So I couldn't in good conscience do a basketball or hockey or softball roundtable question the week of the Ohio State game, lest Bo leap from his grave and stab out my eyes.* On the other hand I've been around here long enough to know what it means when the otters and Big Lebowski references come out (I don't know what posting the game column at 5 a.m. means but it's probably bad).

In that "game column"-type thing Brian suggested a future that's basically 20 years of the late-Carr program. Perhaps a more detailed assessment is in order:

Play out the next four years of Michigan football (If you think Coach X is replaced by Coach Y you can incorporate that into your fantasy.)? What are some of the potential pitfalls along the way? Any reassessment on our rivals going forward?

*People were asking what happened to the Blog That Yost Built.

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BiSB:

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Mathlete: If I would have charted my optimistically realistic expectations entering the Hoke era, here is what it would look like versus achievement on a completely arbitrary scale.

One year of lucky over-achievement, then a year of par and this year. The trajectory is all wrong but the total results are about right. With the strong recruiting and a quality group coming of players moving into the upper class I still think last year could be close to expectations. After nearly three seasons here would be my grades for Hoke and the coordinators:

Brady Hoke: Incomplete

Greg Mattison: A

Al Borges: D (GERG gave up 37 points to UMass, Borges at least torched Indiana)

Hoke gets an incomplete pending how the offense turns out next year. The defense is his specialty and their solid progression is a positive sign. Whether Borges survives to next year or not and if he stays and how much things get better (it has to get better, right?) will be the major determiner of his grade. Most of the offensive failures to date aren't on Hoke in my mind, but everything going forward will be.

The future on defense is Tacos. [Upchurch]

That's a long preamble to the original question, what do the next four years look like?

Next year the defense will be good, probably very good. The offense who knows. At this point I think anything is possible. Borges could get fired but probably won't. He could stay and things could be marginally better, he could stay and things could click and they could be good but probably still frustrating.

Beyond 2014 the defense should be consistently good. Historically, defenses loaded with talent like Michigan is bringing have a pretty low variance. They may not always be elite, but it's pretty hard for them to be bad. I really don't know what to say about the offense. Anything is possible, they could turn into Stanford next year or they could limp through a couple more years of Borges, with enough talent and a good enough defense to keep things intact but not good enough to compete with the best teams on the schedule.

As to the rivals, the only question for Ohio State is, can Urban maintain success at one place for an extended period? He has never stayed in one place for more than six seasons. As long as he is there Ohio State should be pretty similar to what we've seen from him to date. Are they going to go undefeated every year, certainly not, their win streak hasn't exactly come against murderers row. But the schedule isn't going to get a lot tougher in the Big Ten and I would expect their regular season win total to reach double digits more often than not.

Across the state, it's a bit more complex. Does Narduzzi leave after this year? How high of a level can the defense maintain with Dantonio but no Narduzzi. If he stays or Dantonio can keep things moving without him, the Spartans aren't going anywhere. The offense will probably never be good enough to put them at a consistently elite level, but they should be a real player in the East division. If the defense can't stay elite, Michigan State's chances of staying competitive at the top year after a year probably leave too.

[Jump]

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Seth: Those questions are unfortunately easy to answer.

Urban: staying for awhile. He seems to have found his balance and this is the job he was always working toward; 9 of 10 cardiologists agree that coaching a Big Ten power that can play by SEC rules is less stressful than doing so in the SEC itself.

Narduzzi: Moving on, finally (probably to Purdue if I had to guess), but that's not going to kill MSU's defense by a longshot. Dantonio can coach, and his staff can develop talent, and he has other friends down the Saban tree who'd be happy to take the reigns of that machine.

I think we spent a long time explaining how Greg Robinson's defense was going to be better when whatever 3-stars they could add to it matured. There was no question the 2010 defense was going to be worse than the 2009 one, but everything hinged on whether you could see it improving to "just okay" by 2011.

It did, by the way. And there's the lesson: a good coach in college football can turn a unit around surprisingly quickly, and a bad one will get surprisingly bad results just as fast. The dropoff comes with the exodus of the old starters; mass improvement typically arrives when the new guy's guys start popping up all over the depth chart. If either happens all at once the results can be dramatic.

Here's some charts of Michigan and Michigan State FEI rankings since 2007:

Finding signs before roster turnover isn't that hard: two years ago Jack Mewhort was one more lazy Jim Bollman charge; right now he's playing better than Taylor Lewan. That is a statement about both programs and their offensive coaching trajectories.

If you stuck Greg Robinson in charge of MSU's defense next year I expect they'd be 9th then start falling off precipitously. Bringing in top talent doesn't do much if you can't develop it, and lacking a cohesive system that the players and coaches are fully committed to, there is little development that can go on.

Watch Kyle Kalis against Iowa versus Notre Dame. It wasn't Louis Nix or Stephon Tuitt he was lining up against, but he looked epically worse. That's because he's been out of the lineup since Indiana, and his offense hasn't been the same thing any three weeks in a row. At this point in 2009 we were remarking at how good 2-star defensive end Patrick Omameh looked out there. Omameh lacked 90% of the gifts that made Kalis a major recruit, but he'd been training on Michigan's offense for 15 months. He could never pull, but there were plenty of other options in that offense that played to his and the other guys' strengths.

"I'm not a linebacker." [Fuller]

Look, we've got an offensive GERG. Michigan State had one too—for similar reasons—and finally let him go this year to put the kid in charge of playcalling. They grabbed Jim Bollman to do what he does—recruit and preach the Gospel of Tressel—but wouldn't let him near the offensive playcalling, and lo and behold they're now doing things that make sense for their personnel (giving the kid QB easy reads, keeping the receivers' clangy hands away from populated areas, and not having Fou Fonoti do anything more complicated than "hit the bad man") and it's improving before our eyes.

