Sources: Sports-Reference, ESPN, digital.sandiego.edu, Pro-Football-Reference, bcftoys.com

The stork brings them, obviously.

Part I of this (as of now) 3-part series focused on where yards come from in the Harbaughffense. Go ahead and read that for some interesting statistics, definitely sexy, but maybe not the most useable ones. Unless, like me, you’re a believer in RBs getting more involved in the passing game. Then you can read Part I with righteous fury. And vindictive anger on behalf of Chris Evans. And giddy optimism for the prospect of Donovan Edwards this season. And, most interestingly, a glimmer of hope for Iowa’s offense under Cade McNamara, a QB who took ‘free’ yards at an astonishing clip.

Today’s subject is the paydirt of football: points. More specifically, the points scored by the offense. Harbaugh gets a clutch TD or 5 from the defense and special teams every year, and there’s a section in my Harbaughffense Part III outline titled “the best offense is a good defense (and special teams)”, but you can’t live like that and expect success…

…unless you’re Iowa. Wasn’t Iowa’s defense outscoring their offense for an embarrassingly-long part of the season last year? Here’s a fun stat, courtesy of Ben Stevens of SportsGrid:

Anyways, Harbaughffense Part III will focus on “at what point in the game did we really ‘win’?” The reality that Michigan was a second-half team last year was no secret, but I have this hypothesis that the Harbaughffense lives on the edge at all times, and that many of our wins, even the blowouts, weren’t really “clinched” until a lot later than we remember. The dataset for that analysis is intimidating, and it’s going to take me a while. Patience, Luke.

Who are the horses?

In the interests of readability, I’m going to condense this a bit. The important addition this week is the Field Goal kicker, for obvious reasons: if you’ve got Jake Moody on your team, your 4th-and-short decisions might lean a little more towards “take the points” than “go for it.”

Oh, and I’ve decided that I did Nick Eubanks a disservice last week; apologies to Eubanks, who was in the NFL for a bit. And also, apologies to Pep Hamilton, who for some reason keeps getting NFL jobs.

Bold = played in the NFL (or recently drafted and pending playing time)…but it doesn’t discriminate between “had a cup of coffee” vs. “superstar”. Some NFLers are more equal than other NFLers. Everything from 2011-2014 is bold…obviously.

I hate this image conversion. Lesson learned: I'm never pasting in 19 years' worth of football roster again. Sorry...

Once again, I have to point out that Harbaugh – who famously runs a ground-based offense – has had some talent at the receiver position. Especially if you include TEs. But I don’t know if I expect that to really matter in a Harbaughffense: if it’s 2nd and goal from the 1 and you have Owen Marecic and Toby Gerhart in the backfield…no offense to Doug Baldwin, but default option is “Hulk SMASH.” Right? We’ll see! Pete Carroll lost a Super Bowl by choosing…poorly…in that exact scenario.

The other interesting thing is the lack of exceptional kicker talent before Harbaugh went to the NFL. Maybe we’re just spoiled here, but for the past 5 seasons Michigan has had NFL talent at the kicking position and I expect it to show in the stats.

Points

Easy stat is easy. Total points.

Actually, this isn’t so easy. Since this is primarily focused on the offense, I’m removing all defensive scores, removing kick and punt return TDs, but keeping extra points and 2-point conversions in this graph. So heads up that this might not match the ‘total points’ stat for the football season as a whole if you’re looking at any of the normal websites.

Great googly moogly, THIS should put to rest any remaining “but why does everyone call Harbaugh a turnaround coach???” questions. Look at those Stanford years. I’m also seeing a narrative emerging: 2017 was indeed the disaster that we all remember, but I don’t think I appreciated enough how much of a hard reset it actually was. It was back to pre-Luck “hasn’t quite gotten over the hump” Stanford. It was “wore out his welcome” 49ers. The jump in scoring that Michigan experienced with Shea Patterson likewise might be underappreciated.

The past two years have been special. Both the yardage and the points are bearing that out. We just broke an Harbaughffense record for the number of points scored (by the offense) in a season. How much of this is due to an historically-good rushing attack? How much is due to an historically-good kicking game? Let’s take a look!

