yoyo

October 8th, 2017 at 1:58 PM ^

I really don't understand how harbaugh had more success on Stanford with inferior talent against a vastly superior team in USC with Carroll while struggling against MSU with the situation completely flipped.

aiglick

October 8th, 2017 at 2:01 PM ^

Weather really is a great equalizer. Neither team could do much when the weather hit. All this year we've been a second half team. Unfortunately that mentality bit us in the butt this game.

If the weather held out I do think we have a decent shot at winning the game.

Regardless the stats and eye test tell us there are some major issues on the offensive side of the ball.

evenyoubrutus

October 8th, 2017 at 2:11 PM ^

Yeah, kinda wishing there had been lightning so they could have delayed it. The rain literally stopped within minutes of the game ending. We will never know if Harbaugh was able to draw up a second half gameplan that would work.

OTOH, the weather didn't seem to stop their defensive backs from catching O'Korn's passes.

jabberwock

October 8th, 2017 at 8:57 PM ^

"We will never know if Harbaugh was able to draw up a second half gameplan that would work."

Of course we know?  He can't and he didn't.  Did he notice it was raining (or going to?)  Why not gameplan around that?  How about a gameplan that scores more than 3 in the 1st. half?

Yep, we'll never know.

GoBlueInAlabama

October 8th, 2017 at 2:56 PM ^

Look, I wish I could point to the weather as the reason For Michigan's struggles. This offense has been out of sync all year. Is it the fact that the offensive line has struggled? Youth at the WR position? Poor play calling? Poor QB play? To me it is all of it.
Just look at the running game. Higdon was running well and then they plug in an ineffective Evans. Let's face it, Evans has been a big disappointment this year. Toss sweep was working effectively, so let's stop doing that in favor of running Evans into a crowded box.

I hope they get back to practice and establish who they want to be offensively. If not, this is a four loss team with a National Championship defense.

I Like Burgers

October 8th, 2017 at 4:27 PM ^

I feel like if the weather had remained good all game, MSU would have blown Michigan out. They were having their way on both sides of the ball. And I know the defense smothered them in the second half, but a lot of that was by MSU’s “don’t fuck this up” play calling design.



If anything, the weather gave Michigan a chance in the game.

RockinLoud

October 8th, 2017 at 2:04 PM ^

Apples and oranges.

Harbaugh and his tactics were reletively unknown at that time and USC probably didn't take them seriously.

Harbaugh is a known comodity now, hasn't really had that much innovation the last 2 seasons - maybe that's on Drevno more than Harbaugh, idk - not much catches teams by surprise outside of a play or two per game anymore. Plus the defenses in the B1G are much better overall than the PAC12.

Jordan2323

October 8th, 2017 at 2:04 PM ^

He started there a decade ago. The game is completely different now than it was then. He had two good seasons there and went to the NFL after that. I really feel like he thought he was going to be the one to bring the NFL style back to the college game. It's all spread now and he's behind the times.

RockinLoud

October 8th, 2017 at 2:09 PM ^

IDK about that. He was one of first in the NFL to bring a lot of spread/QB run/zone read type stuff to the NFL with Kap. Not sure what he's going for at UM this season. Heavy set one down, 5 wide the next. I guess the Patriots offense, but we're way too young to execute it well.

GoBlueInAlabama

October 8th, 2017 at 3:27 PM ^

Rockin, you bring up a good point. So many teams now have a QB who can run a little bit. Right now Michigan has zero threat at the QB position. I am not sure if they have that guy on the roster. It sure would be nice to force a defense to have to account for the QB on a third down passing play.
I am not saying they need to go pure RPO, but maybe a guy who has some real running ability.

YaterSalad

October 8th, 2017 at 2:09 PM ^

I was wondering this aloud with some buddies last week. I think there must be a level of burning desire within the underdog role. At Stanford all success was success - could have been a steady climb instead of a 3-4 year rapid rise and fans / program / team would have been ecstatic. I feel the expectation at a blue blood is to win, and win big. Players who commit must feel like they are the top of the game ... Not the guy who everybody overlooked. That pressure must be even bigger on Harbaugh - school you played for in a dumpster fire before you came back to coach.

