Part of that question has to be--what does Urban Meyer do? Assuming he was lying about both his heart condition in the late aughts and the mysterious aneurysm issue--would he still be coaching at osu if the refs hadn't screwed us in '16?
In other words, the loss in 2016 served two greater goods: 1. Urban Meyer's defenestration in Jacksonville and 2. the natty. But still, part of me died in 2016.
I haven't heard anybody make the Russell Wilson comp, but I think that's actually really accurate. He's taller than RW, and he's probably marginally faster--we'll see how their arms compare in the league--but both guys have leadership qualities and kind of new-agey positivity philosophies (although JJ's seems much healthier at this point than Russell, no judgement to either guy). Surprised I haven't heard that one before. Honestly, if the Seahawks/Pete Carroll manage to get JJ (they won't, but if they did), I think that could be a really good situation.
I'm split on this question. On the one hand, I believe in my Michigan heart that if McCarthy had thrown the ball 40 times a game, he'd be 1st or 2nd to Caleb Williams. I think his arm talent is right up there with anybody, and his ability to scramble, create, keep his eyes downfield or pick up yards with his feet, not to mention grade-A intangibles--all of that gives him as a high a ceiling as anybody in the draft.
On the other hand, if he had gone to Alabama, and I had only watched 1-2 games, and they had just won a championship with our kind of ground-and-pound offense; I'm sure I'd be very, very skeptical of how that would translate.
The biggest thing I'm concerned with, and the biggest reason I think he should've come back, is his sometimes mystifying inability to loft the ball on deep throws. I wonder if it's a perfectionism thing/if it'll be easy to coach out at the next level, but on deep throws, he seemed to consistently be trying to put the ball on a line to a spot, rather than putting air under it and letting his receiver run. That would concern me if I were thinking of drafting him, say, 3rd.
I agree with this. One thing that has always struck me as particularly ridiculous is that many of the big-time college football programs (think us, LSU, Texas, etc.) have MUCH nicer facilities than many NFL teams. (For example, the Bengals just became the last team in the NFL to build an indoor practice field, and it's just one of those inflatable white bubble domes.) This facility brinksmanship happens because universities are technically non-profit organizations, so they are required to spend all the money they're making off these kids. Why not take some of this facility money and use it to salary your players? There would be downsides (as with all solutions), but at least for the SEC and B1G (in other words, the only college football that's going to matter in 10 years) this should be workable.
Could be. Or he could be way ahead of his time. Maybe he's jumping ship every year, or maybe he's maximizing the opportunity to travel the country on basketball scholarships and NIL deals. Either way, I don't know the kid personally, and I wish him the best.
Right. It'd be in their best interest to find a way to get rid of this and make people stop talking about it ASAP. Ohtani's the most lucrative star likely in the history of baseball, and he just joined the West coast Yankees. There will have been nothing to see here.
I don't care what anybody says, Terrell Suggs would be a great hire if just for program culture. Add Ray at LB coach, Ed Reed once Clink moves up to DC...man, you got a stew going.
I agree with the premise, but "fluke" is the wrong word. Sure, we're not going to reel off 6 national championships in the next ten years, but it's not a fluke when a really talented team and coaching staff wins a national championship. Sometimes key contributors return, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you get injury luck, sometimes you don't. Any championship season will have its share of luck, but that doesn't make it flukey. Three playoff appearances in a row is indicative of the quality of the team and coaching staff.
I agree that it'll be tough going forward, especially with next year's schedule, but with possibly 3 guaranteed B1G teams in the playoff every year, I think we'll be seeing plenty of Michigan playoff games in the near future.
Two other things that don't show up unless you're paying close attention:
1. J.J. was the director of the offense. A lot of college quarterbacks can run around and make plays--not many have the grasp of what everyone's doing on offense and defense that J.J. did.
2. We never actually unleashed his potential as a runner. I think even his passing numbers would've been better if we had done a better job establishing him as a running threat.
My dad has talked about this idea for a long time: when an offense is backed up to its own goal line and gets called for a penalty, the defense should have the option to push the first down line further away, rather than take "half the distance" penalty yardage.
