"The Gattis Effect" on Michigan Football

When it’s all said and done, and college football finally returns to some sense of normalcy in a post-pandemic world, there’s one sentence a lot of Michigan fans are going to be saying for a good while: 

“Thank God they hired Josh Gattis.” 

To be fair, I’m already saying that just a year into his tenure as Sanford Robertson Offensive Coordinator for the Wolverines, but that’s because I see how much things have already changed with Michigan’s offensive identity that not everyone else does. A lot of people are taking notice, but you still see the lazier arguments about their offensive performance under Jim Harbaugh since he’s been head coach. Everything from “he can’t develop a QB” to “he doesn’t know how to use his receivers” and the famous “he’s too stubborn to take his hands off the reigns.” 

Alright, there’s some truth to that last one before 2019, but that’s what people need to understand about this situation. For all of the struggles and caterwauling about Michigan’s offensive output in the last five years, there’s been one constant that so many fans have ignored as the primary culprit: inconsistent offensive system.

Let’s wind the clock back to 2015. Harbaugh comes in with Tim Drevno and Jedd Fisch, dumps the hybrid hodge podge mess from the Brady Hoke era and installs a true pro style offense, but instead of being a straight “3 yards and a cloud of dust,” he allows Fisch to innovate with creativity in the passing game using NFL concepts. This pays off immediately with a team that had more talent on it than its 5-7 record in 2014 indicated. They needed the first six games to get into a groove, but they found it in the middle of the crazy Halloween Minnesota win that season. After that, Jake Rudock looked like a world beater until Ohio State(of course), and then had a great bowl game against Florida. 

The 2016 season brought nearly everyone back except Rudock, but it was still the same system from the previous year, complete with Fisch’s innovations. Statistically, that team remains Harbaugh’s most potent and dominant offense since he’s been head coach, averaging over 400 yards of offense and over 40 points per game. It remains the closest Michigan has come to reaching the Big Ten Championship Game and likely the College Football Playoff. 

That’s the last time Michigan played a season in which they used the exact same offensive system as the previous year. 

As we all know, Fisch left after 2016 and was replaced with Pep Hamilton, and so went the innovation and consistency, which was bad timing giving how much talent left at WR and OL from the previous year. This, plus a reliance on underclassmen and a shaky at best QB room with Wilton Speight, who went down for the year against Purdue, John O’Korn, who outside of the Purdue game just didn’t have anything in the tank, and Brandon Peters who kind of became the lame duck, and you see why 2017 was as bad as it was, even for a team that still made a bowl game, which it lost. 

This led to the firing of Tim Drevno, the hiring of Ed Warinner and the pursuit of Shea Patterson as a transfer QB, but with Patterson also came the need for RPO to suit his style of play, meaning that the rest of the team now had to learn another offense to get going on that. This one didn’t take them as long to figure out, but it still lacked innovation from the top and it was too slow to call plays, which was ultimately part of their demise against OSU for the umpteenth time that season, and why the stats just weren’t there. Harbaugh was still mired in the pro style “manball” ideal, whether it had Fisch’s innovation or not. 

Meanwhile, the entire rest of the Big Ten was switching to spread offense concepts, except for Wisconsin, who will never, ever do that so long as Barry Alvarez is in charge, and Iowa, who will only do it on weird occasions to beat OSU once in a decade. The Buckeyes embraced the smashmouth spread when Urban Meyer came to town and it was a physical brand of the fast, potent offenses seen across the country. Once it started smashing Big Ten schools, most of them followed suit with some version of a spread. Michigan didn’t. 

To be fair to Harbaugh, he was fighting against Bo’s legacy on this one and the lineage of the program itself. The most recent memory Michigan fans had of the spread offense in Ann Arbor was Rich Rodriguez, and those aren’t good memories, even if the problem was largely a lack of defense. People wanted the program to get back to basics and run the same “manball” it did in the 90’s when beating OSU was a more than reasonable expectation. The problem is that the rest of college football moved past that, including OSU. Now, spread is king and pro style is ancient, and furthermore it’s starting to take over the NFL too. Franchises are taking spread offense QBs in the draft and crafting their offenses to fit them and the other speedy personnel coming with them. It’s not a fad anymore, it’s now the evolution of the game. 

Harbaugh finally realized this in 2019, which led him to hire Gattis. It’s honestly the move he should have made in 2015 when he was hired, but he didn’t know any better, and now he was locked into what would be Michigan’s third different offensive system in three years. Just like 2015, it took half the season for the players to get into a rhythm, but when they finally did, starting in the second half of the Penn State game, they rolled. Seriously, they kicked ass…...up until OSU(Broken record at this point). 

The thing is, if you look at the Harbaugh tenure overall, it’s abundantly clear that not being able to stick to one offense has been by far the biggest problem this team has had in his time. You recruited Donovan Peoples-Jones, Tarik Black and Nico Collins for a pro style offense with innovation. They ended up playing in one that had no innovation, then one that had RPO mixed in with still not much innovation, and then finally a pro spread, the whole time taking orders and learning systems from three different sources, whether it was Drevno in 2017, Hamilton in 2018 or Gattis in 2019. 

Putting that into perspective, you can see why DPJ went pro and Tarik transferred, because this wasn’t what they signed up for. It wasn’t what Nico signed up for either, but he adapted and used his size to his advantage to become a deep ball threat. The ultimate point though is that when you don’t have any consistency with your offense, you can’t get your players into a groove because they’re never comfortable having to learn a different offense every year, and you can’t recruit consistently because you’re constantly changing the type of athlete you’re looking for to suit your always changing system. Plus, it gets harder to bring the top kids in when they know you don’t have a clue about running a consistent, aggressive offensive attack that they can thrive in and put up numbers with. 

This has KILLED Michigan in the past three years statistically with their own players, and recruiting-wise with missing out on top tier talent. It didn’t help that Harbaugh was acting like lord and master of it as well, because he’s not a spread offense guy at his core and when he’s trying to call plays in addition to being the head coach, it just doesn’t work efficiently. At all. 

This is why Gattis is the most critical hire he will likely ever make at Michigan. A younger offensive coordinator who runs the type of spread offense that fits Michigan and the Big Ten very well because it uses pro style concepts, he has a clear idea of what type of athlete he wants at every position on offense, and recruits skill players very well. Pay any attention to the type of talent he’s been after since he got to Ann Arbor, and you see a pattern that screams his mantra, “Speed In Space.” Fast WRs. Speedy and strong RBs. TEs that can get downfield when needed. OL that can run tempo and no huddle. Aggressive, dominant and relentless. That is how you sell your program to top recruits, by letting them know what you’re running, how they fit into it, and being consistent with your vision. 

The back end of 2019 was a preview of things to come. You had Patterson, who personally was on his FOURTH offensive coordinator in his career(and you wonder why he had consistency issues), and an offense full of upperclassmen that were finally settling into the pro spread, along with a frosh RB Zach Charbonnet, who has known nothing but pro spread since Day 1 in Ann Arbor, along with WRs Giles Jackson, Mike Sainristil and Cornelius Johnson. When the freshmen were on the field last year, you could see the speed and the energy change, because they were kids recruited to fit into this system from the beginning. Everyone else had to adjust to it from their previous habits. 

Now imagine Year 2 of the pro spread. Sure the team is younger at OL, WR and even QB with either Dylan McCaffrey or Joe Milton, but they all know the system now, and what’s more the incoming freshman like WRs Roman Wilson and A.J. Henning or RB Blake Corum, are all players recruited by Gattis for this pro spread system. So they will be working to be the next cogs in the system along with Nico, Giles, Sainristil, Cornelius and Ronnie Bell. All fast, all quick and all ready to roll in an unchanged offense. 

Don’t stop there, though. Have some more fun and think about Year 3 when Cristian Dixon and Xavier Worthy start blazing trails on the field along with all the aforementioned talent, while JJ McCarthy prepares to take over the future of the QB position. Imagine who else top tier that could end up being a part of that as well. It is clear that above all, Josh Gattis has a plan for Michigan’s offense and it is predicated on consistency, aggressiveness and speed demonry at the WR position. 

This is what will finally get Michigan going on a steeper incline, because it is finally making the transition into modern college football that largely everyone else, especially OSU, has learned over the past 5 years. How well it will work remains to be seen, but fundamentally speaking it has far more potential than anything else we’ve seen to this point in the Harbaugh era. 

Thank God he hired Josh Gattis.

Why the Michigan-OSU Rivalry Is Really Dead

You would think being a Michigan fan since the age of 4 would make this a difficult piece to write, but the truth is not really because it’s just accepting the reality of the situation.

