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Yeah. Sometimes you get a…

Yeah. Sometimes you get a Hoke, sometimes a Harbaugh.

This is passe around here,…

This is passe around here, but I always want a Michigan Man to coach the football team.

I'm overjoyed we have one.

This website heavily implied…

This website heavily implied Harbaugh had CTE because it was upset about losing to Ohio.

Say what you want about Manuel, but he has replacement-level emotional control, at a minimum.

Do you really need an…

Do you really need an airtight case to support the supposition that racism exists at any spot on this earth?

Do you have any sources to…

Do you have any sources to back this up? On its face, it seems true, but I'd like to see the data on white conservative hostility towards, say, public Muslim prayer.

I'd bet there would be some interesting cross-tabs.

I blame everyone who thought…

I blame everyone who thought a playoff was ever a good option for college football.

Let’s just go back to multiple polls and multiple national champions occasionally. It was much more fun and much less corrupt and distasteful.

I turned to my brother at…

I turned to my brother at some point and said, “Mike Sainristil is a Michigan legend.”

It was kind of an epiphany, but I don’t know why. It just kind of hit me that he’s become one of my ten favorite players of all time.

Yeah, I was thinking of…

Yeah, I was thinking of downfield throws, so I wasn't thinking of the pass in the flat to Egbuku. Don't know how I forgot the Harrison TD, though.

For whatever it's worth, we…

For whatever it's worth, we had genuine hate for Ohio in our day. Respect, because they were a top program and there was never any bush league MSU-style bullshit. But we hated them and wished nothing but ill towards them.

I don't know if that was better. But it certainly wasn't ginned up by the press.

They're hamstrung by the QB,…

They're hamstrung by the QB, who was very good on go routes, dreadful on crossing routes, and mediocre on stopping routes. I can't wait to see the Defensive UFR. I am fairly certain he didn't complete a single pass to a receiver moving horizontally, and was less than 50% to guys settling in zones, including a couple of picks.

It's hard to scheme a passing game when your QB is very likely to complete only 10% of crossing routes and 50% of stopping routes. Can't beat man, can't beat zone.

So proud of these kids…

So proud of these kids. There are Seniors who have never lost to Ohio.

We're finally back in the position that we lost immediately when Lloyd Carr retired and we hired an outsider: the non-coaching aspects of a program are self-perpetuated by the older guys to the younger guys. It's a beautiful thing to come into a fully established Program, rather than trying to establish one.

It's not easy to do. Jim Harbaugh is one of the greats.

(No subject)

Not to mention a lot of kids…

Not to mention a lot of kids on both teams are from the state. They know each other, they've played with or against each other, they've gone to camps together, etc.

From both a financial standpoint (fan interest) and a purely sporting standpoint (player interest), this is the type of rivalry that college football is all about. Getting rid of it wouldn't be beneficial to Michigan, or anyone else, as far as I can tell.

The "2002" banner over the…

The "2002" banner over the Big Nut's left shoulder is perfectly out of focus, such that it reads "POOP."

 

Bravo.

Fuck, it feels so good.

Fuck, it feels so good.

I think you're overstating…

I think you're overstating the JJ situation here.

I’m not really stating anything about a situation here. I’m talking about one performance, and the fan reaction to it. Your response is an example of what I mean; I say he had a bad game, which is pretty uncontroversial, and even the most reasonable of commenters takes that as an indictment of JJ as a player or something, a “situation.”

Since Shea, every starting QB has, at some point, been equipped with a read option, run it... and then mysteriously stopped pulling the ball.
 

Yes, indeed. And this charitable (and reasonable) interpretation absolves the QB generally. Except it wasn’t applied last year, and I think that was because there was a five star QB on the bench, making every mistake the starter made easier to criticize. But now that the five star is on the field, and there is no one on the bench, the mistakes are easier to overlook. We need the fault to not lie with the QB, but with someone else, because that way we can believe it can still be fixed. This is more of a pop-psychology take on fandom and less a football take, but I stand by it.