So if you've got a team backed up at their own 2, and they get called for a false start, the defense gets the option of moving the ball to the 1 or pushing the first down marker so it's 1st and 15 from the 2.
Disagree. The offense gets looser with the ball close to the end zone--the risk should become proportionally greater of fumbling and giving the ball to the other team. The risk shouldn't suddenly sky-rocket to "even if the other team doesn't recover it, you lose the ball and 20 yards of field position for no clear reason."
I mean, I'm with you in spirit, but that would be absolute f-ing chaos. Imagine fumbling into the other team's bench--dudes standing on the sidelines would start tackling the other team's players, kicking the ball toward their own, etc.
Although I guess if what you want to see in football is more fistfights, then, yeah, go for it.
Yeah, they got their point across, but it's not great to throw college kids under the bus. Maybe a picture of Brian Ferentz losing his mind at the B1G championship game instead?
It can be. But seems like it's a spectrum. Not every Jets fan is the firefighter dude, but if you haven't once yelled at your TV like the firefighter dude, are you really a fan?
I think that's an easy one to answer. We shouldn't expect the same because Warde Manual's out here talking about "transformational, not transactional." We had a great team this year, lost a bunch of talent (not to mention coaches), and haven't been playing the game you need to play to have another championship level team coming off the bench. It would be ridiculous for us to expect some repeat year coming up.
Of course, the larger question is--why won't Michigan play the money game we'd need to if we wanted to be Bama? And honestly, for me, I'm glad we don't. Maybe we'd be able to make it work, but plenty of teams play that game and lose anyway (A&M, Ole Miss, Tennessee), and it's not our identity. I think our goals should be 1. beat osu, 2. find a way to maintain credibility as an educational institution in the midst of the SEC-zation of college football. If we can do those two things, I couldn't care less about a national championship.
Hilarious take. I genuinely thought the "wreckage in Tuscaloosa" he was talking about was going to be Bama's defensive line--you know, the one our new head coach's unit pushed all over the field last month?
Love that this comes out right after FSU throws a fit about not being included in the CFP. I know CFP and NCAA are separate organizations, but it just goes to show you that NCAA enforcement is more about punishing those you don't like than it is about "justice."
I can't prove it, but a dollar says we would never have heard of this if FSU had just taken their medicine after the CFP teams were announced.
Rich deserves this win. He had to put up with being a national voice in a year when the nation lost its mind over Michigan cheating--that is, doing what every other team does but in the "wrong" way. The man has been holding his tongue for months. I hope he enjoys the repreive.
Brian, I've been reading your shit since middle school. I still have a printout of the post-game article from the '09 game at Iowa--the one where Denard came in and couldn't pull out a win in a last-second drive. You spoke of the fanbase's zeitgeist. How about the zeitgeist now? This site--and more recently, Sam Webb and company--has made the experience of being a Michigan fan not only more bearable but less lonely as well.
I grew up in central Ohio (in middle- and high-school during the lean years from 2004 to 2010), I was at the 2014 UConn game, I was outside in the cold for Jim Harbaugh's introductory press conference. I can tell you when major events happened in my life based on Michigan's concomitant schedule (i.e. I know my family moved in 2005 because we lost on homecoming to Minnesota that October).
This team has made up for ALL of that. Love you all. Thank you, Brian, Seth, and all for the years of support in this horrible lifestyle. It finally paid off. Go. Fucking. Blue.
It's nice to finally be on to basketball season after a stressful fall. Hoping the rumors about culture and Juwan are overblown and this team can settle into a rhythm. They've got the talent to make the tourney!
I think the key here is the attitude/culture shift that's taken place since Day took over. Michigan's gotten tougher and figured out ways to win difficult games. osu's gotten more finesse and lost the win-at-all-costs mentality they had under Meyer.
We play aggressive and loose; they play uptight and conservative. This is a reflection of the respective coaching staffs.
Maybe. Maybe not. I think we'd all agree that what Luke Fickell did with Cincinnati is more impressive than what Day's accomplished at OSU, but Fickell bombed his tryout as head coach in 2011 (albeit with less built-in talent than Day was given).