For 18 years, Ohio State has outright dominated its rivalry against Michigan. Aside from one 35-21 victory in 2003, the last time Michigan won the Big Ten, and a fleeting 40-34 victory in 2011 where Brady Hoke beat Luke Fickell, the games between the two “rivals” haven’t been very close at all for the most part. Close scores here and there sure, but mostly blowouts in favor of the Bucknuts.

The last two have been particularly hard to stomach because they came against Don Brown-led Michigan defenses that were statistically strong against everyone else on the schedule before surrendering 111 combined points to OSU at the end of November in back to back seasons. 62-39 in Columbus was bad enough in 2018, but 56-27 in Ann Arbor is really just as bad to be honest with you.

The fans aren’t happy at all, and why should they be? It’s not just another year of “evil” triumphing over “good,” or just another year of no Big Ten title, or even just another year of ESPN and FOX Sports treating Michigan like a punching bag for everyone’s amusement.

No, it’s also the year of finally acknowledging what we’ve all wanted to avoid but now no longer can: The rivalry between Michigan and Ohio State is dead. Definitively. Unmistakably. Even objectively if you want to talk about competitiveness as a metric.

We can bring out all of the old Bo and Woody clips we want, watch Tiebreaker on repeat and tell stories about how awesome it was when John Cooper was manning the OSU sideline, but it doesn’t change what has happened in modern college football and how that alone has absolutely obliterated what was once a proud and competitive rivalry game between two blue blood programs.

Yes, the change in modern college football, specifically with respect to program construction and recruiting, is absolutely at the heart of why the Wolverines and Buckeyes no longer have a competitive rivalry. Fans of college football are well aware of the stories, whispers and downright evidentiary postings on social media detailing the “advantages” that certain schools have on others with respect to recruiting top tier talent in the country. It always seems like the same schools are in that Top 10 category year in and year out. Now of course, recruiting rankings are subjective in nature, but when you compare them to the on field results generated by those same players in college, the correlation is more than just a little bit strong.

Alabama has had the top composite recruiting class in the nation 4 of the last 5 years and that one year they didn’t, 2018, they were 5th. Clemson has had 3 Top 10 classes and given that the only other ACC team that has had Top 10 classes since 2015 was FSU 3 times(2015, 2016, 2017) and Miami once in 2018, you could see why these two teams have been in the national championship game each of the last 4 years.

What does this have to do with Michigan and Ohio State? Well, the Buckeyes have had a Top 10 class each of the past 5 seasons. Two of them were second in the country behind Alabama and Georgia, and the lowest any of them were was 7th in 2015. Michigan has had 3 Top 10 classes since 2015, two of them being 8th in the nation in 2016 and 2019, and one of them being 5th in 2017. The difference between them and Alabama and Clemson is that Alabama and Clemson don’t play in the same division in the same conference. Michigan and Ohio State do, which means recruiting battles for them are literally for who gets to win the Big Ten East Division and ultimately get to Indianapolis for the championship game.

This is where those “advantages,” made infamous once upon a time by Jim Tressel, leading to his exit as OSU’s head coach in the late 2000’s, come into play. Whether people wish to admit it or not, it is known that there are practices in the recruiting game that OSU is willing to engage in that Michigan is not, and that coupled with the rate of success for the program since the Tressel era, is what gives OSU that 3 to 5 spot advantage over Michigan in the Jim Harbaugh Era. Might not seem like a lot, but that second ranked 2017 OSU class brought in Chase Young, Jeffrey Okudah, Baron Browning, Shaun Wade and Wyatt Davis, all 5-stars, along with 4-star RB J.K. Dobbins among others. Comparatively, Michigan had two 5-stars in its 5th ranked 2017 class: Donovan Peoples-Jones and Aubrey Solomon, the latter of which is no longer on the team.

Now this isn’t a referendum on OSU being a dirty program because the other half of that “advantage” is most certainly OSU’s track record back to the Tressel Era, which featured at worst, a 6-7 season in 2011 under Fickell, surrounded by what is now 15 double digit win seasons between 2002 and present. The Buckeyes simply handled the transition to the modern game much better than Michigan did, which had three seasons of missing bowl eligibility in 2008, 2009 and 2014, after Lloyd Carr went 1-6 against Jim Tressel’s Buckeyes before he retired.

The bottom line is that OSU has recruited high level talent for nearly two decades at a consistent clip and have managed to stay ahead of Michigan in that department enough to create a gap in the pool. Again not a huge gap, unless you look at the scoreboard. One RB like Dobbins is enough to destroy your defensive line to the tune of 211 yards rushing and 4 TD, before you get to all the other talent throwing and catching touchdowns as well.

Until this gap is closed, OSU will continue to have this advantage and as the years go on, it becomes more of a mental advantage as well. How can any Michigan team that recruits 3 to 5 spots lower than OSU ever hope to beat them? Especially since it’s now been 17 out of the last 19 seasons that OSU has won that game, and the scores have gotten worse recently? Recruiting isn’t the end all be all of college football, but again given the correlations that are there, it’s not good at all to see OSU with two committed 5-star players in the 2020 class and Michigan with none. That puts your development of these players at a higher premium and you simply have to play “perfect” football in order to win, while OSU only has to play competent football to beat you by at least three scores.

This is why the Michigan-OSU rivalry is dead, because after 5 years of the Harbaugh Era, that gap has not closed and there’s no indication that it will, unless Michigan is willing to do things that OSU, Alabama, Clemson and a handful of others do, to get those 5-stars signed and to stick around. In the past many fans have called out “stargazers” who place an immense premium on recruiting as the lifeblood of the program, because there are so many examples of teams with lower rated talent classes that have beaten top 10 schools. Thing is, you can find a game or two here and there for that, but not consistently. Michigan State and Penn State have each beaten OSU once in the last 5 years and that was 2015 and 2016 when it happened. Since that first second-ranked OSU class, the Buckeyes haven’t lost to either school either at home or on the road. Yeah there’s Iowa in 2017 and Purdue in 2018, but again it’s not consistent. If you want to beat the Buckeyes with any consistency, which no one has done in a very long time, you have to recruit on their level, even if it’s just 3 to 5 spots higher than you normally recruit.

Until that happens, AND it translates into just ONE competent, composed and organized win over Ohio State, The Game is just a designated loss for Michigan every year and the best we can hope for is 11-1, which won’t get Michigan to Indy unless OSU falters. That’s seriously where we are now, hoping for OSU mistakes to help us out, which is really the same position as the rest of the Big Ten overall.

This is difficult for a lot of Michigan fans to hear let alone accept, but the proof is in the pudding and there’s not much to refute it. Whatever hope you have of the Wolverines finally reigning supreme over their arch-nemesis again one day will only go as far as that coaching staff’s recruiting efforts, whether it’s Harbaugh or whoever succeeds him, so it’s not as easy as replacing the head coach or the defensive coordinator. You need talent on OSU’s level to beat them and until you get it, this isn’t a rivalry anymore. It’s just a pre and post-mortem for what will always be a dour and defeating end to the college football season for Michigan.

Misery equals happiness for many Michigan fans

Michigan fans are some of the most insufferable people on the planet.

The football team spent two and a half quarters erasing a 17-point first half deficit against Northwestern on the road to win 20-17, the largest Michigan comeback win in the Jim Harbaugh era.

You wouldn’t know that at all talking to a lot of fans, pundits and alumni though. In fact, I’m pretty sure a lot of them would have rather Michigan lost the game for some sick reason.

Michigan did not have a good first half on either side of the ball. The defense had no answers for Clayton Thorsen and the Wildcats offense and the Michigan offense had no rhythm whatsoever. Punter Will Hart had in the most work he’s seen this season by far and the penalties were a problem across the board for the whole team.

Yet for all of the badness Michigan played with in the first half, they were only down 10 at halftime and adjustments were made in the second half. The pressure that the defensive line wasn’t getting on Thorsen in the first half materialized in a big way, mostly from Chase Winovich, Kwity Paye and Josh Uche. Rashan Gary left the game with an injury and had issues up until that point, but the defense didn’t surrender a single point for the entire rest of the game.

The offense conversely scored 13 points, though it probably should have been 21 as they had two drives stall out in the red zone and settled for field goals, making the comeback even slower and dicier if you were watching the game at home. In the end, Karan Higdon finished with 30 carries for 115 yards rushing and two touchdowns to give Michigan its fourth straight win of the 2018 season.

It was ugly, it was messy and there are a ton of things for the team to learn from and clean up, but they won the game.

If only that were enough for Michigan fans.

Because the Wolverines didn’t pull a Penn State from the past few weeks and drop half a hundred on Northwestern in the second half to win by blowout, there was little praise to be found in any corner of the fanbase from anyone for what was Jim Harbaugh’s 32nd victory as Michigan head coach, now one ahead of Brady Hoke’s 31 total wins in four years if anyone was paying attention.