Maybe this loss helps to flip that switch on offense. They need the swagger of being a disrespected young group that the defense established. Maybe this loss helps to make sense of Harbaugh realizing there are good coaches in a deep league like the B1G - the PAC-10 probably wasn’t this competitive back then in terms of big name coaching talent. Beat Carroll and Kelly and you were head of the pack.

The worse possible situation is that Harbaugh is a guy without a QB. Maybe it was Luck all along. One must hope not - given the rest of his record without the guy. But that could have been the biggest improvement Stanford got.

victors2000

October 8th, 2017 at 3:31 PM ^

You get that Chip on your shoulder and shit happens. Stanford was nothing while USC and Carroll were the 'everything'; Coach Carroll had what Coach Harbaugh wanted. Stanford was motivated to beat the Trojans in a way the Trojans were unable to match, just like the Spartans are motivated to beat us. Wait a minute, this isn't some 'Karma' thing, is it?

YouRFree

October 8th, 2017 at 3:33 PM ^

Not sure if you watch Harbaugh's stanford's offense. They have very thick playbook and more than 200 plays. They can run no huddle effectively in pro formation with Luck as QB. Harbaugh has not even implemented half of his playbook at Michigan due to the youth of football team every year and the QB situation, probably to his point, Michigan player is not as smart as Stanford player (don't bang me on that. this is generally very very true. Many Stanford players were in biology, engineering, etc. majors, they are very smart people.) We have some OL just keep repeating the same mistakes, either the coach is too bad don't know how to coach (in Funk's case) or the athele is not smart enough and take a longer time than we wanted to master it on the field. anyway, we are at least two years away from playoff contender, without elite OL, we don't do anything. Until then, we will not dominate MSU, period. You got to run the ball over them, out-tough them, not out-smart them.

 

kb

October 8th, 2017 at 2:02 PM ^

A good QB can make all the difference. If you don't have a good QB you are going to struggle. If you have a good one you can mask a lot of problems. On another note, you don't see FSU fans asking for Fischer's head on a stake in their supposed championship run season.

Wolverine 73

October 8th, 2017 at 2:03 PM ^

So I guess the ban on reading Free Press articles has been lifted since they hired Baumgardner from mlive? But, yeah, there are a lot of unpleasant truths in that article.

umfan323

October 8th, 2017 at 2:05 PM ^

The reason I prefer playing cupcakes to start the season... Let the offense get some momentum, some confidence, find go to players,find some plays that they like, some that work against other teams, and get backups some playing time ... There really is no benefit to the program playing good teams to start the year

umfan323

October 8th, 2017 at 2:18 PM ^

That’s why I would schedule terrible teams ... Northern Indiana, Eastern Idaho we needed games where we put teams away by halftime so we could get Peters some playing time and OKorn minutes but we couldn’t do that with the teams we choose to play.. Now it’s showing with how the offense is operating.. No cohesion , no confidence ,no plays that we can lean on..

I Like Burgers

October 8th, 2017 at 4:38 PM ^

The article doesn’t call for anyone to be fired. It does, however, point out what a hot mess the offense is and that we are paying $1M EACH for Drevno and Hamilton. We essentially have a $2M offensive coordinator and one of the worst offenses in CFB.

turtleboy

October 8th, 2017 at 2:08 PM ^

It's pretty much true. The offensive playcalling isn't clever, it's complicated. I feel like we had better rps, and the calls made things as easy as possible on the players in year 1. Now it feels like the coaches are trying to make things harder, to a degree, than they need to. Not find something that works and do it until they take it from you, but do everything no matter how poorly it's been working.

Zenogias

October 8th, 2017 at 4:15 PM ^

This is how I feel about the situation 1000%. The last two years it felt like we had an offense that basically worked, and when it didn't, you could clearly point to places where execution (aka talent) was the problem. This year execution has still been bad, but I can't even tell what the fucking plan is. You can see this in how we fare against weaker defenses. We absolutely SHREDDED weak teams last year. I get that we lost some key guys, but we also entirely changed our base offense. Why the hell would we do that?