FORMATION NOTES: Michigan spent every snap in their nickel. This was fairly typical.

That also shows what I called "shotgun triangle" for IU. Wynn is lined up in the backfield behind the QB, but it's shotgun depth, not pistol. Wynn would always motion out after a hand-wave from the QB; this was always a decoy.

Michigan did show a few okie packages. This is Okie two; I designate them by the number of safeties.

SUBSTITUTION NOTES: Boatloads. Avery went back to safety and spotted Gordon and Wilson from time to time. This led to a lot of Stribling and Lewis, as Michigan played every snap in their nickel. Countess and Taylor did not leave the field, IIRC.

At linebacker the usual Ross/Morgan/Bolden rotation saw Ben Gedeon join. The line was the usual profusion of bodies. Clark or Ojemudia was usually one end with one of Beyer/Ryan/CGordon the other. On the interior, Washington, Black, Wormley, Henry and Heitzman seemed to split snaps almost evenly. Glasgow also got in some.

[After THE JUMP: go go go go go go go go go go]

AHHH

IT BURNS

I'M COLD

Pick one.

GOING WITH COLD

The wind through your eviscerated guts, sort of thing.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN

Gavrilo Princip was a poor nationalist with delusions—

NO, NO, THE FOOTBALL GAME, NOT THE MONSTROUS HISTORY OF THE 20TH CENTURY CULMINATING IN THE FOOTBALL GAME

A disclaimer first: the combination of Indiana's offense and BTN director guy's refusal to use angle that might actually tell you something about a play—must be related to Michigan Stadium's Vice President Of Replay Utilization—makes it hard to figure out exactly what the hell happened quite often. This was not a skycam game featuring Chris Spielman.

I'M DYING MAKE IT QUICK

Right. My theory of this football game is that they were completely unprepared for Indiana's pace and melted in the harsh fast-forward glare of it. This manifested in a pile of mental mistakes, some obvious (dude racing past cornerback who never gets a call and thinks he's got safety help) and some less so. After the fumble, Mattison managed to hold Indiana out for two plays and then dialed up a blitz that should have worked, as it got Clark and Wilson free off the edge. Indiana is going at mega tempo, though, and both guys go for the quarterback:

Maybe that happens if Indiana's playing tortoise-ball; we've seen things like that from Clark in the past. Given the sheer number of mental mistakes Michigan made, usually against ultra jet tempo, I think shock was a major factor in the carpet-bombing they suffered.

Indiana touchdowns:

1. Jet tempo, Taylor doesn't get call, doesn't get zone help he expects.
2. Jet tempo, Wilson can't get over to seam route at numbers from opposite hash, may be misaligned.
3. Jet tempo, Clark and Wilson both run at a non-mobile QB.
4. Jet tempo, Michigan is in a borked coverage that leaves Wynn wide open at the goal line. Three man route at the five yard line and there isn't a guy within five yards of Wynn.
5. Check. Michigan shows 5-1 nickel with blitz and man free. IU rolls pocket away from blitz, Roberson scrambles up middle of vacated pocket for TD.

It's just brutal on you when you've just given up a 17 yard run thanks to 5.5 in the box and the next play comes a second after the ball is put down and it's a pop seam to the tight end. At that pace you are just reacting, and probably reacting to the thing that just happened instead of considering the fact that the line is pass blocking. Do I think that Michigan could have played this better? Yes. But so much of what the game felt like was guys panicking because the ball was about to be snapped. That is a preparation issue, and not a talent one.

The other thing Indiana's tempo gave them was an opportunity to see what the defense was doing and react with a check, or not react, as the case may be. IU's first play after Michigan scored to go up 35-24 was a zone run against five guys in the box; presnap Roberson checks with the sideline, and the sideline is like, uh, yeah, we're good.

Black needs to do a lot better there, but he's not a nose tackle and he's play nose tackle, so… yeah.

That's the third thing IU tempo did: wear out big dudes and make Michigan rotate even more than they usually do. Ben Gedeon, Jourdan Lewis, and Graham Glasgow all saw time after having been excised (or never in) previous gameplans.