Erick All to the house at Penn State to seal the game.
Corum to the house at Penn State to seal the game/Manny Diaz can't get his linemen to maintain gap integrity despite Michigan running the ball 30-some straight times/"Here, have our signs. Now, gtfotw."
Brad Hawkins strip and fumble recovery to win the game at Nebraska in '21?
Yeah, at this point our defense struggles like other defenses against talented mobile quarterbacks—like Georgia’s defense does. In the Carr era, a mobile quarterback on the other team was like them having a 21 point advantage or 15 players on the field
That game should be remembered as the JJ game. He almost singlehandedly lost the game for us, but, after doing that, was nearly able to singlehandedly win it. If the defense could've come up with that last third down stop, if the refs had ruled correctly on the Roman Wilson touchdown, we could easily have won that game despite a sloppy start from JJ.
Parker honestly should’ve dedicated the award to Brian Ferentz. Without the contrast of that offense, I don’t think we’d be talking nearly as much about how good their defense is.
He’s saying they would’ve left Georgia in and dumped Bama despite the conference championship. If Bama had two losses and beat Georgia in the conference championship game, the four would’ve been M, W, FSU, and Georgia
Yeah, the 12 team playoff can’t come soon enough. I’m sick of having the same argument every year.
You can’t just speculate that Alabama will be better in a month than Florida State. Florida State had the better year; that should decide who gets in. We’ve already seen Bama play one of these playoff teams—they lost at home. That’s enough for me.
What if news comes out tomorrow that Jaelin Milroe broke his ankle celebrating last night? Or what if he gets hurt in practice in 3 weeks? Are you gonna swap FSU back in?
Right. There are three undefeated P5 conference champions. Those should be basically automatic bids. There are two 1-loss P5 conference champions. You can only pick one. And they played head to head.
This is only a difficult decision because everyone worships the SEC.
The committee put themselves in a really tough spot by keeping FSU at 4 going into championship week. If you're grading based on who the best teams are, and they were the fourth, and then they won a conference championship, it doesn't make any sense that they would suddenly drop out of the top 4.
Of course, I'm sure the committee will chicken out and let Bama and Texas leapfrog FSU because "third string quarterback." But if the committee were honest all the way through the process, then FSU should've lost position last week because their quarterback situation makes them a worse team.
I hate to keep quoting Urban Meyer in this thread, but he reminded the Fox panel last night that osu won the championship with Cardale Jones 10 years ago. You can't count a team out just because of a key injury.
Do we know the wording of the "arm moving forward" rule? Cause in my mind, if the ball is still in his hand, and Sainristil jars it loose before it is leaving his hand, then I don't see how that could not be a fumble.
Maybe there is some rule about if the quarterback's arm is moving forward, it can never be a fumble, but the ball definitely had not left his hand when Mikey jarred it loose.
Admittedly, it was a weird play, and the ball flying forward makes it seem more like a pass since Hill was able to get some forward momentum on it, but it looked to me like Sainristil got to the ball before it had even begun to leave Hill's hand, which should be a fumble.
Recent Comments
I'd forgotten about '22 PSU. Was that a top 10 matchup? And then we ran for 400 yards lolol
Part of that question has to be--what does Urban Meyer do? Assuming he was lying about both his heart condition in the late aughts and the mysterious aneurysm issue--would he still be coaching at osu if the refs hadn't screwed us in '16?
In other words, the loss in 2016 served two greater goods: 1. Urban Meyer's defenestration in Jacksonville and 2. the natty. But still, part of me died in 2016.
I haven't heard anybody make the Russell Wilson comp, but I think that's actually really accurate. He's taller than RW, and he's probably marginally faster--we'll see how their arms compare in the league--but both guys have leadership qualities and kind of new-agey positivity philosophies (although JJ's seems much healthier at this point than Russell, no judgement to either guy). Surprised I haven't heard that one before. Honestly, if the Seahawks/Pete Carroll manage to get JJ (they won't, but if they did), I think that could be a really good situation.