No, it was all about how unprepared, undisciplined and badly coached the team was in Year 4 of the Harbaugh era against a squad that lost to Akron a few weeks ago. Surely a waste of $7 million a year to pay a coach that calls the most vanilla offensive plays in the history of football and clearly refuses to throw the ball downfield. At this rate, Michigan will be lucky to win two to three more games this season they say.

Seriously, take the Notre Dame postmortem, replace the seven-point loss with a three-point win and that’s what you have from the Michigan fanbase after securing a 4-1 record. To a lot of them it’s just more proof that Penn State and Ohio State are going to curb stomp the Wolverines in November, especially since they played the “best game we’ll see in the Big Ten all year.” Right. The one where Urban Meyer was acting like a baby most of the night on the sideline and James Franklin called a play on fourth down and five yards that couldn’t have been worse if he had told everyone in the world exactly what he was going to do.

At this rate, the best way to enjoy a Michigan football game is to never watch it with other Michigan fans, and don’t read their reactions on Twitter or social media of any kind during or after the game itself, even if the team wins. That is unless you want to see the most miserable, constantly unhappy people on the planet talk about how much their own team sucks.

It’s one thing to be critical of Michigan’s performance this season. You can have questions about the offensive philosophy or why the legitimate penalties keep happening, especially since it’s clear that the referees don’t need a penalty to actually occur for them to throw a flag against Michigan this season. You can have issues with the slow starts and express concern about the rest of the season if you so choose.

On the other hand, it’s something else entirely to sit on Twitter and scream about how overpaid and underwhelming your head coach is, how useless you think certain players are on offense or defense, and how much the rest of the Big Ten is going to pile drive your team because you can only beat Northwestern by a field goal. That’s not criticism, that’s being a miserable jackass.

Don’t get me wrong, there’s fanbases all over the country that act the same way about their teams, but the difference with Michigan fans is that it comes with extra impatience and extra lack of perspective because of how long it has been since the program has won a Big Ten championship or beaten its rivals on a consistent basis. Every Saturday all of the blue hairs and Bo disciples wear their hearts on their sleeves and they want nothing less than Alabama-level dominance against the Northwesterns of the world, and when that doesn’t happen they release the venom about it.

The truth is that Michigan has a good team this year, not a perfect one. They got caught with their pants down against the Wildcats, regrouped and won because they’re truly the better team on the field. Northwestern didn’t beat itself, Michigan took the game from them, however long it took them to do it.

Will that approach be as successful against Penn State or Ohio State? No, of course not but no one is saying that it is. Obviously the team has things to work on and flesh out as the season goes along, but game plans change and are never the same for each opponent, so while you sit there screaming at the TV for them to empty the playbook to beat Northwestern by 30, bear in mind that what they run against one team is not going to be the exact same plan against another team, hence the reason Michigan is paying Harbaugh $7 million a year, not to run the same damn playbook against every team, but to build a game plan for each one that gets them the win.

So far, he and his staff have built four winning game plans out of five games total. That’s an .800 winning percentage for the 2018 season with seven games to go. Maybe instead of going straight to misery and melancholy after a tough road win against an unranked conference opponent in Week 5, you actually let the season play out and see how many more winning game plans Harbaugh’s staff and the players come up with from here on out.

IMMEDIATE REACTION: Notre Dame 24, Michigan 17

It looked like Utah 2015. Seriously. The score was exactly the same too. 

As bad as one could have thought Michigan would play on Saturday night at Notre Dame, it was worse. A good deal worse actually, and almost the entire fanbase is either on the ledge or have already jumped off of it. I'm already seeing legitimate "Fire Harbaugh" threads on message boards that aren't being funny or trolling. 

Michigan did not look good against Notre Dame to start the 2018 season, there's no way to sugarcoat it. 307 total yards of offense with barely any of it on the ground due to the same struggles we've seen for awhile from the offensive line, questionable play calling, and a ton of stupid penalties that gave the Irish all the life they needed in the first half to salt the game away early. 

I get why people are frustrated, because it was a very frustrating game. At no point did Notre Dame look like an unstoppable world beater. This wasn't shades of Tua Tagovailoa at Alabama hanging 51 on Louisville, this was Brandon Wimbush evading the pass rush like he was parting the Red Sea. He extended plays and the offense struck quick to immediately take control of the game and by the time they were ready to give it up, it was too late. Michigan had already given up itself. 

The vaunted Don Brown defense was putrid in the first half. Absolutely putrid. Not only did it give up two long touchdown drives to the Irish on its first two possessions, there were also a host of completely idiotic penalties taken the whole night, from Josh Metellus arm bar to the head targeting penalty that saw him exit the game in the first quarter, to senior Chase Winovich's ridiculous roughing the passer call on 3rd down that kept the drive alive for Notre Dame to extend its lead. There were far too many mistakes made by what was supposed to be the most stout unit on the team and because of that, it felt like the offense was barely on the field, and when it was on the field all it did was avoid three and outs. It still didn't score a single touchdown until late in the 4th quarter when it looked like there was a chance Michigan could actually tie the game up, despite the abysmal performance it turned in to the entire nation. 

It doesn't matter that the defense shored up in the second half because the terrible first half was insurmountable, and even though we expected Michigan's offense to be better this season, it still shouldn't be counted on to erase a 14-point deficit barely half a quarter into the game. Could it have though? Was the opportunity there for it to happen? Sure it was, but Michigan didn't take advantage of it and squandered way too many chances to put points on the board at every turn. It's something that we have seen for a full decade now with Michigan and it's getting serious, because it's not getting any better. 

Yeah I'm writing this fresh off of the game without taking much time to reflect on it and I've already scanned Twitter and the Rivals message board looking for the giant pile of anger and full scale panic that has engulfed the fanbase, so this is absolutely an emotional reaction to the situation. I'm older now and learning not to jump off the ledge about these things because my life will go on no matter what Michigan football does, but I still have a reaction to it and I still have thoughts, and right now my thought is that maybe this program will never, ever recover from The Dark Times of 2008-2014. Maybe Michigan is a program that is not meant to survive or be even close to elite in the modern era of college football. Maybe no matter who coaches this team and how many changes are made in the offseason, it's going to be no better than 8-4 and 3rd place in the B1G East every year. 

Or maybe I'm being too irrational about it right after it happened. Maybe I'm not giving Notre Dame enough credit for how they played and the fact that the game was in their house, a place where they have still never lost to Michigan at night. Maybe as talented as this team is, they weren't ready for a game like that to start off with and it's one of those reality check moments that they learn from and use to galvanize for the rest of the season. 

Or maybe Jim Harbaugh really is overrated and can't do what we want him to do, which is to make this program elite. Four years ago we all agreed he was the one man that could heal all of Michigan's wounds from the Rich Rod-Brady Hoke era. Now after one game in 2018, I wonder if those wounds can ever be healed by anyone. It sure as hell doesn't feel like it right now, not after another complete debacle at the hands of a ranked opponent on the road. 

Shea Patterson wasn't bad overall for his first game. He protected the ball in the first half, commanded the huddle and ended up going 20 of 30 for 227 yards. He threw a bad pick on the run in the second half and also had the game clinching fumble when he tried to escape the pass rush with under a minute to play in the game. He was in and out of the game for awhile with cramps it seems, but when he was in the game he was mobile all night and was running from the pass rush pretty consistently. 

And therein lies the biggest problem yet again, the offensive line. It's pretty clear now for all of the people that were arguing if it was QB or OL that it's definitely OL that is the weakest link for this program. The tackles were giving up the edges to Notre Dame almost all night and most of the 58 yards total rushing that Michigan did gain was right up the gut with Ruiz, Onwenu and Bredeson, but even they didn't have a great night either and with that area of the team looking no different than it did most of last season, it's difficult to just chalk it up to Notre Dame's talent and proficiency in the pass rush. I don't even want to hear what Jon Jansen or Doug Skene have to say about it because it's not going to be good. Not at all. 

This was about as horrific of a season opener as we could have imagined in this situation. The team looks no different than 2017, the coaching looks no different, the decision making looks no different, and now we as fans get to spend that first week after a game dealing with an angry mob of a fanbase and the rest of the rival fanbases chirping like little rats at our expense. The pundits will follow suit as well, echoing sentiments from Jason Whitlock, Mike Valenti and everyone else that loves taking potshots at Michigan out of classless hubris, and there's nothing we can do about it because there's too much history in the last decade backing that chirping up. We are seriously sunk right now and that's a horrible feeling that nearly makes you want to give up being a fan, because this crap is no fun at all. No one likes being the runt that everyone else makes fun of, and that's what Michigan Football is now, just one game into a new season. 

