META: Worst Football Offseason?
Fellow Fans,
For me this offseason has flown by and I'm chomping at the bit for kickoff. However, I paused the other day to think not-so-fondly on times when this program, this team, and this board were filled with such ennui and was reminded of the awful offseason that was 2010.
You may reclal this was the summer of lost athletes, primarily in the secondary. We saw a lot of guys lost to attrition, injury, and even admissions. Still, it wasn't ALL bad - we did get a nice and painfully funny reminder in the form of a "Never Forget" poster.
My memory of offseasons is still fairly recent when compared to the history of Michigan Football, so I pose the question to the board:
What is the worst offseason you can recall, and what happened to make it so damn shitty?
I seem to have forgotten most of those players except for Demar Dorsey. That offseason was awful though. All of them from about 2006-2014 were. Always tried to pretend there weren't huge glaring errors.
Post 2007 off-season. We had some imfamous losses that still were a bad taste and at the same point a ton of talent leaving with not much to replace it. Yeah I was excited to see what Rich Rod could do but knew 2008 wouldn't be pretty.
Along with 2015, obviously, I think 2008 was the last really interesting (not in a great way, obviously) season. A new coach and many new starters (especially on offense).
And by post-2007 off-season , I meant the offseason that technically occured in 2008. Sorry, I didn't make that very clear now that I look back at it and can't edit it. To add to my initial post, I was pretty pissed we lost Mallett and Baby Boren to transfer and also lost out on Pryor I remember ... don't know why we initially thought we had a shot at Pryor.
We had a shot because Rodriguez was recruiting him and Pryor was very interested in RR's offensive scheme. He recruited him at WVU and continued when he moved to UM. May have been shenaninigans as well.
I believe it's champing at the bit...and yes I am too
Nope! It isn't!
Champing at the bit vs. chomping at the bit
This is slightly weird, because the girlfriend and I discussed this very saying last winter, while we were watching "A Christmas Carol" (the 1951 version with Alistair Sim). Scrooge's nephew Fred uses the phrase "Champing at the bit" when speaking to Bob Cratchit, and girlfriend wondered why he said "champing" instead of "chomping."
We decided it was probably a British expression in its origin, and therefore, the British would say "champing," while we 'Muricans changed it to "chomping."
We then congratulated ourselves on our brilliance, and opened another bottle of wine.
Did it lead to banging?
Only after I put on my Ghost of Christmas Past costume and asked her if she'd been a good girl this year.
Edit: She hadn't.
I hope you took the opportunity to give her a good spanking. She was probably champing at the bit to get one.
not that many to choose from. I think 2010 was probably it.
During the later Hoke years, at least the basketball team was winning so it dulled it a little bit.
The summer leading up to the 2007 season could qualify because we lost The Game in 06, got hammered by SC, and then The Horror took place immediately at the beginning of the 07 Season, so we effectively got no season at all that year.
Well, there was the great earthquake of 2015
My life has never been the same
I went into most off-seasons with an almost irrational level of hope:
2008 - No hope. I practically took the year off as a pubic service to everyone around me. Didn't really care about the win against Wisconsin. Sorry.
2009 - A little light at the end of the tunnel b/o Tate. Otherwise, meh. Was what it was.
2010 - Denard won the job! The offense will finally soar. The defense can't be this bad forever. First couple games of the season! Then, meh. Then..well, you know how it ended.
2011 - Hoke told me this is "Michigan, fergodsakes" - ie, we have talent, we can get moar better talent. And then we're gonna coach 'em up [claps hands]. Very lucky season that happened in spite of Borges. Next year might not be so fortunate, but we're on the right path.
2012 - Year 2 of Hoke. We'll continue to improve with coaching. Borges realizes what he has with Denard, right? Bama..ugh...where's the offense..Gardner!
2013 - Gardner! Good recruiting class. The OL? The RB's? They're young. They'll get better.
2014 - Borges is gone! We have a younger, visor-wearing visionary from the SEC to command our offense! The offense can't be as bad as they were in 2013. Even if Garder is ruined, we still have sugar Shane Morris! Until we didn't.