I'm split on this question. On the one hand, I believe in my Michigan heart that if McCarthy had thrown the ball 40 times a game, he'd be 1st or 2nd to Caleb Williams. I think his arm talent is right up there with anybody, and his ability to scramble, create, keep his eyes downfield or pick up yards with his feet, not to mention grade-A intangibles--all of that gives him as a high a ceiling as anybody in the draft.
On the other hand, if he had gone to Alabama, and I had only watched 1-2 games, and they had just won a championship with our kind of ground-and-pound offense; I'm sure I'd be very, very skeptical of how that would translate.
The biggest thing I'm concerned with, and the biggest reason I think he should've come back, is his sometimes mystifying inability to loft the ball on deep throws. I wonder if it's a perfectionism thing/if it'll be easy to coach out at the next level, but on deep throws, he seemed to consistently be trying to put the ball on a line to a spot, rather than putting air under it and letting his receiver run. That would concern me if I were thinking of drafting him, say, 3rd.
In the weight room...
(there, that's better)
I agree with this. One thing that has always struck me as particularly ridiculous is that many of the big-time college football programs (think us, LSU, Texas, etc.) have MUCH nicer facilities than many NFL teams. (For example, the Bengals just became the last team in the NFL to build an indoor practice field, and it's just one of those inflatable white bubble domes.) This facility brinksmanship happens because universities are technically non-profit organizations, so they are required to spend all the money they're making off these kids. Why not take some of this facility money and use it to salary your players? There would be downsides (as with all solutions), but at least for the SEC and B1G (in other words, the only college football that's going to matter in 10 years) this should be workable.
Must not have been TOUGH enough for Cryi---I mean Tough Guy Ryan Day
Could be. Or he could be way ahead of his time. Maybe he's jumping ship every year, or maybe he's maximizing the opportunity to travel the country on basketball scholarships and NIL deals. Either way, I don't know the kid personally, and I wish him the best.
Right. It'd be in their best interest to find a way to get rid of this and make people stop talking about it ASAP. Ohtani's the most lucrative star likely in the history of baseball, and he just joined the West coast Yankees. There will have been nothing to see here.
See ya in 2026 (hopefully)
I don't care what anybody says, Terrell Suggs would be a great hire if just for program culture. Add Ray at LB coach, Ed Reed once Clink moves up to DC...man, you got a stew going.
Anonymous Big Ten coaches say Mitch McGary stole "Win the Game" from Ryan Day via in-person scouting. Juwan likely to be retained another decade.
I think people are downvoting the title and not reading the text...
I agree with the premise, but "fluke" is the wrong word. Sure, we're not going to reel off 6 national championships in the next ten years, but it's not a fluke when a really talented team and coaching staff wins a national championship. Sometimes key contributors return, sometimes they don't. Sometimes you get injury luck, sometimes you don't. Any championship season will have its share of luck, but that doesn't make it flukey. Three playoff appearances in a row is indicative of the quality of the team and coaching staff.
I agree that it'll be tough going forward, especially with next year's schedule, but with possibly 3 guaranteed B1G teams in the playoff every year, I think we'll be seeing plenty of Michigan playoff games in the near future.
Two other things that don't show up unless you're paying close attention:
1. J.J. was the director of the offense. A lot of college quarterbacks can run around and make plays--not many have the grasp of what everyone's doing on offense and defense that J.J. did.
2. We never actually unleashed his potential as a runner. I think even his passing numbers would've been better if we had done a better job establishing him as a running threat.
My dad has talked about this idea for a long time: when an offense is backed up to its own goal line and gets called for a penalty, the defense should have the option to push the first down line further away, rather than take "half the distance" penalty yardage.
So if you've got a team backed up at their own 2, and they get called for a false start, the defense gets the option of moving the ball to the 1 or pushing the first down marker so it's 1st and 15 from the 2.
Disagree. The offense gets looser with the ball close to the end zone--the risk should become proportionally greater of fumbling and giving the ball to the other team. The risk shouldn't suddenly sky-rocket to "even if the other team doesn't recover it, you lose the ball and 20 yards of field position for no clear reason."