I know it sounds like I've jumped off the ledge but I really haven't. I'm just venting. I know it was only one game and there's a minimum of 11 more to get things going, but the reality is that we shouldn't have to be saying that to anyone right now. We shouldn't have to be justifying the badness that is happening with this football program, after so much optimism and hope from an offseason that appeared to address every major issue the team had in 2017, but showed none of that promise in the first game of 2018. 

Alright, I'm done ranting for now. Here's hoping the season does get better from here on out because otherwise, Michigan Football might truly be dead......for good, and that would be horrible. 

Managing expectations for Michigan Football in 2018

It's been a long eight months since the Outback Bowl disaster for Michigan. A lot has happened with the program since then in the way of coaching changes, positional philosophies and development of personnel in general. 8-5 was sobering for all of us Michigan fans, most of all the team itself and they've been aware of it from the beginning, which is why so many changes were made in the offseason after the abysmal 26-19 loss to South Carolina to end the 2017 season as the only B1G team to lose its bowl game, a fact that the rivals and haters love to chirp about. 

Now the 2018 season stands before us and it's time to see what's next for Michigan Football going forward. We all know the big changes that have been made, most notably the addition of Ed Warriner to coach the offensive line, Jim McElwain to coach the wide receivers along with former Michigan WR Roy Roundtree, and of course the addition of junior transfer QB Shea Patterson from Ole Miss, who was cleared to play this season and has won the starting job to begin the year. Aside from all that, the biggest change we've also heard about and seen evidence of now is Strength and Conditioning coach Ben Herbert, who has appeared to make huge gains with the team's size and build since arriving in the winter. 

If you're noticing that all of the major organizational changes occurred on offense, that's what happens when your previous year's offensive unit ranks 105th in the nation in total offense and tied for 91st in scoring offense averaging 25.2 points per game. Michigan had a plethora of issues offensively in 2017 ranging from a substandard offensive line that allowed two QB's to get hurt, a QB room that was anything but strong and confident, and inexperienced WR's that struggled to hold their own even when the QB's had time to throw. 

That was all last year though. Now it's time to officially turn the page to this year, this season and this team. The biggest question remains, what is it all going to look like in 2018? 

Depending on who you talk to will provide a variety of answers. Nationally, the Wolverines aren't getting the respect some seem to think they are getting or deserve. Most pundits are looking at the 8-5 2017 campaign, the 1-5 record against the rivals since Jim Harbaugh was hired and the five preseason Top 5 opponents that are on Michigan's schedule this season, three of which are on the road, and they're projecting a ceiling of 10-2 if Michigan is lucky. Most are thinking 9-3 at best and a few trolls that love to trigger Michigan fans are saying 7-5 with another third or fourth place finish in the B1G East Division. Those same trolls are also the ones calling Patterson a bust already because of his less than stellar efforts against Alabama and others in the SEC West at Ole Miss, and they expect he will be no better than what Michigan has had at QB since Harbaugh took over. Obviously the trolls who say that Patterson is all the talent the team has on offense would disagree with that, but they still see the Wolverines playing fourth fiddle to Ohio State, Michigan State and Penn State respectively. 

The other side of that locally is a divided Michigan fanbase that is both confident and leery of the upcoming season. You've got fans that think Michigan has finally added the missing piece it's always needed in a QB like Patterson to lead the offense and have bought into the reports from the off season about the gains that the OL and WR's have made, not to mention the reportedly improved pass blocking of the running backs, all of which has them thinking 10-2 is the floor and undefeated is within reach. Then you have many other Michigan fans that have been snakebitten far too much since The Dark Times of 2008-2014, have seen too many losses to the rivals under Harbaugh since 2015 and believe the schedule is too daunting to overcome given the history of the program in the last decade. Michigan has not beaten a top-ranked opponent on the road in a long time and many fans are unwilling to say that they will do so this year without any proof on the field. In other words, they're not trolling when they say 9-3 or 8-4, they're actually afraid that it will happen and don't see a way that it doesn't, especially now with the injury to WR Tarik Black.

So which is it? Is the ceiling high for Michigan Football in 2018 or is it over-inflated out of hype? Well to begin with, there's no hype. At least not from the team or the coaches themselves. They have talked openly and honestly about the changes they have made on offense with regards to strength, scheme and functionality as a unit, and they've praised Patterson's work ethic and ability that they have seen to this point, but they haven't made any bold proclamations or predictions for people to chew on. They want to win the B1G and they want to win a national championship, as would any major Power 5 school have aspirations for, but any hype behind what this team is doing is media driven and further fueled by the fanbases, many of them from the rivals are who are predicting a giant misstep and continued mediocrity for the program as a whole. 

The thing is, it's difficult to look at Michigan's situation logically and think that some improvement from 2017 won't happen at all even with the tougher schedule. Of the 4 teams they lost to in the regular season last year, the only one that wasn't close was Penn State, who will be in Ann Arbor this year without RB Saquon Barkley who is now playing for the New York Giants, and offensive coordinator Joe Moorhead who is now the head coach at Mississippi State. They lost to MSU by 4 and the other two losses to Wisconsin and OSU were close in the fourth quarter, and that was a team that had trouble running the ball and protecting the QB all season long, but the argument could still be made that a better QB at the helm wins them at least MSU and OSU, given the other circumstances of what happened in those games. 

That being said, it's tough to know exactly just how much Michigan will improve on offense, so calling for an undefeated season and an unstoppable offensive unit might be pushing it as far as expectations go. All we can reason is that they will be better than last year based on all of the changes made. How much better is what this season will decide. 

If you're wondering why I'm not talking about the defense until now, it's because nobody's really worried about the defense. That doesn't mean there aren't concerns, like how the defensive line will replace Mo Hurst in the middle and whether or not the safeties have improved upon last year's issues, but based on the track record that the entire unit had even last year, the general belief is that Michigan's defense will be stout under Don Brown once again, but of course where they would greatly benefit is from a stronger offensive unit giving them more point margins and efficiency to work with and more time on the sidelines to rest up due to ball control, despite the positional rotation that keeps the defensive units fresh throughout a game. 

So the reality of the situation is that Michigan's offensive unit is likely somewhere in the middle of "better than last year" and "unstoppable," which is actually a pretty significant improvement to compliment that defensive unit. Despite what many pundits and trolls will tell you, Shea Patterson is not being asked to be a savior or to put the entire offense on his back. Any ability that he has to make plays and be a playmaker will be complement options to add to what should be a more steady performance from the entire unit. The OL is all a year older with 2017 filed away as experience for this season going forward, which before factoring in all of the other reported changes, should make them a better unit than 2017 by default, with an opportunity to be better than that being open. The same goes for the WR's who all have a lot to prove themselves, but now have the benefit of a more experience OL to steady the line of scrimmage more than it did last season. 

It should also be noted that just about every player on this Michigan offensive unit has something to prove, including Shea Patterson himself. There is a lot of talent there without question, but the need for it to be displayed on the field to silence all doubters is also there. The people who think Ole Miss is better off without Patterson are part of why he has to prove he is a steady, winning QB that just needed the right school to unlock the full range of his talent. The OL has heard all of the criticism from last year and knows how important it is that they prove themselves a stout and capable unit this season. The wide receivers know this as well and understand that they are mostly young and have a lot to prove in the passing attack along with Patterson and the OL's help, and the running backs all want as many yards on the ground as possible and be able to salt close games away in the fourth quarter when necessary, as well as pass block with competence and strength when they are on the field. 

Putting all of this together, Michigan is certainly a team with a lot to prove to many especially the team itself, but it has the talent, experience and coaching to be able to make sizable improvements from last year's squad at the very least, and that should be enough to mean another double-digit win total and above all, a trip to Indianapolis for the first time in school history for the B1G Championship Game. Those should be the minimum expectations from fans for the Wolverines this season without question. It doesn't require them to go undefeated (though they certainly can) and there is a realistic margin for error that will get them there in the B1G East, but it's also got to be decisively better than last year's 8-5 campaign, and it's difficult to believe that it won't be based on all the changes made in the offseason and the experience that this team gained from going through the ringer in 2017. 

The illogical impatience of Michigan football fans

Four years ago, Michigan football was a dumpster fire. 

