Baumgardner Doubles Down

I dislike Baumgardner and his takes, but also follow him on Twitter. That's my contribution to this thread.

Baumgardner's Twitter header includes, "Opinions are usually right, unless they're wrong."  Certainly an oracle.    

Why go to more complex plays if you're working on getting the basics rock solid.  Why reveal a lot of the playbook to others before its absolutely necessary.   

Shea Patterson runs zone-read, the quintessential RichRod spread-option play.

"That's why it's called pro-style — professionals run it."

"This offense puts a lot of pressure on everyone on the field to do their job perfectly on every play. That's why it's called pro-style — professionals run it. 

Whether or not Michigan can accomplish that will determine how this season ends."

This is so true and why recruiting elite talent at every position is so critical especially since we don't run a spread. When one guy doesn't do his job the whole play fails. 

I believe the full on pro style offense doesn't work across the board in college because it requires too many moving pieces.  You need a good/great offensive line to buy the qb time, the wr needs to run the perfect route, and the qb make the perfect throw, then the wr needs to make the perfect catch.  Almost need 11 elite guys running the system.

Theres a reason that even Alabama has moved away from the traditional pro set up.  Spreads work, get athletes in space.  Not saying it needs to be Rich Rods offense but theres a reason why Harbaughs offense hasn't looked up to par when we need a quick score.

There's something to what he's saying. 

I think spread formations can hide bad offensive line play. Look at Penn State. McSorley (who's really solid, admittedly) and a bunch of ok skill guys (certainly no better than ours) gashed a pretty solid Ohio State defense. Theyve put up like 65 on everyone else.

Harbaugh is holding back alot, as not to reveal his real plays to be used later on..it's a risk but it's working .  I think we will find that the team does much better in the big games, while the weak games will scare us. 

Worked out pretty well for Stanford and San Diego State. 

I just hope Baumgardner doesn't get snatched up by some NFL team before we can fire this bum, Harbaugh .

Baumgardner is by no means a football guru and I find his writing to be very shallow, but the criticism of Harbaughs offense is such a common thread amongst members of the blog. I’m in no way saying everyone is negative, but there are many who do this. 

First, Harbaugh’s offense is “pro-style”, but I don’t personally find it to be something where I think it is too complex for the players he has. The players aren’t running around like they are confused, players aren’t throwing their hands up like they ran wrong routes, nor are the results poor. Michigan is moving the football and running well. Shea has made plays, Karan is having a good year, there’s WR participation in the game plan, and TE are generally having a good year. So, the too complex part is really hard for me to grasp. Last year was simplified offense with backup QBs  it was predicatable and not successful against good teams  

Second, who are we comparing ourselves to?  Ohio State is a better team on paper than Michigan. They have better dudes on the offensive side of the ball. They aren’t unbeatable, but they are better at the moment. Penn State has benefited from having a once a decade talent at QB and last season having a once every few decades player at RB. It wasn’t that long ago they didn’t have anything. Wisconsin runs the football. They have a giant line, but Hornibrook is not a great QB. So, who are we comparing ourselves to?

Third, last week was an overall challenging game. The week before was heralded as great and Harbaugh was a great coach. I get many would disagree, but is it so bad to coach to a win?  I don’t think Harbaugh looked at last week and said “wow, that was great execution”, he essentially coached to win, and it worked. It’s like a pitcher who doesn’t have his A game and has to grind to get a win. The NW game was a combination of Michigan playing average to bad at times and a NW team in their Super Bowl game. It was a game coached to a win, this happens in the NFL all the time.

Lastly, the playcalling at times is confusing. I’ll grant that, but I do think a huge part of that is trying to establish an identity  time will tell if that is wise, but I’m going to defer to Harbaugh.  Let’s not forget, he could lose games, get fired, and pick up a job in the same week. You may think that is stupid, but it’s most likely accurate.

Just my 2 centavos. 

Look he's not saying anything I haven't thought when I see Michigan stymied and having to punt and I just wanna scream JUST LINE UP IN THE PISTOL AND RUN THE OPTION WITH 75 TIGHT ENDS ON THE FIELD DANG IT. 

Passing the ball is a fad you know it in your heart.

Isn't he really a disgruntled Spartan fan?

I mean, Brian has kind of stumbled (I say that because I don't think he believes it nor intentionally points it out) into this idea of "always 1 guy away". As in, that 1 run was set up to perfection except the 1 guy missed his assignment.

That has been a consistent theme for the last couple of years as far as I can remember. Specifically on running plays - (not counting the WRs since they are 15 yards from the ball or the QB who hands it off) 7/8 guys run the play correctly but that 8th guy turfs it and it's always a different 8th guy. When it comes down to every player within a 5 yard radius doing their job each time, you can't expect those guys to win even a majority of their assignments against equal talent/coaching.

BUT, the opposite idea is also holding true in that the coaching staff knows the limitations of their players and try to scheme around it. Sometimes it works really well like OSU last year where they legitimately had 1-2 guys running wide open every play. Other times you get ND this year where they tried to scheme around issues but nothing really was a dead on hit with enough consistency to produce scores.