 So that's a concern, but it's not a *pattern*. 

I didn’t claim it was. This goes back to the weird reflex to defend him as a player and not deal with this specific game. This game was bad, as you admitted a few times, and was the point of my comment. 
 

The stuff that we want to see and haven't is mostly stuff that have been consistent across multiple Harbaugh QBs.

Yes and no. Cade was much better throwing over the middle of the field and on crossing routes. I don’t have a statistical analysis of this, but I would bet a lemon the stats would back me up. The only reason this is important is because in this game, with Illinois playing a lot of man coverage, running man-beaters like mesh becomes more important. My argument is that JJ’s relative inaccuracy over the middle hurt him in this particular game. JJ does other things better than Cade did, but this isn’t one of them, and it contributed to his bad performance.

 

Seems like a lot of copium…

Seems like a lot of copium and deflection from bad QB play.

The same receivers made more plays last year with the lower-ceiling QB. Now everyone is blaming them instead of the high-ceiling QB. It’s the WRs fault, not the QBs, see.

The bad reads on keep/give got the lower-ceiling QB the famous cyan circle. Now nobody is blaming the QB, instead positing reads are not live. It’s the coaches fault, not the QBs, see.

McCarthy throws very well outside the hashes and poorly over the middle. We have enough data to make that claim, His deep passing has been bad all season, but we’re supposed to take heart in the fact that he’s been “close.” He makes bad decisions on where to go with the ball, such as throwing to Gash instead of a wide open Loveland in the endzone or throwing to the covered in-cut instead of the TE dragging across the field with no defender on him.

This was a bad performance from McCarthy. The WRs didn’t help, the weather didn’t help, and some RPS stuff didn’t help, but avoiding talking about the bad performance because we can’t face that fact that the five star QB with a rocket arm and 4.6 speed can sometimes play really poorly does not do any good.

I believe he can clean it up against Ohio. Their defense is not extraordinary, and we’ve won plenty of games despite his weaknesses over the middle, deep down the sidelines, and suboptimal decision-making. He has a tremendous arm and will very likely run more than he has all season, with nothing to hold back for. But even if he looks like Vince Young in the Rose Bowl on Saturday, that will not make this Illinois performance anything other than bad.

Because if you ever want the…

Because if you ever want the running back to not bounce it outside, Stokes isn’t your man yet.

I don’t know about him, but…

I don’t know about him, but I do. Always have.
 

JJ is a good thrower of the ball and a good runner of the ball, but somehow isn’t a good quarterback. His decisions-making has always verged on disastrous, and he holds onto the ball way too long. I would take him in a 7-on-7 competition, no doubt. But I would have gone with McNamara, and stuck with him unless he played his way out of the job.

JJ has always struck me as more of a tabula rasa for fans to project their five star hopes onto rather than an actual player. Hopefully, by the time he is done here, those people will be proven right.

He has been a game manager…

He has been a game manager this season. Today, game manager was a level he couldn’t quite reach. We’ve won a lot of games over the past two years with game manager quarterbacks, so I wouldn’t knock it. If he manages the game against Ohio and our backs are healthy, we should be OK.

If he overlooks wide open tight ends in the endzone again…

This is certainly true, but…

This is certainly true, but DeVito didn’t seem to have the same problems.
 

JJ is inaccurate deep and inaccurate over the middle. That’s all there is to it. He throws very well to the sidelines.

Not me.
 

This will solve…

Not me.

This will solve the “problem” of not leaving a deserving team or two out of the playoff, but the playoff itself won’t be about determining the best team or the team who had the best season, only which good team got hottest in the end. I already have professional sports for that.

I miss the old system and the occasional multiple champions. I much preferred it. I don’t need the certainty or whatever the BCS was meant to provide, and it has only occasionally actually provided it.