Why do we want to call back and remember the details of something that sucked? Hell, I've spent a ton of money on booze to do just the exact opposite of what this thread asks for many times in my life.
Maybe I should start a new thread - "O.T. - most painful injury to your testicles?" Me - there was that one time i was hammering some nails with a HUGE hammer and missed and smashed my balls with it. Then unfortunately as I jumped in pain I fell into a huge vat of lemon juice and salt - boy did that ever sting!
So how about you? When did you hurt your balls the worst?"
One time my cat hooked the tip of my Johnson (just beneath the helmet) when he saw something moving around in my pajamas. Huge panic. I managed to unhook him without significant trauma (or later infection).
Something something pussy, something something banana.
I worked in bottle return at the local grocery store. This was back in the day when customers turned their bottles and cans in to a cashier, and then the cashier put the bottles and cans in a cart for some high school kid in the back to sort/crush.
We had a lot of filled plastic bags on the floor because either the Coke or the Pepsi rep was there to pick up their returnables. I reached across the pile to put a bottle in a box, my foot slipped on the plastic, and I landed balls first on the corner of a box.
Stars, cold sweat, everything. I just kind of sat down and spaced out for about 30 mins -- there was absolutely no one back there checking on me or anything, so it's not like productivity with the bottles and cans was lost. One of the weirder evenings at the grocery store.
Agree, I also don't know how you guys actually remember offseason events and what years they happened in. As for the balls, it's usually the little nick that gets me just in the right spot that hurts the most, but then again I've never endured something as traumatizing as you have.
I developed what's called a testicular torsion. My left nut started swelling up out of nowhere after I got home from practice—it wasn't the result of an impact—and pretty soon the pain was excruciating. It felt like some maniac had my nut in a vise and was gradually tightening it. By the time I got to the hospital it was swollen to the size of a small lemon and just as hard.
Thankfully, the urologist quickly diagnosed the problem and within a few seconds was able to untwist things without having to resort to surgery. The pain started subsiding immediately, and The doc said that if I'd waited much longer before seeking help that he might have had to amputate the nut due to the blood supply being cut off. I've never been so grateful to another person in my entire life.
The experience also taught me that I would never last under torture.
August 1st, 2017 at 10:36 PM ^
I'm gonna say 2014. Because of the disaster that was the 2013 season, we all knew deep down that Hoke was in over his head. It felt to me like the program was on the verge of going into a tailspin (Nussmeier hire notwithstanding), even as I tried to tell myself that we were poised for a rebound. Luckily, the stars aligned for us to hire Harbaugh, but during the offseason of 2014, it certainly didn't feel like the program had a bright future.
Rock bottom was definitely the MSU loss that year (and the "aware, but not fully aware" fiasco that accompanied it). That was the week before David Brandon resigned and Jim Hackett took over, which was the first step along the road to redemption.
Yeah we really shot the moon in that 2014 season. It's one of those situations where we had to suck sooooooo bad that we ended up with an amazingly positive result. Rarely happens as perfectly as it did that season. It didn't feel good going through it but we were all better as a result.
I think it was more like the deer-that-doesn't-even-see-the-headlights look.
Man, I remember how weird it was in the 2013-2014 time frame to begin thinking of Michigan as a basketball school. I really stopped giving a fuck about football because it hurt too much to care anymore. I followed many games by reading summaries of the games afterward. As opposed to now, where I watch every minute of Michigan football throughout the entire season.
Amazing what one coaching hire can do. Harbaugh's hire is the home run that never came down and just reached orbit and is still up there.
2014 for me. Trying to decide whether a 9-3 season with losses to MSU, OSU, and Notre Dame was acceptable or not given the poor performance the year prior. Really no hope of Hoke becoming elite.
It showed on the board. It showed in the way Hail almost didn't get published--it was only a few days before the deadline that people like me finally buckled down and actually went ahead and bought the thing (according to Seth, a kickstarter failure there would have been a major upheaval for him and the blog).
The RR years were rough, but there was always hope attached to them. In 2014 Harbaugh was a happy NFL coach and we were staring at the possibility of years of total mediocrity. Even Brian's season preview suggested how half-hearted he was about the whole thing.
