Basically the coaches have put guys who couldn't possibly succeed in a position to fail even harder. [Fuller]

Hey, UFRs are coming out today and tomorrow, but we can get most of the sad clown out now. Sad clowns: Brian, Bryan, Brett, Brandon, Brace, and Brseth. What I asked:

The worst part of it is…

Coach Brown: Man, what a loaded question. I think the worst part of it is, that we don’t know what the worst part of it is. Right now Michigan is 6-2 with a loss to Penn State that I don’t think they should have. The Michigan State loss was painful, but expected. That being said, there seems to be a list of issues that are present each week, with a few new ones popping up occasionally too.

Early on Devin was the interception king, while last week he played like he was so scared to turn the ball over that it might as well have been glued to his hand.

The offensive line has been different so many times I don’t even know who is playing what position anymore. Even the All-American left tackle has been moved around. The youth is inexperienced but talented, but so far has been pretty lack luster. Derrick Green is averaging around 3 ypc. Dymonte Thomas was thought to be all-world but he can’t get on the field. Channing Stribling has been there, but not quite. Kyle Bosch unfortunately has had to play. Shane Morris trips over yard lines. Jake Butt is being asked to do a TON. Jourdan Lewis shows signs of being the next Raymon Taylor. Brian, is he good or aren’t we sure yet?

Does the inverted veer have a counter in this offense? Does the coaches know what a counter is? [Upchurch]

Granted a lot of stuff sucked against Michigan State and those memories are at the forefront right now, but a lot of these things have shown up in every game this season. Inconsistent line play and positioning, ball security issues with Devin, no running game whatsoever, game-plans that seem to be constructed as the coaches walk onto the field.

I’m not even going to try and address the coaching issues that seem to be unidentifiable, but are definitely present. Is it Hoke’s leadership? Is it Borges’s predictability and lack of creativity? Is it Funk not knowing what to do with young linemen? Is it Mallory purposely teaching DB’s not to look back for the ball? Is it Mattison being too NFL-like that he won’t blitz when a blitz seems to be an obvious choice?

I know these guys have been football brains for many, many more years that I have been and on a level I can’t even comprehend, but at some point shouldn’t those brains be able to get things get fixed? I’d love to be a fly on the wall in the war room to see and hear what the coaches talk about. They have to know these concerns right? And if so, where are the adjustments or the explanations for why things are happening the way that they are.

Michigan is 6-2 and could potentially go 9-3, while 8-4 is probably more likely, with 6-6 being….dammit, a very real possibility. There is a laundry list of issues with some being more glaring than others. Some things are controllable and some things are not. This team can’t get older and more experienced overnight.

I don’t have fool-proof answers and I don’t know exactly why these issues seem to be unaddressed, but one thing is clear, Team 134 isn’t that good. Facts are facts. What happens this year and next will be telling for the future of the entire staff and the direction of Michigan football.

[Jump. Or small hop if your ribs are still healing. Try not to step on the dead dove.]

----------------------

Seth: Definitely McGary's back injury, which terrifies me because those don't always go away. The rest of the team will be fine. Walton is looking exactly how we want him to look—a pass-first, relatively safe-with-the-ball proto-Burke. GRIII is still hella effective as a role player, though I'd like to have seen him do some of those ball-floor things. Stauskas and Levert have definitely progressed, Caris especially. And Irvin is pretty wow. I'm a bit surprised that Horford's been getting more play than Morgan, but not at all surprised that he's averaging 4 fouls to Morgan's 1. It could just be that they know what they have in Morgan and want to see what the 2014-15 center will look like.

----------------------

BiSB: I defer to the Mathlete, but by my calculations there are actually 74 Worst Parts Of It. For my money, the worst of the Worst Parts was that, like Brian noted, we kind of expected this.