So…I'm not even answering my question. But I am. There's a hard cap on how good Michigan's offense can get with this offensive staff, and the longer we go without seeing a player put in a position to succeed, the lower that ceiling is.

Defensively, follow MSU's progression. It's going to be elite, probably soon. So the future:

2014: Defense looks elite until game at Ohio State. Every game is close, four losses all accrued on the road (four of ND, Rutgers, MSU, Northwestern, OSU). Borges fired. 8-5

2015: Slow start with a loss to BYU or something but offense looks significantly improved as year progresses. 9-4.

2016: Offense takes a major leap forward, defense a small step back as it's breaking in young players next to a bevy of proven stars. Tough Big Ten schedule (OSU, MSU, Rutgers and Iowa on the road, Wisconsin and Penn State at home) depresses an otherwise good season. Win Citrus Bowl to finish 10-3

2017: Offense falls way back, fanbase convinced younger QB is answer to all their problems, defense is elite or okay depending on how many of the 2016 stars returned instead of going to the NFL. 8-5.

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Brian:

2014: The defense takes a step forward and verges on dominance, with a couple issues holding them back from all-consuming destroyers. One is the lack of a A-level pass rusher as Clark falls just short.

On the other side of the ball, social order begins to break down as energy costs soar after a terrorist dirty bomb makes large sections of the Arabian penninsula uninhabitable. Outbreaks of a radically mutated strain of flu begin hewing down not only the old and young but 5% of healthy adults.

Think of Michigan's defense and offense of the future as an elite tennis prep school developing pros on one court and playing Eschaton on the other.

2015: Michigan takes some hits in the front seven with Beyer, Morgan, Clark, and Ryan leaving, but gets the entire secondary back save Raymon Taylor. Michigan should be fine on the line with a senior version of Bolden coming through, or possibly Gedeon; Pipkins will be a senior, Ojemudia... Charlton... With the Heininger Certainty Principle in effect, there is little dropoff, and possibly an out and out elite unite.

On offense, martial law is instituted by the United States after energy riots break out. Inner cities erupt in turmoil as most can barely afford to feed themselves on repurposed envirogruel that McDonald's swears is not people. Weakened by a lack of nutrition, disease spreads, mutating in the loamy soil of the weakened human body until it becomes both lethal... and capable of reanimating its victims as shambling disease carriers.

2016: The defense is very good.

Chaos. War breaks out as countries scramble for dwindling resources. Nuclear exchanges are had between Pakistan and India. China bombs itself, then bombs the US; the US retaliates massively. Radioactive corpses are reanimated by the disease and used by belligerents as shock troops, herded by doomed slaves soon to join the undead hordes. Eventually, what was civilization stops kicking its own dead body, and flops to the ground.

2017: Perhaps a small step back on defense.

In the bombed out wasteland on offense, a band of survivors fends off robotic horrors and radiation to begin anew. We fade to black as the attractive but disheveled love interest waters the first green shoot that will become a new civilization.

BiSB: Truth be told, I don't have the first clue. Most of the ingredients are there for a stable, successful program. The defense looks for all the world to be on an upward trajectory, recruiting is still going gang-busters, and they have enough offensive talent (ON PAPER) to overcome most schematic deficiencies. Michigan's prospects for the next four years rely more than most teams on their ability to identify talent on the offensive side of the ball. Some coaches (Narduzzi and Mattison come to mind) just plug Random Next Guy Up into their systems and make magic happen, so for them the expected drop-off of a missed evaluation is minimal. Most coaches see a relatively straight line correlation between Quality of Jimmys/Joes and Success of X's/O's. It's becoming more clear by the day that Borges is the kind of guy who NEEDS superior talent to succeed, but if he has it, he can do a great deal with it. If the '13 offensive line crop doesn't pan out, or if Shane Morris and/or Wilton Speight can't do what the coaches expect, then we're looking seriously at the prospect of becoming Florida.

Dude, I just blew up Twitter. Yeah, I used your emoticons—people didn't know what hit them. Ha!

'14 should be pretty decent. Losses on the defensive side of the ball will be minimal, and with the addition of guys like Jabrill Peppers (LALALA I CAN'T HEAR YOU LALALA), the defense should be really, really good. The offense will probably be better, given that (a) Devin won't be that Jolly Rancher that is still in the wrapper but was clearly dropped and maybe stepped on so when you open the package all the Jolly Rancher dust falls out, (b) the return of Amara Darboh, the further maturation of Funchess and the addition of Drake Harris will probably cancel out the loss of Jeremy Gallon and remember-when-we-used-to-use-this-guy Drew Dileo, and (c) the offensive line can't POSSIBLY be this bad next year. What's that? You've heard that before? Well, I mean it this time. For serious. 8 wins because STUPIDEST SCHEDULE EVER and road games suck, setting up...

'15 will be The Year. The offensive line will presumably have the depth and age to remove them as excuses. They'll have a junior 5-star quarterback under center (albeit in his first year as a starter). They'll have Magnuson, Kalis, and Braden in their 4th years in the program and Bosch, Dawson, Kugler, LTT, and Chris Fox in their 3rd years in the program, and Green, Smith, and Harris running behind them. If a coaching staff can't execute the kind of offense they want with THAT group, all hope for competence vanishes. My prediction: solid but below-expectation production and like a 9 win season, questions are temporarily answered, but in a "Hoke has saved himself for the time being" sense. The defense will remain solid, so you'll have that going for you Mrs. Lincoln.

In '16 we will have flying cars. Parking at the stadium will be much easier because you can just hover-park above any Blue lot. For $25. Air space ain't free, yo.

In '17 we will presumably all be dead.