So yeah, I'm UFRing the Spring Game. Did you want recruiting roundups instead? Yeah, that's what I thought. Anyway you're not supposed to read much into spring stuff except I noticed they were still doing a thing that annoyed me a lot last year.

If you missed all that, there was a running question through these exercises whether Cade McNamara's keep reads were hot or if they were determining what their post-snap mesh results were going to be beforehand. This was true for RPOs as well as zone reads. And it made life hard because I couldn't tell for certain if the coaches were telling McNamara to give no matter what, or if that was just how he was reading things, or maybe he was reading something else.

With the benefit of an offseason and Sherrone Moore's recent coaching clinic, where he echoed Josh Gattis's claim that they put reads on all this stuff, I think I can say it was mostly on McNamara.

However there were a few instances where his coaches gave him a read that wasn't the thing that turned out to be wide open. And I wanted to call attention to that, not because Michigan's missing out on some easy yards, but because I think they're making a conscious decision about this, and…you're going to laugh…it kind of makes sense.

The Wide Open Bubble

Let's begin with this play from the spring game.

Maize has Darrius Clemons in the backfield (the one on top) as a split-back flanking McNamara with Donovan Edwards. Clemons takes an orbit motion to the opposite flat, but nobody goes with him. The defense is blitzing the slot safety, Caden Kolesar, behind a crash from the OLB, Jaylen Harrell. That means there isn't anybody for Clemons until the deep safety.

McNamara is clearly looking at Kolesar. Kolesar is clearly the slot defender in the best position to be running outside with Clemons. Kolesar is clearly blitzing. And yet McNamara gives. Why?

We're going to ignore the play's result (it's a risky but successful demolition of Counter GT by Kris Jenkins) to focus on what McNamara does after the handoff. First thing he does is look at Clemons. And probably feels kinda bad.

But it's what Cade does next that interests me. This is a trot, but he's clearly been practicing this as a rollout/QB run.

The look to Clemons suggests that's an option. But given his reaction to Kolesar, I think I can say with some confidence that McNamara wasn't reading Kolesar on an RPO bubble to Clemons; he was reading Kolesar on a QB keep with a pitch option to Clemons.

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The Wide Open Keeper

Let's go back to another snowy day (really, winter, enough!). This was in late November, just before Thanksgiving, and Michigan was on its way to beating Ohio State 42-27. For this example we are removing the Cade factor, since J.J. McCarthy is in at quarterback.

It's a nice memory, Blake Corum getting down to the 6 yard line two plays before another touchdown (OSU contested that one, but not the next one). But you also might have wondered at the start if it was the right read.

Conceptually this is the same play as the one from the spring game, except the read is reversed: Corum's bash run is effectively the same play as Darrius Clemsons's bubble screen, while McCarthy keeping would have been the same result as the spring game, with JJ serving for Edwards behind Counter GT.

Ignoring the CORUM WHEEE!!!! result and just looking at the disposition of these defenders, the keep seems to be the right option here, right? The free safety made his intentions known when he scooted across with Corum, and the cornerback to the Counter GT side was dropping back. Unless the crashing backside end can catch up to McCarthy that's a touchdown.

But McCarthy isn't reading this like an RPO. He doesn't see the safety at all. He's reading this the same as McNamara was reading the one above.

Simple zone read. That's what you'd expect here, since there's a good chance the crashing end could take out the ballcarrier before the slow-developing blocks of Counter GT are made. There's no check to see if the defense has abandoned all hope of covering the run side. It's just a simple read. The same read that McNamara is making. A zone read.

So What?

Sherrone Moore recently put out an online clinic (accessible from Throw Deep Publishing) and this Bash from the OSU game was one of the plays he went over. He even noted, after JJ was running into nowhere, that there was a lot of space out there, but that wasn't the read. Duh, right?

The question isn't whether JJ made the correct read, but why these huge imbalances are being generated. The answer goes back to the construction of Michigan's offense, which has simple concepts for the players, and a lot of frippery to make defending it hard. Defenses started responding to this by turning the tables, forcing the read they wanted, and overreacting to the result. The frippery created imbalances, but the offense wasn't actually threatening all the things they were showing.

Technically both quarterbacks last year were freshmen (Cade had a redshirt in 2019 and 2020 didn't count against anyone's eligibility). The coaches weren't going to be putting too much on their plates. McNamara had a complicated passing offense to get down, and JJ was a true freshman. Something had to give, and that turned out to be zone reads, which had very simple rules and different sliders per QB.

As of spring, that was still something that you could mess them up with. Michigan's Blue team showed you how a defense can overload the playside and force a give right into it. Ohio State showed you how a defense can overload the backside and force an outside run into it. Only Michigan's blocking and Corum's ability to use it to take out the linebacker pursuit turned that into a positive play.

But that was last year, and they're not going to show you their next step in spring ball. Since they've got their own and their rivals' coordinators willing to abandon entire sides of the field to force reads into their traps, the logical next step would be for Weiss to start teaching his quarterbacks to recognize the traps.

What that looks like, hypothetically, is training the QBs (or since it's offseason now, having the QBs train on their own) to recognize when there's a reaction to that play's frippery and take what's there. In JJ vs Ohio State, that would be if you see the safety bailing on the mesh, KEEP IT AND BOOK IT to the other side to escape the crashing DE, with the RB taking that guy out if possible. As for McNamara in the spring game, if you're getting a double blitz to the side of the bubble, cancel the read and throw the bubble.

But adding reads is a big coaching decision. Added complications are multipliers for mistakes, which is why many coaches keep hard and fast to simple rules. Michigan will likely opt instead to build in plays that attack those spaces automatically. If you see they're flipping the safety and corner like that, run the back out and have JJ run the Counter GT. If you see they're crash/replacing on the option edge, throw a bubble.

At best, I think what they'll start adding this year are pre-snap reads for this sort of thing. RB motions can tell you if they're going to have one of these overreactions, and McNamara is very good at picking up the subtle clues that signify a hot read. Now that defensive coordinators have had a season and a winter to figure out Weiss's additions to the offense and how to counter them, they're going to have to do something. The yards are too good to pass up.