Let’s up the pedantry. It’s…

Let’s up the pedantry. It’s not one or the other.

What the State players did was assault and battery. As the helmet/fist/foot traveled through the air, the players were assaulted. When they touched the players, they were battered.

Seems like everyone writing…

Seems like everyone writing online has taken to calling it EDGE in all caps, which makes little sense to me grammatically and seems less useful as a descriptor than an actual position. But here we are.

Georgia.

Georgia.

McCarthy was kicking the…

McCarthy was kicking the ball around the turf while McNamara was in the middle of the best game of his career versus MSU. I was hoping we'd get away from that kind of thing this year, and we might, but if McNamara plays well and loses his job because of "ceiling," I will question Harbaugh for the first time in his tenure.

I hope we don't cost ourselves a game trying to make one individual happy, thereby costing everyone else on the team.

Yeah, ultras are the…

Yeah, ultras are the hardcore. Usually a membership organization. Usually full of insane hooligans who think they own the club. American soccer doesn't have the hooligan culture of South American or European soccer, so I would imagine the LAFC fans are fantastic.

Every now and again, you read a headline about some European ultra stabbing a visiting fan, or a South American ultra assaulting a referee for a red card.

Never been to Medellin, but…

Never been to Medellin, but I have been to a couple of AS Roma matches with/near the Ultras. There are very few things I like less. The fact that Brian liked it is very interesting, but I don’t know quite why or what it suggests.

Jesus, what a way to find…

Jesus, what a way to find out Charles Drake is dead.

I think he should be fired,…

I think he should be fired, and I don't think it's because Michigan is holier than thou. I don't think "no hitting colleagues" is a particularly holy proscription.

Nor do I think that standard should be lowered based on the race or upbringing of the coach. As a psychological explanation, I buy it 100%. A black guy from Chicago is going to see a fat white idiot that feels entitled to touch him after calling a bush league timeout differently than a white guy from the suburbs. I get why Howard might feel the way he did in that moment. That doesn't change the pretty low bar rule we are working with, though: no hitting colleagues.

I also find it weak that the argument goes immediately from "people who think Howard should be fired are unreasonable about what they expect from Michigan" to "MSU coaches hit people all the time and don't fire anyone." The implication seems to be that the MSU standard is right. What about someone like me? What if I hold Michigan to a standard that MSU doesn't quite reach but doesn't seem particularly stringent: no hitting colleagues.

All that disagreement aside, this was the sanest reading of the situation that I've read anywhere.

I still wear black Nike…

I still wear black Nike socks when exercising, 30 years after it became cool. Juwan Howard was and is a huge hero of mine and a big piece of my youth. I’m a youngish man. My hair is black with quite a bit of grey. No blue. I was thrilled to have him coach the team.

He should be fired. You can’t throw hands.

Ok, now this is the right…

Ok, now this is the right place for the hundreds of “interviewing with the Vikings is exactly like your girlfriend cuckolding you” analogies I’ve seen on here over the last week.

He is not going to be fired…

He is not going to be fired. This is especially true if we have another good year. 

Yeah I don’t get that…

Yeah I don’t get that framing of it. If I were Jim, and I worked with a young analyst I like but who I could not hire as a coach, I would use my connections to help him out. And if I had a brother in the NFL, I would consider that a pretty good connection.

Your analogy was as if your…

Your analogy was as if your wife came to my place and got wore out for a weekend, then went home to you, at which point you started to compare our weekend tryst to Matt Rhule commenting on the Michigan job while being employed by the Carolina Panthers.

It’s analogies all the way down, pal.

You and Harbaugh are not…

You and Harbaugh are not lovers. He is hired to complete a task for an organization for which you have a rooting interest.

No overtime except in…

No overtime except in playoffs. Ties are fine. Better than losses, even!

I’ll bet a lemon that if…

I’ll bet a lemon that if Brady retires, Rodgers will demand a trade to Tampa. He seems that type to me.