I like now so much better.
I remember that offseason. Although, I was holding out hope that all of our problems were on Borges and Nuss was going to fix everything. Then 31-0 happened. That was when the real 2014 despair set in for me.
The worst football offseason was December 2014....Hoke fired, we missed a bowl game, we lost to Ohio State after having a glimmer of hope to win that game, concussion-gate was still talked about, Brandon's issues were fresh in our memory, rumors Mora Jr. turned us down, etc.....it felt like we could be destined for a decade in purgatory.
...and then rumors of Harbaugh started to swirl and it became the best offseason in memory.
Fall of 2014 - rumors of Brandon being fired and possibly Harbaugh coming...I was glued to MGoBlog.
August 2nd, 2017 at 10:22 AM ^
agreed, i definitely wouldn't call *that* part of 2014 the worst. the fire brandon thing was incredible to follow.
I'll say 2014 in retrospect just because of the contrast between off-season hope and the results on the field. 2013 seemed like kind of an outlier due to terrible playcalling which would be saved by Nussmeier replacing Borges. We'd won 11 and 8 games the other two previous seasons so it wasn't that unreasonable to expect that a senior QB and Devin Funchess would turn the offense around. Brian's preseason preview predicted 7-5 as the worst case scenario and 11-1 as best case.
Then: Substantial win over App State. Torched by ND. Sluggish win over Miami (NTM). Soaked vs Utah. Shane Morris has a concussion. Students organize a grassroots protest to oust the AD and it's not even Oct 1.
The RR offseasons were dreadful, but we knew in the back of our heads that it was going terribly. Better to meet low expectations than failing to meet high ones.
Agreed. I find myself watching blow out games now in a way that I never had before. I cherish every minute of Michigan football. Having experienced how profoundly painful it is to suck as a program has made me realize that we aren't entitled to win anything. Experiencing losses to Maryland and Rutgers makes me want to watch every minute of each of those fucking games, even if, ESPECIALLY if, we are winning 78-0. God bless Jim fucking Harbaugh.
August 1st, 2017 at 11:17 PM ^
It's a tie between after the 2006 and 2007 seasons. We should have been in the title game for the 2006 season and the 2007 team was built to go undefeated, yet ended 9-4.
I'm with all the 2014 offseason people on here. I had very little optimism at that point that things would get better (Nuss was the only glimmer of hope). The slowly improving rebuild of the RichRod years turned in to a gradual but steady decline in performance with Hoke. I don't even want to think about it anymore.
Not worst as in the worst stuff happened. But it was the worst as in it took forever, and I needed it to start already. What DO YOU MEAN ITS ONLY MAY!! kind of worst.
And that was 2015.
First off it started in November, in heart breaking fashion, instead of late January. A third string Quarterback, the one we loved to poke fun at for not playing school, takes over and just destroys us. Up until then we were in that ballgame. With a shot to get some semblance of good out of that season.
Thankfully Brandon was already out the door, and Hoke left soon after the final. This lead to absolutely the longest month and change ever. Hourly coaching search updates while we only wanted one guy. Conflicting reports that we would never get him, that we want David Cutcliffe, that we need that baffoon from Rutgers who couldn't cut it in the NFL. All we were doing was waiting around for the NFL season to be over to get our guy. But my god that wait. Let's play FOOTBALL! Wait, it's still freaking January?
Then BOOM. Media firestorm. Story after story. Signing day (still February, fergodsakes) then the long wait till spring ball to see our coach and our team under a proper coach. What do you mean it's only April? That summer was the longest on record too. Honest to god. The "There are..." threads counted 98...97...96...97...96...95...98...97...96...95...
8 long years had passed us by since we last saw some consistently good football. It was right there. Just out of our grasp after so long. And I just needed it to start. Still out of our grasp. 7 days. 6 days. Just writing this, I'm still anxoius to start that 2015 season, and it's freaking 8/1/2017! It was worth the wait, but damn that wait was the worst.
The Worst Offseason (wait) Ever.