The 2014 season featured a 5-7 campaign that included losses to Rutgers and Maryland, blowout losses to Notre Dame, Michigan State and Ohio State on the road, the Concussion-gate controversy with Shane Morris during the Minnesota game which was another blowout loss, and student-led protests on campus against then athletic director David Brandon, who cared more about marketing the Michigan brand than he did about fielding a successful program. It would be the third time in seven seasons that Michigan would miss a bowl game, after having gone 33 years straight from 1974 to 2007 without missing a single bowl game, and Brady Hoke, the coach who was supposed to be the program's savior in the wake of the Rich Rodriguez disaster (15-22 in three seasons) was on the steady decline from going 11-2 in his first season at Michigan, to 8-5 a year later, to 7-6 the year after that before his final 5-win output of 2014, which surely contributed to the eight decommitments from the 2015 recruiting class that year, one of them being 5-star Mike Weber who is now at Ohio State. 

Enter Jim Harbaugh, hired at the end of December 2014 by interim athletic director Jim Hackett to be the head coach of Michigan football. It was a highly calculated, crafty move that involved stealing a successful professional football coach from an NFL franchise that didn't want him after he had just spent four seasons taking them to the NFC title game three times and getting to the Super Bowl, where he lost to his brother by a field goal. Almost the entire nation told us for months that he would never leave the pros for a college job, even if it was his alma mater. We needed to move on and go after Bob Stoops or David Cutcliffe, or maybe finally see if Les Miles will somehow take the job. Any of those scenarios were more realistic than Harbaugh, we were told. 

Harbaugh took the job though, and his task was truly gargantuan: Fix Michigan football. Now. 

That edict seems so simple when you read it, but it's far more complicated than it looks because of just how horrific Michigan football had become after Bo Schembechler's death and Lloyd Carr's retirement. For seven years, the football team in Ann Arbor was a punchline at best, Rutgers at worst. A 46-42 record that featured two total wins against Michigan State (2012) and Ohio State (2011). A fractured alumni base that was at odds about how the program should proceed for the future. A fractured fanbase that had never seen Michigan win only three games in an entire season. Seriously, when you have students actively protesting to get your AD fired and fans calling radio shows screaming that the program needs to clean house, you have problems well beyond just wins and losses. Those are culture issues, and those take awhile to repair because trust is involved on all levels and that can be very difficult to repair if it can be at all. 

So with all that in mind, here we are now in 2018 on the precipice of Harbaugh's fourth season at Michigan. His record is 28-11, which features back to back 10-3 seasons and an 8-5 campaign last year, a pair of loaded recruiting classes ranked fourth in the nation in 2016 and 2017, and a current one ranked seventh in the country. 

If you had told 10 Michigan fans in 2014 that Harbaugh would do this in his first three seasons, at least 9 of them would have taken it in a heartbeat, myself included. The planet picked him to go 7-5 at best in his first year and he won 10 games instead. He has galvanized the alumni, the students and the majority of the fanbase as a whole in a bid to repair and revitalize the culture of Michigan football and with Warde Manuel as athletic director, everyone is on the same page now more than they had been before Harbaugh was hired. 

And yet, a large portion of the Michigan fanbase now doubts him and questions his ability to coach for one reason: 1-5, which is his current record against Michigan State and Ohio State. 

To briefly summarize how that has happened, in 2015 he lost to MSU on a dropped punt snap that was returned for a touchdown as time expired, and got blown out by an OSU team full of talented seniors that had won a national championship the year prior as juniors. In 2016 he beat a 3-9 MSU squad on the road, but lost to OSU in double overtime by three points on a controversial fourth down spot call that would have won Michigan the game the other way. In 2017 he lost to MSU by four in a monsoon with a QB that only got worse as the season went on and lost to OSU by 11 in a game that was close until the fourth quarter. 

No one likes losing to rivals and Michigan has been doing it for far too long as a program, but given all that has happened in the last decade there needs to be some serious context taken into account here. The belief in 2015 was that Michigan was three to four years away from competing with its own rivals, let alone winning a Big Ten championship. The thought was that Harbaugh needed to get to a point where he had all of his own recruits on the field with talent and experience and his system in place and then he could start taking steps towards winning his division, but because he turned Brady Hoke's recruits that had gone 12-13 in 2013 and 2014 combined into a team that went 20-6 in 2015 and 2016 and saw several players go to the NFL, Harbaugh is suddenly an overrated underachiever that can't beat his rivals and cares more about taking his team to Rome and Paris than he does winning football games. 

You know what that mindset is? It's 15 years of frustration as a Michigan fan being piled on to the current head coach who has only been here for the last three. Stop it, it's ridiculous. 

We all forget pretty quick that the 2-15 record against OSU since 2001 started with Lloyd Carr's inability to beat Jim Tressel for seven years. A 1-6 record. 2003 was the only time Lloyd won that game, incidentally the last time Michigan won a Big Ten title outright in football. 

Then Rich Rod happens. He fails to beat the rivals once in three seasons. 0-3 against MSU and OSU apiece. 

Then Hoke comes in and only beats each of them once in four seasons. 1-3 against MSU and OSU apiece. 

That's 14 years of rivalry damage before Harbaugh even steps to the podium on December 30, 2014, and that's amidst all of the other garbage that was going on with the program at the time. So he's had a giant mess to clean up since he's been here and if you go back and compare what Michigan football looked like in 2014 to even what it looked like last year, it's still night and day. No one is happy losing any games, especially to chirpy trash-talking rivals that troll your coach's media day press conference with inanities about the record against the rivals, but if you're a Michigan fan questioning Harbaugh's success at this point in time then you have serious issues with impatience, and what's worse is that the pundits and experts know that and capitalize on it. That's why you have jokers like Jason Whitlock and Shannon Sharpe calling Harbaugh a failure after his first three seasons. Whether they believe that garbage or not, they know that Michigan fans eat that up as a self-pity special and they're going to make sure they hand it to us on a silver platter to consume. 

Whether Michigan fans or the pundits admit it or not, Jim Harbaugh is being blamed for more than a decade of failure at Michigan that he had nothing to do with. He's the one that's been spending the last three years doing all he can to fix it, and when you look at the program as a whole, I don't see how you can't find what he's fixed. The alumnus dissension is over, the divisions are gone, we have a competent athletic director and the talent gap between Michigan and the rivals is all but closed. That's seven years worth of catastrophic damage mostly repaired in his first three seasons. Is that the ultimate goal? Of course not. Do we want to beat the rivals and win the Big Ten? Of course we do, but stop the revisionist history on the situation Harbaugh walked into just because you're tired of losing to MSU and OSU. It wasn't that long ago that "Trouble With the Snap" or "JT was short" was "a minimum three touchdown loss by the third quarter to either rival. No moral victories, but it's still a process headed in the right direction at the end of the day. 

"All or Nothing" is worth every Michigan fan's attention

I'll admit that after the 2017 college football season ended, the last thing I wanted to do was see what came of the Amazon documentary show about Michigan Football. Watching the 8-5 nightmare was painful enough, why would I want to relive that at all? 

Then the trailer came out a few weeks before the show released and it seriously looked good. Instead of being a show simply about wins and losses on the football field, this looked like a show that was going to give us the glimpse into the coaches, players and program in general that we all had wanted through a tough season. This wasn't going to be like a championship video gone awry because the team had failed to do it, this was going to be a chronicle of what that season did to our Michigan Wolverines on and off the field. 

I didn't get a chance to binge it all on Friday April 6 when it was released, but I've been sick lately and confined to quarters so Saturday was a perfect time for it. 8 episodes total, each of them less than an hour in length. I'm in. 

After binging through the whole series All or Nothing: The Michigan Wolverines, I can confidently say that not only am I glad I watched it, but also that any Michigan football fan that suffered through the 2017 season should find some time in their schedule and watch it too. You owe it to yourself to do so, in my opinion. 

What do I mean by that exactly? Well if you were like me and many other Michigan fans during the 2017 season you were frustrated, confused, angry and heartbroken for pretty much the entire season through eight wins that were almost all tougher than they should have been, and five losses that outside of Penn State could have gone the other way if only we had a solid QB......or an offensive line......or someone other than Tim Drevno and Pep Hamilton calling plays for us on offense......or if Jim Harbaugh showed the same energy and intensity that we saw him have in 2015 and 2016. You probably fell into one of those four camps of reasoning as to why 8-5 was the final record. 

All or Nothing does an incredible job of addressing almost all of those camps, to the point where if you give the show an open-minded watch as a Michigan fan, you might come out of it with a clearer understanding of why this team faltered the way it did in 2017. What makes the show awesome is that it manages to do this without completely throwing anyone under the bus in the process. The struggles and the pain of 2017 are still very much there in a way that we've never been privy to see before, but there's no finger pointing done by anyone involved or by narrator Mark Harmon. You are presented with everything the 2017 Michigan Wolverines Football team had to deal with, what the outcome was and how it affected them. Fully. In great detail. 