You know, I had this whole statistic planned. It was going to be called “TD-to-FG Ratio”, it was going to measure the number of TDs compared to the number of FGs, and make the case that there was a sweet spot, a ‘corridor’ of values which correlated with a “successful” or “good” offense, and that anything outside that corridor was some version of “bad.”

But, looking at that chart…f*** that. Not gonna do it. Goodbye TD:FG Ratio. The Harbaughffense gets its scoring events pretty much wherever it can, whether you’re asking Josh Johnson to throw (and run) it around the field, unleashing Andrew Luck on your opponents, making David Akers work harder than he ever has in his career, or taking your 2x Joe Moore offensive line aside at halftime to say “listen, we’re going to grind them into fine powder, snort that powder, and tell Haskins and Corum that they don’t get dinner if any DB has intact knee ligaments at the end of the game!”

It’s subtle, but noticeable: Moody and Nordin (when he was right…) got borderline NFL-level usage. Actually, due to the number of games that the pros play, it probably evens out to about the same number of FGs per game. That’s…big. Anyone remember that time that RichRod clearly said “I should have gone for it” after a missed FG…then started going for it on 4th down and the offense suffered because of it? Michigan did that a bit when Nordin’s accuracy dipped, but it’s a high-risk move. 30 extra “safe” points per year is huge. We’ve been spoiled during Moody’s tenure.

Take a look at the Patterson years. Pep Hamilton must have felt SOOOOO vindicated. I can just see him puttering around his McMansion (he has a McMansion in my head), muttering to himself “y’all shadow-fired me for that shit?!” and “too many deep shots.” I promise I still have that note from Harbaughffense Part I to check whether I still think that 2018 could have been special if not for Pep – we’ll get to it.

Also, I can’t look at 2019 and tell whether we owe Josh Gattis a huge side-eye for not being able to improve on Pep Hamilton, Jim Harbaugh a huge thank-you for realizing that Gattis was in over his head and reasserting the Harbaughffense, or our 2 NFL RBs, 3NFL WRs, 2 NFL TEs, and 2 NFL kickers a huge thank-you-that-could-have-been-so-much-worse. Probably all 3. 2019 was an…interesting…year: the pieces were there to put it all together, but Michigan just…didn’t. I have my theory as to why: we went away from the Harbaughffense for a big big portion of the year. Go back and check Harbaughffense Part I: QB rushing yards and especially RB receiving yards took a nosedive.

Finally, it warms the cockles of my cold, dead heart to remember that so many of our 2019 scoring events happened against Notre Dame and Michigan State. Eat it, you bastards.

Rushing TDs

Ok so let’s take a look at-

SHOW ME HOW MANY RUSHING TOUCHDOWNS CAME FROM THE QB POSITION!

I spend way too much time on this site.

Dudes and dudettes I don’t know what to look at first.

1. Harbaugh’s NFC Championship season featured a grand total of 17 rushing TDs, only 12 of which were from RBs… which would have tied a RECORD low (the year before…) for him at the time. We basically matched that in the debacle of the 2020 COVID season. Harbaugh leaned on his defense pretty damn hard in the NFL, didn’t he?
2. 2017 featured ZERO QB rushing TDs – only the second time that’s happened in 19 years of Harbaughffense. You can forgive a guy for a “Year 1” lack of offense at Stanford. But 2017 was ROUGH.

Here’s what I’m going with: the 10 rushing TDs that Khalid Hill scored in 2016 are worthy of celebration. As far as I can tell (fullback stats are hard to track), only one FB in FBS has exceeded 10 TDs since, at Northern Illinois. And that dude was a Mr. Versatility QB/RB/FB hybrid who went to the NFL. Between 2016 and 2017, Khalid Hill scored 13 rushing touchdowns as a designated fullback (and 3 more receiving touchdowns). He was responsible for 78 points in 2016, which was 16% of our offense. He could have been the entire Rutgering by himself.