Rodgers is a great QB, but it’s shocking that he has only been to one Super Bowl despite Brady/Manning being in the AFC for almost the entirety of his career. 

Shai-hulud.

Shai-hulud.

Their opinion of Hayes is…

Their opinion of Hayes is hilarious to me. It’s not that they can’t win that matchup, because their ends are pretty good. It’s that the “top” tackles in the SEC are fat, sloppy pieces of shit who get their feet in the right place a couple of times a game, so they might find it more difficult than they usually do.

Ryan Hayes could transfer today and be Georgia’s best tackle tomorrow.

Georgia’s tackles are just…

Georgia’s tackles are just the fat bitch type that Ohio’s are, and that type doesn’t handle our ends very well. 

Professional offensive…

Professional offensive linemen make less than the quarterbacks they protect. That has led to a huge problem in every NFL locker room.

I love that man.

I love that man.

Seth:

My feeling watching…

Seth:

My feeling watching the game was that Cade and the passing game improved in the second half by calling more protections with the back staying home. Is there any way to scrape the data for that kind of thing?

It seems like it took us almost a full half to decide the extra receiver wasn’t worth it against Iowa’s fire zones, since a lot of those backfield routes end up in the covered flats or into the dropping zones.

They came to the right decisions, it seems, but maybe a bit late. I’ve not seen Georgia play this year, so I don’t know if they call as many fire zones as Iowa, but I’d like them to start out with more back-in protections and go empty more often if the defense allows it,

Sure. But I don’t think we…

Sure. But I don’t think we’re anywhere near that yet, or that we ever will be.

And the same goes in reverse. If the public believes making mathematically correct decisions is always or automatically more important than having the team believe in its coach, then the public could be educated. That’s what my comment attempts.

You also didn’t mention the risk to career that option A presents, because you and I know you’re not going to educate your boss into letting you keep that job if you turn a few too-many potential two-point losses into concrete nine-point losses.

Regarding the “classic…

Regarding the “classic blunder”:

Losing a few games via choice A gets you fired. Losing a few games via choice B does not get you fired, and might even get you plaudits for playing a close game, and maybe even losing at the last second on a failed 2-point conversion.

A valiant effort! Just a few inches away from tying it! We’ll get them next year!

Plus, as your language indicates, choice B is a matter of the coach “removing” himself and A “inserting” himself into the situation. This is far more than most players on a team are comfortable with. Keep us in the game for as long as possible. Don’t go for two and potentially take it out of our hands when you don’t have to.

Choice B is correct 100% of the time when humans do it, and a flow chart which doesn’t include the effects it has on your career or your team’s confidence in you is worth nothing.

I will die on this hill.

This kind of weird sports…

This kind of weird sports racism is so prevalent it’s funny.

I’ll bet he thinks Hutchinson makes all his plays with “a motor that doesn’t quit” instead of elite athleticism and tremendous genes from his All-American father.

And I’d bet he thinks Ojabo is an “athletic freak.”

Yes, so let’s turn to the…

Yes, so let’s turn to the guy whose stat line was:

1/3, 6yd, 0 TD, 1 INT.

Listen, we know that our fancy yourself a scout. But you’re the one who cited the stat line (and cut out a nearly perfect 4th quarter). Did you not know someone was going to do this to you?

The most encouraging thing…

The most encouraging thing to me, and the thing that most clearly separates this season’s Harbaugh from previous versions, was that 91 got a stupid fucking unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on third down that extended Iowa’s drive and then never saw the field again until garbage time.

I have been going on and on like a raving idiot for 6 years about Harbaugh not benching guys who get stupid fucking penalties. In the past, he has let guys stay on the field for the very next play. This year, he is sitting them. I have to imagine that sort of discipline is related to the discipline shown by the entire program, which reflects in our decreased turnovers and penalties and cleaner play in general.

Michigan is elite this year,…

Michigan is elite this year, while JJ is the backup.