw him out there today

Offense looked decent and coherent, but sloppy and unlucky. Not sure what the hell the 1st quarter was. 

This game on O would have felt a lot different if McKeon makes that catch, Higdon doesn’t get a phantom hold, and Collins had some GD field awareness.  

Really, this was a test on the road and we survived.  Play calling in the first quarter sucked on both offense and defense, yet we fought through. If you don’t see this game as being a positive, you should really consider either becoming a monk or blowing me.  I told My 8 year old we would win at the end of the first quarter and I believed it. This team is good.  There are tests in life. Feel free to contract genital warts all you losers.

One thing I’m a bit concerned(?) about is that our offensive line is playing serviceably and we still aren’t doing much on offense. Makes me feel like this really is mostly on the playcalling which I really did not want. Because that’s probably the one thing we aren’t gonna improve on. 

Hire an offensive coordinator...like right now please.

Nico frustrated me.  Huge, strong body.  Great control gathering tye ball and getting feet down.  But he cant get YAC to save his life.

I see a lot of complaints about Collins. Could he have been smarter? Sure, but he's still learning. I'm happy that at least he was getting open and catching the ball at a time when no one else was even doing that much. 

One word: FLIMSY.

It's like your college beater car: It might get you home one more time in decent weather, but in tough conditions it's either going to break down or kill you with bald tires.

Even my wife who knows NOTHING about football kept asking why they kept running the ball up the middle on when “it doesn’t work”. 

A win is a win. I’ll take it but I don’t think Harbaugh is taking advantage of the athletic ability Patterson has. This power offense thing works good against teams that absolutely cannot play defense but as the season goes on, Harbaugh is going to have to quit stubbornly sticking to the same old, same old. This is not the Bo era of football anymore. 

HAIL TO THE VICTORS!

This team isn't really built to move the chains with any reliability based on a rounded passing game. Harbaugh is a former QB and seems to be eager to have a good QB (as seen by his focus on transfer QBs), but it seems that the fundamental ingredient for the offense is the ability to frequently gash them with fairly straight forward run plays.

If the run play on 1st down fails, the offense seems to be in a bit of a dilemma. How often did Patterson have to scramble to save us from big busted plays? WIth a John Navarre at QB we'd probably lose this game.

The predictability of trying to get the run up the middle going and the stubborn insistence on it, is probably the biggest weakness of an unimaginative old-time pro offense. It permanently puts the pressure on us on offense because you basically treat a 1st down like something to be achieved in 3 tries, rather than credibly creating the fear in their minds that you could take three, four, five 1st down distances from them at any time with one play. That's a way of making those 65-80 yards you need to score a TD feel awfully long. We have only two ways of speeding that process up seemingly, a big run by Higdon or an open TE running a deep route. That's not enough to put points on the likes of OSU or PSU.

It's really frustrating because we do have a decent QB now, so it's not that we're just stuck with this offense out of lack of options..it's just inherent to the way the coaching staff plans the games.

Offense is too vanilla with that QB. This is more tailored to McCaffrey. The last TD by Higdon was a great call but we are lucky we didn’t get flagged with too many guys in the backfield.

Consistency in the QB is a must to have a great offense. We need a 2-3yr starter who can grow with the team and knows the weaknesses and strengths of every player. Using transfers will lead us nowhere. Shea is really good but i feel he is still adjusting and so is the team around him.

Patterson is a baller. 

I guess I thought the oline was ok. I think Onwenu struggles when pulling tho. My real problem though is the lack of creativity. There are no passes to the back. No screens. No wheel routes. Little to no crossing routes or taking advantage of the middle of the field. We threw a fade into the end zone to the shortest receiver on the field on our second or third drive instead of to Collins or Gentry. 

Northwestern had an extra week to prepare for us and Fitzgerald is a good coach so they definitely had our number the first quarter and a half but after that they got nothing. 11 penalties of which I think about 8 were legit.  It again some MINDBOGGLING calls from the refs. 

All in all a win is a win. But to beat MSU, PSU and OSU we’re going to need to have an offensive strategy that is less vanilla. I’m not sure Pep is capable of that. And I do blame this on Pep as the offense has been so blah since his arrival. 

Coming back from a big deficit on the road is good in the abstract, but the fact that it had to happen against a team that lost to Akron is not.

The offensive explosion against Nebraska was a mirage, because the Cornhuskers are terrible. Unless there's dramatic improvement, this offense will put all the pressure on the D to bail its nuts out of the fire against PSU, MSU, WI, and OSU.

We have a 10-11 win defense and a 7 win offense. Considering that we have a head coach who's supposed to be an offensive savant, that's mystifying.

I missed portions of the game.  Did we pull out many new formations or plays?

Positives are the oline looked pretty decent and Patterson showed some grit coming up with plays late despite not having a great night. The offense has to find a way to create more explosive plays and finish in the red zone moving forward though, every drive can't be like pulling teeth

I’d liked seeing Shea run, planned or not

Shea...  needs to take some serious chill pills to deal with the stress of the pass rush.

Karon - doing really well but occasionally has vision issues and missed obvious gaps for short yardage.

O-line - seal things up, help the QB out.

Offense in general - don't wait until you get punched in the mouth a few times before you start to respond.  

There are a lot of assholes in this thread.

Wasn't the formation with four receivers to one side illegal?  It looked like only one of the four was at the LOS, and Michigan had a QB and RB in the backfield as well.  Thought we were going to be flagged for that....

I like Nico but this offense needs Tarik.

The OL was the most encouraging part of the game. Not that they were great, exactly, but Northwestern's defensive front was not dominating the game the way I had feared. Shea was actually bugging out too soon much of the time, and a lot of the poor runs were RPS-minus plays where NW was throwing guys into the hole that the blockers had no chance to stop. This was not a situation where Gaziano was destroying our OTs on every snap. 

That put into focus the dodgy nature of our passing game. Not infrequently Shea would have time to look around and find nothing. It looked like, at times, there were guys who were at least somewhat open that he would pass off; at other times there appeared to be nowhere to throw the ball. 

It's a concern. Our receivers are supposed to be talented, they need to get open, and Shea needs to hit them. 

Guessing this may have been discussed at some point before.  But why don't we ever run RB screens?  Is it too difficult for the o line?  Michigan use to use these to perfection against hard charging defensive fronts.  Is it because we haven't faced an aggressive defense?  I don't recall us using it all the past couple of seasons.

Just glad we got the win.  The team under any of the recent QBs probably wouldn't have come back.  The defense again gave the offense a chance to win and they did.  The playcalling...

GO BLUE!