If I find out that he’s paid for his own beer in Ann Arbor ever since, I’m going to be very disappointed.

The last few of graphs have me surprised. I went back and checked: 2016 was a pretty decent year from a yardage perspective, but not abnormally good. But from a points perspective, it’s up there with the Harbaughffense’s finest. Even in 2021 we didn’t score as many points on offense. I think it’s time to re-watch the game highlights of that season and give credit where credit is due. That’s right: thank you Chris Ash. Rutgers deserves a lot of credit for our numbers that year.

Receiving TDs

You know what I’m going to do here. You know. I’m going to give a stacked column graph of which positions scored receiving touchdowns over the years, and I’ll talk about how many receiving TDs came from running backs. At some point I’m going to give you some stats that Saquon Barkley put up at Penn State. You know this, man.

Look at that consistency. Harbaugh went full Arena Football with Josh Johnson…and then the Harbaughffense became the Harbaughffense. Except one magical year with Andrew Luck.

I know we saw these figures up above, but something about this particular chart is just extremely deflating. I can tell myself “dude you already know that Harbaugh plays situational football and high-value downs like 3rd and goal correctly go to the RBs” all I want. I can tell myself “dude our rushing attack creates explosive scoring plays kinda all the time” all I want.

The fact that the Harbaughffense hasn’t exceeded 25 passing TDs since 2010…idk man. It’s not like this is out of line for Michigan: the Henne years featured passing TD totals of…25, 23, 22, and 25. The RichRod years were at…11, 15, and 23. That’s right, Nick Sheridan and Steven Threet were a more effective (pass) scoring machine than John O’Korn, Wilton Speight, and Brandon Peters in 2017. The Hoke years featured passing TD totals of 22, 20, 21, 10. That’s right, the abysmal offense that got Hoke canned was still a more effective (pass) scoring machine than John O’Korn, Wilton Speight, and Brandon Peters in 2017.

And Sheridan/Threet also rushed for a total of 3 TDs, which is 3 rushing TDs more than John O’Korn, Wilton Speight, and Brandon Peters in 2017. Vindication for Nick Sheridan and Steven Threet! Devin Gardner rushed for 4 TDs in 2014, which is 4 more than… you get the idea.

Fun fact: the last time that a Michigan football season exceeded 25 passing TDs was 26 in 2003, and we only snuck in that 26th one because Steve Breaston threw a TD pass that year. Anyone remember that? But that’s it. We touched 25 pass TDs twice more during the Elvis Grbac era. That’s it.

For reference, the past 10 years of Ohio State offenses have featured passing TD totals of (starting in 2022 and working backwards): 42, 46, 22 (COVID year), 48, 51, 39, 26, 19 (the Cardale Jones saga), 42, 38. No further comment.

It’s time to rant about RBs being more of a factor in the passing game.

Actually…I actually don’t have too much to add here - just playing feelingsball, but somewhere in the range of 3-5 TDs thrown to RBs and/or FBs every year feels about right, especially if you have a Harbaughffense Standard Issue Tight End™ or 3 every year as well. That drought from 2016-2020 isn’t a good look: those included the Chris Evans years, the Khalid Hill years, and we managed to get a grand total of 6 receiving TDs out of that???

Here’s your Saquon Barkley Memorial Receiving Running Back™ TD reception stats: 1, 4, 3. For as critical as he was in the passing game, when it was time for a score, he was carrying the ball, not catching it.

I’m still all-in on RB receptions being an overlooked factor in taking the Harbaughffense to the next level. Moneyball, bitches.

The Harbaugh passing offense kinda is what it is. I’m not enthused. But there is context here. Let’s look at Michigan’s 2022 season: historically good rushing attack, historically good kicking game, and JJ McCarthy did struggle to connect with WRs a bit as the pass attempts got longer. If that’s his “Andrew Luck in 2009” learning curve, the 2023 season could be incredible. I hope that anyone reading this after the 2023 season is going “wow, good call dude” rather than “you poor optimistic fool.”

Points Per Drive

Had to break this up. See Harbaughffense Part II(b) in a few minutes.