In the past two months, the "Hoke's teams aren't good on the road" meme went from interesting, somewhat annoying factoid to a potentially crippling flaw in the Hoke regime. Up until this year, you could make excuses for most of the road flops; Trash Tornado, Notre Dame's Defense is Really Good, Goodnight Sweet Prince, etc. There are really no satisfactory mitigating explanations for UConn, Penn State, and MSU. If this was just a matter of players not executing on the road, it wouldn't be as large of a concern. Those kinds of problems tend to smooth out with experience; after all Michigan remains a young team (drink). Instead, we got to once again experience the dream in which Michigan was taking an exam for which it hadn't studied. This feels like a systemic problem somewhere in the coaching staff, and those don't tend to smooth out.

The other primary candidate for "worst of the worst parts" is the continuing failure to counterpunch. This was Ohio State '12 all over again; Michigan finds some success, the defense reacts, and Michigan stagnates. It's as if the offense plays a game of chess until it finds itself in an advantageous position, and then refuses to make any more moves because their previous strategy was working. The lack of counters, constraints, or even the slightest unpredictability is becoming maddening.

Is boss. [Bill Rapai]

----------------------

Seth: Hard to find something to be mad at. Shooting percentage, I guess? They've now taken 240 shots and have 14 goals to show for it, but I guess this is just what they are now. Copp and Moffatt shots are the only ones around the 1-in-5 region you like to see—I can't imagine Moffatt's will stay there but neither do I think PDG is going to remain at 11%.

I'm not yet so sold on a lot of the young defensemen as Brian seems to be, but if you asked me three months ago if I'd take solid, non-scoring play from all the freshmen blueliners plus Mac Bennett playing Hobey hockey I'd leap out of my chair and hug you then jump up and down saying "Yes yes yes yes!" #justfriends. Their solid play plus the exact opposite of the backchecking from last year is winning Nagelvoort stars, and winning 1-goal games.

A brutal non-conference schedule that easily could have put Michigan into the Big Ten season under .500 stands at an astounding 6-1-1, with Nebraska-Omaha, Niagara, Ferris State, and the GLI left. The loss to UMass-Lowell won't even hurt them much in the pairwise given wins over BC, BU, and New Hampshire.

So not really complaining here that the forwards are a crew of fourth-line-plus guys who generate zero scoring chances but a ton of everything else. After last year I will ride that like a boss. Copp is boss!

----------------------

Brian: Oh man. There are many candidates. In no particular order:

I'm really sick of arguing about how much of the current problems are the previous coach's doing. Because this generally means that 1) it's quite a lot and 2) there is no quick fix. At least this time there's not a lot of pushback on the idea Rich Rodriguez really boned the program with his late recruiting.

Anticipating what will happen at the end of the year. It's going to be another game where Michigan fans bail en masse and those who don't end up within hailing distance of OSU fans yukking it up. Also Michigan is going to get their faces punched in like they're Purdue and struggle to get over 200 yards of offense. I thought we retired Lloyd Carr, you guys.

Again with the Notre Dame tease. Michigan beats Notre Dame, feels awesome about itself, displays worrying flaws for the next few games, and then pipers are paid, chickens flit home to roost, and Michigan ends up a crappy, crappy team. I thought we fired Rodriguez, you guys. The emotional state of the fanbase from post-ND ("Bring on OSU x2! Gardner for Heisman!") to now ("Fire everything twice") is a stomach-churning rollercoaster ride.

Not anticipating anything else. Is anyone actually looking forward to seeing this team play? This feels like watching the hockey team for most of last year: something you do out of momentum and loyalty without getting one single thing in return (unless you're playing Indiana). After the ND game this team has been torture to watch, mostly passive on D and discombobulated on O. There are jolly crappy teams (again, Indiana) and dour ones; Michigan is emphatically the latter.