You really get to know that 2017 team and staff VERY well throughout the whole show. You don't just meet Harbaugh's entire family from Episode 1 on, you also meet Don Brown's family, Pep Hamilton's family, and the families of Rashan Gary, Karan Higdon, Chase Winovich, Brandon Peters and many more on the team. Not everyone is featured or profiled in the show, but you get a great look into the lives of these men that went through a tough season last year. 

That's really the part of All or Nothing that makes it a great show: the ability to humanize our heroes at The Big House into regular people and show you their lives outside of the gridiron and how football is just part of their incredible world. It's really an incredible look at the story of 2017 from a lens outside of just being a fan. To see Gary's emotional struggles in a powerful moment with his mother Jennifer, to see Tarik Black's mother with tears in her eyes as she talks to Kevin Tolbert about her son's broken foot, and to see the brotherhood bond between the whole team and the coaches that will never be broken no matter how much we all want to forget the 2017 season. It's seriously powerful stuff and something that really only a Michigan fan will fully understand and accept, especially if you experienced that season as a fan like I and countless others did. 

It's not the easiest thing for a Michigan fan to watch at times during the five losses, especially when you remember how you felt when they happened and then you see how the team and coaching staff felt about them. Only a heartless bastard wouldn't feel some emotion for those kids or those coaches after the MSU loss, the OSU loss or the bowl game loss. Sure if you're a Spartan, Buckeye or South Carolina Gamecock fan you'll probably be gleeful at reliving those nightmares for Michigan, but you'll also be wasting time watching a show that isn't made for you and shouldn't concern you at all......unless you're obsessed with Michigan in general, in which case I understand. You poor devils. 

If I'm judging All or Nothing as just a Michigan fan, I would absolutely take a show about a much more successful season over what happened in 2017. As a fan of good TV shows however, I could argue that this show is as good as it is BECAUSE the season went the way it did. It's easy and in some cases pretty boring to watch a show about a winning team that experiences a great deal of success because you've got no high and lows or peaks and valleys to entertain you or keep you interested. When that happens a lot of times, like when Big Ten Network does championship season retrospective shows, they'll stretch to find low points in a show to display adversity that the team faced and a lot of the time it just seems contrived or over the top. This is REAL adversity with Michigan Football in 2017 though and we see it up close and personal throughout the show, and more importantly we see the lessons that the players and coaches learn as a result of that adversity. Now whether or not that has bearing on the 2018 football season remains to be seen, but the message is very clear in this show and it is done very well with great production value by Amazon. 

The bottom line is watch All or Nothing: The Michigan Wolverines if you really want some more insight and depth of understanding into what the team and coaching staff went through during a very tough season. Your perspectives on some of what you think you know might change a bit. I've already seen a lot of people change their minds about Pep Hamilton for example, going from fans that wanted him fired along with Tim Drevno to now really wanting him to have another shot to succeed in 2018. Your opinions of Harbaugh's energy and determination may change too. They may not at all and this show just might be a reminder of a terrible season for you, but as a Michigan fan I'm glad to have gotten to know this team better in a way that we fans don't generally see and I truly could not be prouder of them as a fan as I am right now. Here's hoping 2018 is miles better for all of us. GO BLUE! 

The uncertain, but not hopeless future of Michigan Football

It's been over a week since the Outback Bowl disaster. Yes, it was a disaster. Even the most eternal optimist among Michigan fans has to admit that to themselves, one would think. 

If you don't, you really don't have to go far to find a fellow fan that will remind you of it. 

Michigan's 26-19 loss to South Carolina in the 2018 Outback Bowl was the rotten cherry on top of what was at best a disappointing 8-5 season in Jim Harbaugh's third year as head coach. To say that the Michigan faithful are beside themselves at this point would be an understatement. Emotions are somewhat understandably all over the place, ranging from those who are remaining patient until 2018 when the roster is full of nothing but Harbaugh-recruited upperclassmen for the most part, to those who are calling for Harbaugh's head and proclaiming this to be just as bad as The Dark Times of Rich Rod and Brady Hoke. 

If I'm leaning toward either of those extremes, it's the former one for certain. I've mentioned before that the eight recruiting defections before Harbaugh was even hired coupled with the two weeks he had to recruit at all in 2015, effectively robbed him of a true "Year 3" like James Franklin at Penn State, Urban Meyer at OSU and Nick Saban at Alabama to name a few enjoyed. The 2017 Michigan Wolverines Football team featured far more inexperienced underclassmen on both sides of the ball than upperclassmen, and the season featured more than a few growing pains along the way. 

Yet now in the offseason, much the fanbase is screaming at Harbaugh and the coaching staff for the most part because of how putrid the offense was all season. Inexperienced or not, many think that even a very young team can do much better than 96th in total offense, 49th in rushing yards per game and 111th in passing yards per game. Honestly, they would be right. Even with an offensive line that still featured at least three of Hoke's recruits and injuries at running back, wide receiver and quarterback, the offense should have been demonstratively better than the bottom third of the nation's teams. 

Was all of it purely because of QB injuries? Well, as easy as it is to pin everything on Wilton Speight and later Brandon Peters going down, it's hardly the whole picture. John O'Korn was simply not good in relief outside of the Purdue game and it was major gaffes by the O-Line in the first place that even got Speight and Peters hurt as it is. The prospect of burning Dylan McCaffrey's redshirt wasn't even a consideration and just like that, Michigan had a major depth issue at QB. Again, many are calling out Harbaugh for that based on the "Year 3" principle. 

On the one hand, you can see the point from a perspective of time, but on the other hand it's not like he didn't try to get a QB in his first and only two weeks of recruiting in 2015. In fact he did get one, Zach Gentry who was later converted to tight end. After that, we're looking at a progression of transfers in Jake Rudock and O'Korn and actual recruits with a grand total of five games of experience between them, so it's also easy to say the jury is still out on Harbaugh's QB recruitment. It really is. 

This is why the Shea Patterson transfer is so important, not because it's an indictment on Peters or McCaffrey's abilities, but because of numbers. Now that O'Korn is graduating and Speight is transferring, you're left with two QB's on your roster that aren't true freshman, one that will be in Joe Milton and another in Kevin Doyle that is being asked to attend prep school for a year. Michigan simply needs numbers at the QB position and if Patterson is likely cleared to play in 2018, they'll have three capable players at the position. 

But what does all of that matter if the coaching problems still exist on offense? It's painfully clear that Michigan's offensive identity for most of 2017 was "ineptitude" and while it was easy for fans like me to blame that on youth, it became clear that the play calling and coaching were beyond suspect most of the time, the Outback Bowl arguably being the most egregious example. 

Under no circumstances can 2017's horrid offensive numbers ever be repeated. Ever. In Everdom. This is likely why former Arkansas offensive coordinator and former Michigan State QB Dan Enos has been brought aboard, reportedly as WR coach and offensive assistant. Now we're all waiting to see what happens with the rest of the staff and it's just not happening fast enough for most fans right now. The notion of either Pep Hamilton or Tim Drevno returning as part of Michigan's offensive coaching staff in 2018 is beyond repellent to Michigan fans after this season, even if in a diminished role. 

In my opinion, I think Enos' hire means the end of Pep's short time at Michigan, but Drevno could still remain in another capacity. The only way I'm okay with that is if the responsibilities of the offensive coaching staff are streamlined. No more "running game coordinator" and "passing game coordinator." That time should be over. Have someone be THE offensive coordinator, even if it's Harbaugh himself. If it's his offense and he is unwilling to delegate that responsibility to someone else to create Michigan's offensive identity, then he needs to take it over himself and be the bearer of that responsibility. Having several hands in the process didn't work. Clearly. If it did, we wouldn't be in the position we are in now. 

Michigan fans want a pound of flesh for this season's disappointment, as well as the 1-5 record against the rivals that the nation has been trumpeting for a while now, and for still no B1G title game appearance even in the first three seasons of Harbaugh's tenure. This is tough because as a fanbase, we aren't just dealing with the past three years with regard to disappointment. We're dealing with more than a decade of it in terms of winning the B1G championship and being 2-15 against OSU since 2001 and 3-8 against MSU since 2007 is just extra stinging salt in the gaping wound. 

Of course, all is not lost. Not by a long shot. 

Changes have already happened and are further coming with the coaching staff. Enos is aboard, Al Washington from Boston College is aboard and already recruiting along with Sherrone Moore from CMU, and while there is still uncertainty about Chris Partridge's future we at least know he turned down a job at Alabama. Here's hoping he stays on that defensive staff for sure. 