I mean, I'm with you in spirit, but that would be absolute f-ing chaos. Imagine fumbling into the other team's bench--dudes standing on the sidelines would start tackling the other team's players, kicking the ball toward their own, etc.
Although I guess if what you want to see in football is more fistfights, then, yeah, go for it.
Yeah, they got their point across, but it's not great to throw college kids under the bus. Maybe a picture of Brian Ferentz losing his mind at the B1G championship game instead?
I see I'm not the only one up at this hour.
It can be. But seems like it's a spectrum. Not every Jets fan is the firefighter dude, but if you haven't once yelled at your TV like the firefighter dude, are you really a fan?
I think that's an easy one to answer. We shouldn't expect the same because Warde Manual's out here talking about "transformational, not transactional." We had a great team this year, lost a bunch of talent (not to mention coaches), and haven't been playing the game you need to play to have another championship level team coming off the bench. It would be ridiculous for us to expect some repeat year coming up.
Of course, the larger question is--why won't Michigan play the money game we'd need to if we wanted to be Bama? And honestly, for me, I'm glad we don't. Maybe we'd be able to make it work, but plenty of teams play that game and lose anyway (A&M, Ole Miss, Tennessee), and it's not our identity. I think our goals should be 1. beat osu, 2. find a way to maintain credibility as an educational institution in the midst of the SEC-zation of college football. If we can do those two things, I couldn't care less about a national championship.
Hilarious take. I genuinely thought the "wreckage in Tuscaloosa" he was talking about was going to be Bama's defensive line--you know, the one our new head coach's unit pushed all over the field last month?
Hey, that guy stole my vacuum cleaner!
Ravens-style defense + outdoor winter-weather game. Let's hope he doesn't catch a cold or this game will be a complete blowout.
Love that this comes out right after FSU throws a fit about not being included in the CFP. I know CFP and NCAA are separate organizations, but it just goes to show you that NCAA enforcement is more about punishing those you don't like than it is about "justice."
I can't prove it, but a dollar says we would never have heard of this if FSU had just taken their medicine after the CFP teams were announced.
Johnson is the obvious choice on defense. Zinter and Keegan will be 10-year guys (health assumed).
Kenneth Grant and Kris Jenkins.
Sadly for Blake, I’d expect Donovan to do better in the league—just seems like a more prototypical back.
That deserves a LINK!
Yeah, my bad on the title. I'd had a few.
In Aiden Hutchinson's favorite post-game phrase: "Complimentary football."
Bet.
Lol. No. Why would anyone ask that question?
Loved seeing us ahead of Zeke's rushing number on the SVP postgame.
2023 M isn't coached by a guy groping 18 y/o's at his restaurant after losing.
Rich deserves this win. He had to put up with being a national voice in a year when the nation lost its mind over Michigan cheating--that is, doing what every other team does but in the "wrong" way. The man has been holding his tongue for months. I hope he enjoys the repreive.
Brian, I've been reading your shit since middle school. I still have a printout of the post-game article from the '09 game at Iowa--the one where Denard came in and couldn't pull out a win in a last-second drive. You spoke of the fanbase's zeitgeist. How about the zeitgeist now? This site--and more recently, Sam Webb and company--has made the experience of being a Michigan fan not only more bearable but less lonely as well.
I grew up in central Ohio (in middle- and high-school during the lean years from 2004 to 2010), I was at the 2014 UConn game, I was outside in the cold for Jim Harbaugh's introductory press conference. I can tell you when major events happened in my life based on Michigan's concomitant schedule (i.e. I know my family moved in 2005 because we lost on homecoming to Minnesota that October).
This team has made up for ALL of that. Love you all. Thank you, Brian, Seth, and all for the years of support in this horrible lifestyle. It finally paid off. Go. Fucking. Blue.
It's nice to finally be on to basketball season after a stressful fall. Hoping the rumors about culture and Juwan are overblown and this team can settle into a rhythm. They've got the talent to make the tourney!
I think the key here is the attitude/culture shift that's taken place since Day took over. Michigan's gotten tougher and figured out ways to win difficult games. osu's gotten more finesse and lost the win-at-all-costs mentality they had under Meyer.