So Mattison did not prepare us at all for this game.

He did get smoked. Is anyone surprised, though? This Is Michigan, which means going out to the Rose Bowl and watching USC run the ball zero times in the second half of a 3-3 game that you lose, or, you know, the Horror. A couple of people emailed me this week, worrying about a seemingly dismissive answer Hoke gave about the idea that they'd have to change things to prepare for IU tempo. Heiko's recap of that presser reveals a much less standoffish version of what happened:

A lot of teams use two scout offenses to try to simulate Indiana’s tempo. Have you done that at all?

“We pretty much all year practice high tempo. I run the scout cards for the defense, so I have the offensive line with me. We do it at a pace so we can get reps of what the plan might be against certain plays so that we can see it as coaches and evaluate it if it’s good and all that. So we do that constantly. We’ve got two sets of skill people on both sides, so they’re ready to go. The offensive linemen, they do a tremendous job of finishing and wherever the ball is spotted, I’m running over there. I know it’s hard to believe. We go pretty quick.”

Has you added to that this week?

“It’s pretty much the way we practice.”

I'm sure Hoke believes that Michigan goes pretty quick… or at least did.  When the rubber hit the road here, Indiana showed Michigan what quick really was.

To me the issue goes deeper than Mattison. This is a whole-program issue, one that I think we all wondered about when Michigan hired a guy who was all about manball. If Michigan can't get a two-minute drill executed in under eight minutes, how can we take the idea that Michigan is comfortable at high pace seriously? They suck at it on offense; they suck at it on defense. This goes back to the guy in charge.

At least we can take solace in the fact that a lot of teams seem to be having trouble with the Hoosiers, who are second in the FEI rankings. And that's an attempt to make Indiana's offense look less impressive statistically since their tempo distorts metrics that don't divide, like total offense. FEI takes a drive, figures out how well an average offense expects to do against the defense you're up against, and gives you points based on how far away from that average you end up. It is tempo-immune, and it says the candystripers can play.

Why are you so nice to Mattison instead of Borges /something about PPG

are you seriously using ppg as a stat in a year when the offense is handing teams free touchdowns all the damn time and the defense is intercepting all the things

I'm from the internet. Yes, I am.

I see. Well, FEI can spit out some goofy results from time to time but it reflects what I think is going on with Michigan's units: defense is 17th, offense 35th, special teams a miserable 88th. This defense is still in the same range it was the last couple years, which is what I expected before the season. Thus: overall contentment.

I think it's fundamentally much more difficult to deal with Indiana's offense than Penn State's defense. That stuff is hard, man. MSU will be a test for both coordinators. Borges has an opportunity to show he can do anything against a top notch defense; Mattison has an opportunity to shut down a bad offense.

CHART

I didn't even… oh. I see what you did there.

[Reminder that DL is a MAKE PLAYS position and being neutral is bad; for a full game you want +4 to break even.]

A pretty appalling DL performance; it is mystifying to me how Michigan can put Black and Wormley or Heitzman out there as the DTs. Henry and Washington are not rushers, but they would give Michigan a fighting chance with six guys in the box.

Everything else is also flames, though the starting linebackers coped pretty well, as did Raymon Taylor. Which I think you're probably going to point at right about…

Our defensive backs are shambling meat-sacks. MEAT SAAAAACKS.

I'm actually not that down on them. Stribling obviously had major issues, not only by phasing out of our reality but also by turning a simple five yard out into 26 yards by missing a tackle. He needs 15 pounds. He is a freshman. He actually might be pretty good next year.

Countess was solid when not falling prey to the mental errors that beset everyone. The wide open short touchdown had to be on him, because Stribling wasn't going to be able to cover two guys to that sideline. Other than that he was probably the best guy out there. I said he'd gotten burned in the game column, but the longer Wynn touchdown was not on him. It was more on Wilson and a defense that was vulnerable to that particular play given how they aligned. He got a PBU on a corner route that was straight out of pressing Michael Floyd and living; he was close enough to bother IU receivers; he is pretty good. He's not the crazy star we thought he'd be, at least not yet.