So in all of that, what I'm saying is that the coaching staff hasn't put themselves in situations to be successful enough IMO throughout the last 3 years. They have games where they look like the best staff in college football and then they have games where the idea of running a FB dive for 2 yards is out of the question for some reason. Toeing the line of leaning on Ben Mason for 2 yards but not going full goal line too often is where I get annoyed with things. 

What you see is what you get.  Smash mouth, NFL style football.  Harbaugh ain't ever going to change his approach to football ... his goal is to deliver a defense that is dominate married to an offense that controls the clock and protects the football.   That is a winning formula at every level of football.  Yes, the "basketball on grass" approach may be easier to implement because that is what most high schools run, but it only goes so far in college ... think Alabama as the model. 

Now keeping it modern by adding new power play concepts and some RPO, yes Jim will likely do that ... but at its core his program is all about controlling the line of scrimmage.  If folks want that to change or think it should, then they are asking for a new coach. 

BTW, don't believe everything Baumgardner writes ... he has never been a Michigan guy and now even less so that he is with the Freep.  He understands football X's & O's, but mostly he is writing articles to "fan the flame of discontent" in order to get clicks for his paper.

Baumgardner knows nothing.

Most of these so called journalist get their info from talk radio.

Go read Neck Sharpies.  Michigan is running an ISO play out of a shotgun look with an RPO WR screen.  That is very much a modern spread offense, and exactly what fans have been clamoring for.  And it's working.

The problem is that we are just now starting to do the modern stuff and we're not as practiced as we could be, and we still haven't formed an identity around it.  That's where my complaint lies--we wasted last year and are just now developing the offense that we should have had.

But to answer your question directly, Nick is full of shit and knows less than many fans on this site.  This year's offense is no more demanding in its execution than any other in college football.  We are running many of the same plays as other teams.

Perhaps a valid complaint is that Michigan does not employ the slant/fade tactic as much as other college teams and still uses a more complex, pro-style passing game.  I would love to see more slants and more fades, especially with Collins, DPJ, and Gentry as receiving options.  That said, McCaffery threw a few arm punts with great success, so perhaps the offense is moving in that direction.

The problem, IMO, is that we are in year one of this offense despite being in year four of Harbaugh.  Last year was a wasted year learning concepts we're no longer using, so we're not as polished in our modern approach.

Urban had talent galore on the OSU team when he took over. Harbaugh had some talent but much deficiencies, especially along the OL. Plus some of the skill positions were not properly recruited under Hoke and left us with mostly FR WR last season. We still suffer on the OL and this may take 2 more years to work itself out where we have both talent and depth on the OL.  We tried the spread rout with RR and that did not workout at all!

IMHO it takes too long to learn & prevents younger players from being successful and fails to put the ball in the hands of the best athletes easily enough...there are too many moving parts that all need to execute correctly before said player can get the ball.  I'd prefer a simpler system and that get our best athletes with the ball in their hands that doesn't require as much precision and execution.  I'm not sure our offense will keep up with other good offenses that can do more with less.

Georgia's boring offense certainly doesn't look like it will go anywhere this year. 

I don't care about boring. I don't think the word "boring" means anything. Gaining yards means something. Scoring points means something. Winning games means something. "Boring" is not that something.

The theory Nick is kicking around, that the scheme in use requires better execution from more people and is thus more susceptible to failure, isn't new. I (and others) posited that this was an issue in the Borges era. Space Coyote would drop long essays on why a specific, reviled playcall actually made sense even though it didn't work; he'd get pushback, but the problem seemed to be that Michigan was terrible at executing and it always seemed that one or two little things would blow up a play.

But most of us speculating on this stuff are amateurs. And we're myopic. We take little, selective glimpses of other programs and wonder why our program isn't like that. And we ignore the stuff that happens that doesn't fit our narrative.

You know what offense turned out to be vulnerable to little things not working? Chip Kelly's Oregon machine. They'd scorch up and down the field, annihilating the Pac 12, lighting teams like Stanford on fire. But then they'd get matched up against Nick Fairley or LSU or OSU...

And, mysteriously, the offense would dry up. A dominant DL would invariably tighten just enough space to keep LaMichael James from rocketing into the secondary. They'd wind up in clear passing situations with some frequency, and they'd be relying on the so-so arm of Darron Thomas and Kelly's rather unsophisticated route combos. They'd get punts instead of TDs, and the tempo would never get a chance to wear down the defense, and they'd lose. 

We get into tricky spots when we try to analyze exactly why an offense doesn't seem to work. Sometimes the issues are obvious--the OL was a real problem at Notre Dame. Yet the OL performed adequately against Northwestern and Shea wasn't in constant peril and the offense still didn't look particularly high-powered. 

The one thing I'd like to get more information about is Michigan's specific route concepts. At times it seems like (here's that selective pull of outside data again) other teams can spring guys wide open with just a little talent and time to throw. Michigan struggles to get this sort of thing going against better teams. 

The problem is that we need all-22 footage to really drill into this, and we'll never get it.