Did conservative offensive play calling or ineffective o-line play cost UM CFP?

The inability to sustain a long drive in the 4th quarter cost us. The oline just isn't there yet. Soon enough.

It has been a concern from early in the season that the OL could be a liability in key games against great DLs. I had basically accepted that we had basically no chance against Bama if we made it that far; the OL kept us from making it that far earlier than that.

The OL was a question going into the year and in my opinion the result was disappointing. It wasn't all bad, of course--guys like Kalis turned in some good stuff, and the Newsome injury was a blow. But too often the team needed to be able to run and could not. Honestly, the area that jumps out to me is center. We expected Cole to be the rock on the line, but he was abused by quality DTs in multiple games. That is the one area that fell decidedly short of expectations.

But it was the whole line. The blown pickup by Kalis to give up a safety at Iowa, the inability to run at all late against OSU...

When a great OL is humming, they can run at will. This offense needs that to function at optimal levels. It is a credit to the coaches that the offense was productive despite this weakness, but you could tell from the play selection that they knew the OL couldn't run at will.

Were they conservative late at OSU? Sure. But when you can't run and your injured QB has thrown two backbreaking picks, what are your options?

Both

Of fucking course it did! We knew that during the entire last month

did. Mainly droped passes and missed blitz pick ups.

Well darboh had plays to make in the Iowa game and Ohio state game in the 4th quarter that could have won the game. Jabrill had a 1 on 1 with samuels 12 yards short of the first down. Plenty of reasons beyond o line and play calling

I see the Reply button, I see the upvote, the downvote...

where the hell is the Delete Thread to Preserve Sanity button?

Yeah, even if you said yes to one of or either conservative playcalilng/O-line resulting in losses...are you gonna talk about EVERYTHING ELSE that went into those losses?

Special teams. Officiating. Dropped passes. Inaccurate throws. Mental lapses. Stupid penalties.

And while we're at it, let's look at everything that went into our 10-2 regular season that resulted in us winning:

Playcalling. O-Line play. Special teams. Caught passes. Accurate throws. Mental focus. Sacks. D-Line Play.

C'mon...unless you're running an M football livestream, there's no way to talk about everything in a comprehensive manner. So let's all chill on the arbitrary cherry picking and just Harbaugh on.

Go Blue.

finish games and make plays when they're needed, which means you get first downs to close out games and you run the ball successfully when the other teams knows you are going to run and stop the other team in a similar situation. In two games, that didn't happen, and because it didn't, Michigan is playing in the Orange Bowl instead of a semifinal matchup. I blame that primarily on the Iowa loss, not the Ohio defeat, which will always be tainted in my mind given the circumstances.

was not that bad. They played well enough to win. The staff at times in bailed on the running game to soon and did not allow the line a chance to prove themselves. Now I by no means think the O-line was great, but they were good enough.

Duh. Yes.

One led to the other.

Quarterback play cost us both games. The ability at times to love the ball and poorly thrown passes ultimately did us in. The O line still needs to improve and so does the run game but we win our two failed games if throws are made. We also need better over all decisions from our quarterback. I know I'll take some hate but it's the truth.

A few times now in the Harbaugh era we would have won if we could grind out a first down late in the 4th quarter.  2015 MSU, 2016 Iowa, arguably 2016 OSU (the two 3 and outs didn't help the defense).   Even in wins we've looked bad in the 4th quarter like 2016 MSU

It's the O-Line play. It has always been the O-Line play.

Ineffective OL play is the reason for the conservative play calling.

Can't wait for the Harbaugh guys to be on that line. Kalis just couldn't get out of his head.

I said it all year long. We were a dominant RB ( Barkley type) from being the best team in the country.

*

This thread will probably get nuked but can anyone tell me who would've won the division if we beat Iowa? I thought I was reading PSU awhile back for some reason. Is that right?

The line was just never consistent enough. The amount of 2 yard runs made me want to vomit. Bad OL play cost us in the Iowa game this year when we couldn't run out the clock and it cost us last year when we couldn't run it out against MSU. You could argue it did against OSU too because we couldn't keep a drive going.

I think everyone is categorizing failed plays as 'conservative playcalling' or 'Lloydball'. Vs Iowa Harbaugh was going deep and trying goofy pitches to the extent that I kinda wish he was MORE conservative in that game (simple routes to Butt and the WRs, straight ahead running).

Against OSU it just killed us that we cant run the ball. Wilton was basically 100% of our offensive success last week.

You can only mask a bad run game so much and it was the difference between 10-2 and 13-0 right now

I wish there were a "snowflakes: your hot takes on CFP, bowls and why the rest of the world doesn't view UM in the same light as we do." Otherwise we will continue to get these threads and responses like mine decrying the plethora of playoff threads. My work here is done.

No

why not have a couple of wrinkle plays by the last quarter of the season? Both VT and Clemson had a couple each last night to remind me. To me that's more disappointing than anything else because it was in the staff's control.

Pretty sure that we had guys 2-3 yards past the DBs regularly at Iowa, but Speight was having an off night.  When your QB is not hitting open receivers, what other options do you have?  Try to run and hope for someone to make a play, and fall back on your stellar D if it doesn't work.  Absent the phantom facemask, it might have worked.

We had the same problem at OSU.  The only way OSU was able to score against us in non-OT situations was where our passing game gave them a short field.  To be fair, in a ref-neutral world, it actually worked quite well.  We got them off the field before the Hill uncatchable PI give them a fresh set of downs, and we also stopped them on 4th down in OT before the spot (and the rest of the ref shenanigans) gave them the game.  We actually did enough to win despite it being a sloppy game by the offense, and just got bad breaks and bad calls.

Passing is a high risk-high reward endeavor (especially against the opportunitistic OSU secondary), and when it goes bad it neutralizes one of our greatest assets - our defense.  It was only a bad idea in retrospect.

TL; DR - Not really.