Having the competence needle move in the wrong direction. The way Michigan has gone about trying to fix their offensive issues has just made them worse. They've made transparently nonsensical decisions that have blown up in their face, killing anything resembling chemistry on the OL, setting practice time on fire, and are once again stuck in a hodge-podge offense thanks to the fact that they cannot do what they want to do even a little tiny bit and have to resort to being a crappy spread team if they want to move the ball. Learning: we do not have it. I worried before the season that Michigan was on its way to being on the wrong side of history with respect to Ohio State; now I'm also worried that MSU has a sustainably better coaching situation than Michigan. /attacks wrist with highlighter

----------------------

Seth: It's losing a game to a rival and then watching my brain turn to basketball and hockey because everything about the football team was just exposed and there's no reason to think they'll improve because each game since the beginning of the year looks like a step backwards. I'm surrounded by Spartans, and right now I feel like the biggest one.

----------------------

Mathlete: Everyone knows this team had a major roster hole due to the coaching transition. This was supposed to be the last year it would be a major impact. The defense is what I expect from that. Doing most of it what it can with what it has. The defense isn't perfect but considering the roster I think most of our satisfied with their output relative to the pieces they are working with.

Sparty's execution, on the other hand, looked pretty on-target. [AP via Ledger-Enquirer]

The worst part is the offense. Unlike the defense, the offense is maddening collection of frustrations. The OL is young. Whether they should be better or not is a matter of debate. They certainly could be better, but at the same time there is a significant amount of youth that is a very real factor. My expectation is as a football coach you have a philosophy, you assess your personnel and you adapt accordingly. You don't want a coach without a philosophy but you don't want one who will continue with it in the face of all reason. 

Our offensive (mostly line) personnel issues aren't getting better this year. That isn't Coach Borges' fault. The worst part is continued pursuit of game plans that fail to acknowledge the limitations in front of him. Technically, yes, all of the problems have been execution issues. The same would be true if you trotted out an all-blogger offensive line. Our execution would be poor (but our executions would be swift). When you put players in a consistent position to fail, it becomes an issue of coaching execution rather than player execution. 

The worst part is that at this point in time the offensive coaching executions seem a fundamental part of our nature and we are stuck in that worse spot as a fan, part of you hoping for failure to drive the change in coaching staff because you see no other practical solution to the problem.

----------------------

Ace: BiSB and Brian have covered pretty much all of it, so I'll add just a couple morsels to this already-depressing roundtable.

We're so sorry, man. [Upchurch]

Hearing the same explanation for the same issues, and having the explanation not actually explain anything. I understand that this coaching staff isn't going to give much to the media by design, and that's not entirely a bad thing. When the same issues keep cropping up, however, and it seems like they're largely scheme-related, "well, we didn't execute" becomes a tired mantra. This isn't just about answering questions from reporters. It's about trying to relay to the fans why the program they're devoted to watching (and often throwing gobs of money at) is performing below the expectations that these very coaches set—this team isn't sniffing a Big Ten title. The coaches don't have to throw specific players or coaches under the bus; there's still a large chasm between doing that and saying "we didn't execute," which is both blatantly obvious and becoming a way to dodge accountability (and, from the way it comes off most of the time, pinning more responsibility on the players than the men coaching them).

Legitimately feeling awful for multiple players. I don't normally feel bad for scholarship athletes, even when their team is doing poorly. They have very bright futures, enjoy being the most popular people on campus, get plenty of top-notch academic support, and live out a dream that most of us are physically incapable of living (stupid genes).

After the MSU game, though, all I could really think about was how bad I felt for Devin Gardner, and how much his entire body must hurt, and how demoralizing it must be to trot out there series after series knowing that the reward for his bravery is going to be another helmet to the ribs—oh, and then some idiotic internet tough guys are going to question his ability to play quarterback afterward. And don't even get me started on Fitz Toussaint, who's got a daughter to support and such a rough background that he described an incident in which his father stabbed his mother's boyfriend at one of his high school scrimmages as "embarrassing." Two years ago, he seemed destined for the NFL draft; now it seems like he'll be lucky to get a cursory look as an undrafted free agent, and much of that turn was entirely out of his control.

Can the next TWO be about basketball, please?

----------------------

Seth: If the home game win streak ends, definitely.