Meanwhile… Taylor is the 2013 Jonas Mouton Memorial Huge Plays Both Ways defender. You can assign some of his performance to the team-wide inability to keep pace with the Hoosiers. The opening touchdown was that, obviously. What's left after you slice out the stuff where he didn't know what he was supposed to be doing is a combination of nice plays, like a PBU that got Michigan one of those punt things, and boggling almost-plays, like the should-have-been pick six that was not.

I think he's getting better. Set aside confusion that was a defense-wide issue and Taylor's day is actually kind of good. When they tried a fade route on him that he was in man coverage on he got his head around and had the throw hit him in the shoulder. Even when Indiana was getting completions on him they were often narrow things. The shoulda-pick-six is one; this slant is something I'll take from a CB all day:

Useless BTN director never showed a replay of Taylor's coverage on a fade route he broke up in a way that really seemed like it could have been interference:

From the stands I can tell you that Taylor simply would not let the WR release. By the time the ball was in the air, Taylor was in the guy's chest and gave him no chance to catch and underthrown ball. If it's not interference that's great coverage.

I did have an issue with a couple of plays where IU got to Taylor on run plays and he attempted to fight inside instead of holding the edge. Let the safeties do their jobs, man. I still think Taylor's day was considerably more good than bad.

Finally, Jourdan Lewis as got be just… like…

…I'ma quit this bull and go be a monk.

Any indication that Jake Ryan is back to being Jake Ryan?

Just flashes here and there. Ryan had a trademark chaos play as he forced a throwaway:

He did not get a ton of playing time, and did have one flight upfield on first and five that was one of three contributing factors to a 15-yard run.

Linebacker play seemed not so good.

It kind of was, it kind of wasn't. Ross got bashed out of a hole on power and made a rookie move by getting sealed to the same side as his help. That's a bad memory of linebacking corps from a few years ago. Bolden whiffed a potential TFL in space, thought he was the force player on a zone run that Ross bailed him out on, but Ross did bail him out. That TFL miss was bad, though:

Bolden was out there in OT against PSU, earning that PT with a good game, but he reverted to the overwhelmed guy we saw in the first half of the year. Bad game for it, because it's hard to get him out of there once he starts struggling.

Anything else?

Here is the Norfleet return that was fun.

Heroes?

Uh… yeah, I'm going with Raymon Taylor. Thomas Gordon bailed Michigan out with the IT late.  Willie Henry was Michigan's best run defender.

Maybe not so heroic?

Team-wide, Michigan was not prepared for IU's speed. Put that on Mattison if you want, to me that is a Hoke issue that stems from his philosophy. Black got gashed, a lot, and did not provide extra pass rush. Stribling needs to make plays.

What does it mean for Michigan State and the future?

Hopefully not much. Indiana's tempo is a program-defining thing. You can install a tiny fraction of it in a couple weeks, but Michigan's not going to see much if any of that against Iowa and MSU. Nebraska, Northwestern, and OSU all have elements of that in their offense but to a much smaller extent. They might burn Michigan for a play here and there, but it won't be the foundation of a gameplan. Also, Michigan just got a huge wakeup call right before a bye.

Raymon Taylor is improving. I think he's quality. I know that's a contrarian take after that game, but his issues were neither technique or athleticism; I'll take a guy who just barely misses an INT a week after he jumps a route for a badass one.

At the other corner spot I guess you just roll with it and hope the things we've seen are small sample size outliers. I think you can make the case for that. In defensive backery, 80% of success is just showing up.

Michigan needs to have a nose-type person on the field in any standard down. Henry or Washington; this business with a 280 pound SDE lined up next to another SDE who is probably a freshman is an invitation to get gashed. It's been like this all year, though, and I don't expect it to change.

Ryan's showing flashes. Come on, baby.

Gedeon may start eating into Bolden's PT. I speculated Michigan might drop him just in time for a good game against PSU; after another worrisome outing there is now a contender for his snaps.