So yeah, Michigan's shellacking at the hands of Wisconsin this past weekend has me and a lot of the fan base rattled. What happened this weekend? What happened this year? And what does this all mean for the future?
JH fired his OC from last year because the offense was a relic and slow and couldn't compete at the highest levels even when paired with a talented defense. The new OC, Josh Gattis, has a great pedigree having coached the Deep State PSU teams and more recently at Bama. When Mike Locksley took the Maryland job, Gattis was tapped to be his OC. But JH intervened and got Gattis to come to A2 instead. 3 games in, and the offense looks substantially worse than last year. The OL didn't make any holes and was porous in pass pro. Play designs against Army didn't include constraint plays to punish the Cadets for overplaying Option A. Perhaps the biggest offense is not getting all of Michigan's talented WRs the ball enough. Shea Patterson doesn't look any better than he did last year.
The defense took a step back as was expected when a ton of NFL talent departed. There is a huge deficiency of DTs on the roster and the coaches aren't ready to trust the promising true freshmen yet (that's defensible perhaps).
While I'm not ready to write off the season, expectations have been dialed back considerably. Rutgers, Illinois, and Indiana still look like wins, Maryland and MSU will be battles. PSU and Iowa are likely stiffer battles, and UM will likely be heavy dogs against ND and OSU. 8-4 would probably be a good result, 9-3 would take some luck, and 7-5 is a real possibility.
For the first time, the fanbase has had to consider what happens if JH has a bad record this year (7-5 would qualify, 8-4 would likely be considered OK depending on the games themselves) and things don't look much better next year. At this point, I'm just hoping the offense looks discombobulated because of big changes, but I'm not sure that's true. This team needs to have a productive couple of weeks heading into Iowa because otherwise, things could get ugly quickly.
JH fired his OC from last year because the offense was a relic and slow and couldn't compete at the highest levels even when paired with a talented defense. The new OC, Josh Gattis, has a great pedigree having coached the Deep State PSU teams and more recently at Bama. When Mike Locksley took the Maryland job, Gattis was tapped to be his OC. But JH intervened and got Gattis to come to A2 instead. 3 games in, and the offense looks substantially worse than last year. The OL didn't make any holes and was porous in pass pro. Play designs against Army didn't include constraint plays to punish the Cadets for overplaying Option A. Perhaps the biggest offense is not getting all of Michigan's talented WRs the ball enough. Shea Patterson doesn't look any better than he did last year.
The defense took a step back as was expected when a ton of NFL talent departed. There is a huge deficiency of DTs on the roster and the coaches aren't ready to trust the promising true freshmen yet (that's defensible perhaps).
While I'm not ready to write off the season, expectations have been dialed back considerably. Rutgers, Illinois, and Indiana still look like wins, Maryland and MSU will be battles. PSU and Iowa are likely stiffer battles, and UM will likely be heavy dogs against ND and OSU. 8-4 would probably be a good result, 9-3 would take some luck, and 7-5 is a real possibility.
For the first time, the fanbase has had to consider what happens if JH has a bad record this year (7-5 would qualify, 8-4 would likely be considered OK depending on the games themselves) and things don't look much better next year. At this point, I'm just hoping the offense looks discombobulated because of big changes, but I'm not sure that's true. This team needs to have a productive couple of weeks heading into Iowa because otherwise, things could get ugly quickly.