It's difficult to believe that Jim Harbaugh isn't aware of how much needs to be fixed with the offense, or that he's not hearing the howl of the wolves in the fanbase and among the alumni that want his head on a platter. He simply has to know that there is much to fix and now it's just a question of whether or not you trust him to fix it. Either you treat 2017 as a "down year" just before the rise we have all been waiting for, or you no longer trust Harbaugh and you're ready to move on if 2018 isn't a drastic improvement from even how 2016 ended. Plenty of Michigan fans sit on either side of it but time will tell which side is going to be louder when it all shakes out. Right now the trust level is waning at best, eroding at worst. 2018 and its ensuing off-season certainly looks to be the year that BIG things better happen for Michigan Football, or else that scrutiny that is happening now among the fanbase is only going to get worse. A lot worse. 

Fixing O'Korn is Michigan's best chance for success

18 of 26 for 270 yards, a touchdown, an interception and a 161.5 QB rating.

That's John O'Korn's stat line from the Purdue game weeks ago.

It's not fake or exaggerated. HE did that. He IS capable of that kind of play. 

The question is, what has been different over the last two games since he had that good one against Purdue? The easy button answer is that he played better defenses, but he threw for 198 against MSU, statistically #4 in the nation in total defense that gives up 161 yards in the air per game. 3 INT's yes, but to act like the rain had nothing to do with that at all is just being silly. 

If it's a case of not making all of his progressions and getting tunnel vision on the first guy he sees, what was different about Purdue? That their defense wasn't able to capitalize on that? The same Purdue defense that held Wisky QB Alex Hornibrook to 199 yards passing and 2 INT's at Camp Randall? 

Against Sparty, O'Korn was all over the place, as was the offense as a whole. Against Indiana, he was exactly 50% at 10 of 20 passing, and since Michigan allowed no sacks in the game, clearly there was a dedicated emphasis on running the football. Is that solely because of lack of trust in O'Korn or because the running game is getting better? 271 yards rushing and 6.2 yards per carry says the latter. 

So then how misleading is 58 yards passing? If you have a young offense that needs simplicity to build confidence, why not go to the ground game if you know it is working? Everyone talks about having a balanced offense and that's the prettiest option to look at, but if you have something that is starting to work and it will help you win, why wouldn't you go to that more often? How many people screamed that during the MSU game? How many suggested that exact course of action leading up to Indiana? Now that Michigan actually did it, it's a huge problem? That dog don't hunt. 

Look, O'Korn wasn't good against the Hoosiers and he needs to improve but he didn't turn the ball over and it wasn't necessary for him to air it out for them to win. That's football. You go with what works. Today the running game worked. Really well. Michigan shouldn't be crucified for going to it so much. 

Against Purdue, O'Korn was on target, cool, calm and collected for the rest of the game. An argument can be made that Michigan doesn't win that game without him playing as well as he did that day. The best course of action now is to figure out what he did in that game and get him back to that, because that John O'Korn DOES exist, we have seen it and getting him back to that level combined with a seemingly improving running game with a possible feature back in Higdon is what this offense needs to optimally succeed......and calm most of you down. Maybe. 

The truth about the pain of being a Michigan fan

I don't like it when my teams lose. In fact, I hate it. It makes my skin crawl. 

Part of the reason why isn't the loss itself. It's the fans, so called pundits and trash talkers that do everything in their power to troll you afterwards, especially if you lose to a rival. 

The 21st Century has been anything but kind to Michigan Football when it comes to major rivalries. In 2001, Ohio State hired Jim Tressel and in his decade of tenure as the Buckeyes head coach he went 9-1 against Michigan, a stark contrast from previous head coach John Cooper's 2-10-1 record against the Wolverines, which was a great time to be alive for sure. Urban Meyer is in his sixth season at OSU and is a perfect 5-0 against Michigan there. 

That's just the beginning of the nightmare. In 2007, Michigan State hired Mark Dantonio as head football coach and he is now 8-3 against the Wolverines, with four of those wins coming in Ann Arbor at The Big House. Now granted, six of those wins came during The Dark Times of Rich Rodriguez and Brady Hoke from 2008 to 2014, but it's beyond maddening to consider that Michigan's primary rivals are a combined 17-4 against the Wolverines in the past decade, the most recent win being a 14-10 debacle which saw Michigan's offense turn the ball over to Michigan State five times and manage only 300 yards of total offense. 

Naturally, the headlines have been nothing short of vile: 

Yes, those are vile to me. I told you, I hate when my teams lose. 

Now look, I won't even deal with the full unpleasantness of the game, with everything from ESPN's Spartan Love Fest during the entire broadcast to the refs that managed to give MSU home field advantage in the first half, because the truth is that Michigan deserved to lose that game. Well, the offense did. On all levels and in all facets. Blocking, ball security, ball control, red zone, field position, play calling, clock management, etc. All of it was putrid for the Michigan offense against its in-state rival on a national stage at night in front of 112,000 fans that got drenched in a monsoon during the second half. It was a bad game for Michigan, there is no doubt about it. Everyone shoulders blame and everyone gets to live with the sting of those rats in East Lansing taking Paul Bunyan back there yet again. 

So now we deal with the aftermath, which is nothing short of biblical already. For someone like me that is a rational Michigan fan, I'm basically dealing with several levels of classless behavior for at least the next week from the following sources: 

- MSU fans that love nothing more than to pour a giant bag of salt into your gaping wound. All of you can go straight to Hell, I mean that with everything I have in my cold black heart. You had no business being in that game let alone winning it and now I have to deal with your fanboy chirping about how Harbaugh is one of the worst coaches in the country and can't hold Dantonio's jock.....the same Dantonio that half of you idiots wanted fired after you won three games last year. Go share the Paul Bunyan Trophy with your prison brethren and call it good, you classless little rats. Was that too harsh? Good. 

- Pundits and experts that spell doom and gloom for Michigan and are itching to put Harbaugh and his staff on the hot seat. Without question, BTN, ESPN, FOX and any other sports outlet that covers college football will be dancing cantatas on the figurative graves of the Michigan offensive coaches and Harbaugh himself. Expect Paul Finebaum to chirp about it on his show, expect Mike Valenti to have a field day with his daily browbeating of Michigan fans on 97.1 The Ticket, expect former players from MSU and OSU to chirp about it on television and social media, and expect Michigan to be declared the worst ranked team in all of college football over one horrible performance. If there is one thing that is certain about life itself it is that our misery and pain as Michigan fans is joy and rapture for the rest of the world. Everyone else loves to hate us. Period. When we lose, especially badly, the jokes, the memes and the genuine cruelty can't come fast enough. 

- Michigan fans that are beyond impatient and now want the entire offensive coaching staff fired, up to and in some cases including Jim Harbaugh himself. Believe it or not, this is the worst group of them all because these are Michigan fans that are choosing to ignore reality and practicality in favor of hyperbole and snap judgment. These are people who think we were better off back in The Dark Times with Rich Rod and Hoke because Hoke had a better winning percentage at this point against the rivals. These are people who only see the 1-4 against Dantonio and Meyer now for Harbaugh and completely ignore the fact that it's Year 3, or they know that it is Year 3 and they think he should be ruling the roost now because they ignore the fact that unlike other successful coaches in Year 3 like Urban Meyer and Nick Saban, Jim Harbaugh was sandbagged with his first recruiting class by the previous regime, so instead of a Top 10 class of 25 kids in his first year like both Saban and Meyer had, he was stuck with a class ranked 50th of 16 kids, half of whom transferred or left the team by now. This means an offense in Year 3 that is devoid of super talented juniors and is heavily reliant on freshmen and sophomores to get the job done in several places. In fact, aside from Mason Cole, Patrick Kugler, John O'Korn, Ty Isaac, Grant Perry and Karan Higdon, the entire rest of the offense that regularly starts is underclassmen, especially at wide receiver. Good luck winning a national title with that because neither Saban nor Meyer had to deal with that one bit. 

Look, I understand the frustration to a point. After The Dark Times, Michigan fans are tired of excuses and waiting for the ship to be righted. They want to go back to beating both rivals into submission, they want pretty blowout wins, an offensive line that blows everyone five yards off the ball on every play, running backs like Mike Hart and Tyrone Wheatley, wide receivers like David Terrell and Braylon Edwards and QB's like Tom Brady and Chad Henne, and since they haven't had that for so long, they want it all right now. They see the salaries that the coaching staff is currently making, they see the lack of results offensively every week and they are out for blood and a pound of flesh right now. Patience is the last word they want to hear at all about Michigan Football......which is partly why I am going to say it here because I couldn't care less if they don't want to hear it. The truth is that patience is needed here because this team full of underclassmen has got some growing up to do and that only comes with game experience, not practices. 