We play aggressive and loose; they play uptight and conservative. This is a reflection of the respective coaching staffs.
Maybe. Maybe not. I think we'd all agree that what Luke Fickell did with Cincinnati is more impressive than what Day's accomplished at OSU, but Fickell bombed his tryout as head coach in 2011 (albeit with less built-in talent than Day was given).
Erick All to the house at Penn State to seal the game.
Corum to the house at Penn State to seal the game/Manny Diaz can't get his linemen to maintain gap integrity despite Michigan running the ball 30-some straight times/"Here, have our signs. Now, gtfotw."
Brad Hawkins strip and fumble recovery to win the game at Nebraska in '21?
Yeah, at this point our defense struggles like other defenses against talented mobile quarterbacks—like Georgia’s defense does. In the Carr era, a mobile quarterback on the other team was like them having a 21 point advantage or 15 players on the field
That game should be remembered as the JJ game. He almost singlehandedly lost the game for us, but, after doing that, was nearly able to singlehandedly win it. If the defense could've come up with that last third down stop, if the refs had ruled correctly on the Roman Wilson touchdown, we could easily have won that game despite a sloppy start from JJ.
Parker honestly should’ve dedicated the award to Brian Ferentz. Without the contrast of that offense, I don’t think we’d be talking nearly as much about how good their defense is.
He’s saying they would’ve left Georgia in and dumped Bama despite the conference championship. If Bama had two losses and beat Georgia in the conference championship game, the four would’ve been M, W, FSU, and Georgia
This news is kind of meh to me. Julian Fleming and Kyle McCord are transferring. Everybody else we already knew about.
As has been said, they probably already have a qb lined up, and I imagine they’ve recruited some talented receivers that can step in.
As long as Day is there, they can put whomever they want on the field.
All this portal news just makes you even more grateful for guys like Corum, Hutch, Zinter, etc. who actually care about the team they're playing for.
Keep them. F*** the playoff selection committee. I want to watch good football.
Yeah, the 12 team playoff can’t come soon enough. I’m sick of having the same argument every year.
You can’t just speculate that Alabama will be better in a month than Florida State. Florida State had the better year; that should decide who gets in. We’ve already seen Bama play one of these playoff teams—they lost at home. That’s enough for me.
What if news comes out tomorrow that Jaelin Milroe broke his ankle celebrating last night? Or what if he gets hurt in practice in 3 weeks? Are you gonna swap FSU back in?
Right. There are three undefeated P5 conference champions. Those should be basically automatic bids. There are two 1-loss P5 conference champions. You can only pick one. And they played head to head.
This is only a difficult decision because everyone worships the SEC.
The committee put themselves in a really tough spot by keeping FSU at 4 going into championship week. If you're grading based on who the best teams are, and they were the fourth, and then they won a conference championship, it doesn't make any sense that they would suddenly drop out of the top 4.
Of course, I'm sure the committee will chicken out and let Bama and Texas leapfrog FSU because "third string quarterback." But if the committee were honest all the way through the process, then FSU should've lost position last week because their quarterback situation makes them a worse team.
I hate to keep quoting Urban Meyer in this thread, but he reminded the Fox panel last night that osu won the championship with Cardale Jones 10 years ago. You can't count a team out just because of a key injury.
Generally, I agree, but to be fair, Dan Mullen predicted FSU this morning over Bama. Go, Dan Mullen.
Do we know the wording of the "arm moving forward" rule? Cause in my mind, if the ball is still in his hand, and Sainristil jars it loose before it is leaving his hand, then I don't see how that could not be a fumble.
Maybe there is some rule about if the quarterback's arm is moving forward, it can never be a fumble, but the ball definitely had not left his hand when Mikey jarred it loose.
Admittedly, it was a weird play, and the ball flying forward makes it seem more like a pass since Hill was able to get some forward momentum on it, but it looked to me like Sainristil got to the ball before it had even begun to leave Hill's hand, which should be a fumble.
Right, I’m supposed to feel bad for the coach’s son who ruined the team’s offense?