I watched that game against MSU and I saw a young Michigan team that had no idea what that game was going to be like. No idea that MSU wasn't going to be intimidated on that field because of how many times their stupid program has won on it in the last decade. No idea how physical they were going to be and how chippy they wanted the game to get. No idea how personal and emotional that setting was for them, especially with a chance to humiliate their hated rival on ESPN in front of the whole state of Michigan and the entire nation itself. They were expecting a football game and they got a street fight, which is what MSU does under Dantonio. It's dirty, it's ugly and it's grinding but it's what they do. Our kids didn't know that going in and they weren't going to know that until they experienced it themselves. Now they have, in brutally honest fashion and they will never hear the end of it from anyone, including our own fans. This is the time when a team faces true adversity and decides whether or not they are going to answer the call. 

It's very easy to point the finger at people and say it is their fault that games are lost or that things happen. It's much more difficult for people to look at all sides of a situation and understand exactly what is going on that is causing things to be the case. For me, I'm not happy about any loss whatsoever, especially to THAT fanbase in East Lansing, but I'm also not surprised, nor am I angry about it. I said going into the season that the floor for a Jim Harbaugh coached Michigan team was 10-2 and I stand by that. One of the games I thought they might lose was Florida and they didn't. The other one I suspected was Wisconsin at Camp Randall in November so two losses are certainly still possible, but I'm not allowing the MSU game to plunge me off the ledge into "this is a 6 or 7 win team" territory like so many fans have already done. I'm not allowing it to change my opinion of Harbaugh as a head coach, or my belief that this team is talented enough to win the remainder of its games on the schedule. They hit a major snag against the Spartans and it's going to hurt them, much to the delight of Dantonio and his classless cronies, but this team and these young players will learn from this pain, their coaches will help them learn from it and it is up to them to decide how they are going to fight back for the rest of the season. Michigan is now a one-loss team, that is true. So is Ohio State, Oklahoma, Oklahoma State and USC, all teams that lost while being ranked in the Top 10. If none of those schools are going to give up at this point in the season, then neither should Michigan......or its fanbase. 

Angry Michigan fans need to remember "The Dark Times"

No sane Michigan fan wants to go back to this. Remember that the next time you decide to blast Harbaugh, Drevno or any of the players this season. 

I've been actively watching Michigan football for over 20 years now and this is the most I have ever seen the fanbase complain and whine over a currently undefeated Michigan team. Seriously, I can't remember a time when it was THIS bad. You got fans booing players on the field, fans calling out coaches including Jim Harbaugh himself and fans sending angry hate messages to players on social media, which feels like it should be illegal to do but it sadly isn't. 

When you confront these fans about their irrationally frustrating behavior, they give you the following line of excuses for it: 

- We are paying fans and we have the right to be critical of our team!

- We are not going to pretend like everything is alright! When there is something wrong, it needs to be addressed!

- Bo is rolling over in his grave because of how this team is playing right now!

- This kind of play is not going to get it done against good teams on the schedule! 

- We haven't won a conference title in over a decade! Heads need to roll! 

I'm paraphrasing, but this is the kind of logic I have seen on several message boards and in Michigan Facebook groups. A lot of fans really are angry that Michigan doesn't have a good red zone percentage, doesn't have a world-beating QB and isn't beating teams by 40 or more three games into the season......which is funny because I remember three years ago when all I wanted as a Michigan fan was a team that didn't embarrass the hell out of me every Saturday afternoon in the fall. 

I think that a lot of Michigan fans complaining now about our 3-0 team have lost perspective on the situation and are in desperate need of a history lesson. This history lesson doesn't go back that far at all, just ten years to be exact. Well to be fair, it's actually closer to eleven years, all the way back to one of the saddest if not the saddest day in Michigan football history: The Day that Bo Died. 

Make no mistake, Bo Schembechler was the patriarch of Michigan football and is still arguably our most hallowed and revered coach in the long and storied history of the program. The day he died, I was working at Jet's Pizza in Davison, Michigan and I got a text alert that it had happened. Shortly thereafter my dad, the man responsible for initiating my University of Michigan love at a young age, called me and said that it felt like a death in our own family and he was right. Not to get too maudlin and depressing here, but that was officially the beginning of "The Dark Times" as I call it for Michigan football. 

The next day, our undefeated 11-0 football team took the field against our 11-0 arch-nemesis Ohio State and played the historic "No. 1 vs. No. 2 game," which saw Michigan lose by a field goal 42-39, ending our bid to win the B1G and our bid to get a shot at playing for a national title. We were all heartbroken for too many reasons that day. 

The following year saw Michigan football as the victim of the greatest upset in the history of college football when Appalachian State came into Ann Arbor and literally shocked the world with a 34-32 upset of the No. 5 Wolverines. Instantly, we were the punch line of the entire nation and our enemies had shirts made to commemorate our single greatest failure on the football field. Seriously, as if we hadn't been hurt enough already. That loss was epic enough to drop Michigan more than 20 spots, all the way out of the polls and they didn't get back to being ranked until Week 8 with a 5-2 record. They finished 9-4 that year with a Citrus Bowl win over Urban Meyer's Florida Gators, led by then QB Tim Tebow and it was a grand send off for head coach Lloyd Carr, who was retiring after that game and handing the reigns of the football team over to Rich Rodriguez, fresh from West Virginia with a nice new spread offense in hand. 

I remember friends of mine thinking that 2008 would be at least a nine or ten win season and that we would win a national championship within the next year or two. I didn't argue with them at all because I also thought it was possible. Little did we know what abject horror and pain awaited us around the corner. 

That pain was a 15-22 record over the next three seasons, complete with no bowl appearances in 2008 or 2009, snapping our bowl game streak, two seasons of sub-500 finishes in the win-loss column and most damning of all, a winless record of 0-6 against BOTH major rivals, Ohio State and Michigan State. It was positively surreal. 

In the midst of this, Dave Brandon was hired as the athletic director. He fired Rodriguez and then hired Brady Hoke, a former defensive line coach for Michigan that had compiled a 47-50 win-loss record as a head coach at smaller programs like Ball State and San Diego State. Before Rich Rod was hired, we thought the spread offense was what we needed to get out of the antiquated "three yards and a cloud of dust" mentality that we always seemed to be in offensively, but now we were desperate for the old days again and Hoke and Brandon promised us that they were coming back. For a minute, it seemed like they were when the team went 11-2 in 2011. They still lost to MSU, but they did beat OSU for the first time since 2003, a victory that still rings somewhat hollow because it was during OSU's probationary period and Luke Fickell was the interim head coach, Jim Tressel having been let go earlier. The year ended with a Sugar Bowl win over Virginia Tech and we thought we were back in business. 

We found out the next year that business just wasn't good. At all. We took a throttling on national television from Alabama to start the season, turned the ball over six times a few weeks later in a silly loss to Notre Dame, also on national television, and finished the year 8-5 with a loss in the Outback Bowl that made Jadeveon Clowney famous for his crushing hit on Vincent Smith. Just like that, the nation was right back to laughing at us again. 

Then came 2013 and with it, the game that broke my soul as a Michigan fan: November 2 against MSU. I knew we were going to lose and I knew it wasn't going to be pretty, but I didn't know it was going to be that brutal. I watched Devin Gardner almost die on the field that day in a 29-6 loss that wasn't that close and I was done with Brady Hoke at that point. What had been a 5-0 start with some shaky wins agains Akron and Connecticut, followed by a quadruple OT loss to Penn State on the road and a video game offense win at home over Indiana ended with losing five of the final six games, including a mismanaged one point loss to the Buckeyes at home and a humbling loss to Kansas State in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl. At 7-6, it really felt like we were back where we started when Rich Rod left. 

One more year of embarrassment from Brady Hoke and Dave Brandon, both of whom were fired in 2014, featured Notre Dame waxing us 31-0 on national television again, losing to Utah at home, losing the Little Brown Jug to Minnesota at home in the infamous "Concussion-gate" game with poor Shane Morris, losing to Rutgers AND Maryland in their first years in the B1G, and of course getting pasted by both rivals on the road. 5-7 record, no bowl game in sight for the third time in seven years and back to the all-time low that we thought we were escaping when Hoke was hired. 

Michigan's overall win-loss record from 2008 to 2014 was 46-42, a winning percentage of .523. The team averaged 28.4 points per game in that time while giving up an average of 25.4 points per game to its opponents. 

From 2015 through the first three games of this season, Michigan's overall win-loss record under Jim Harbaugh is 23-6, a winning percentage of .793. The team has averaged 34.8 points per game since 2015 while giving up an average of 15 points per game to its opponents. 

So that means in two seasons and counting since Harbaugh has taken over, Michigan's average margin of victory has gone from a field goal to 19.8 points. Alright, to be fair the team is under it's average just for this season, only winning each game by an average of 18 points, so I guess there is improvement to be made to get that 1.8 points back. 

Seriously. Perspective, people. I spent seven years in abject hell as a Michigan fan constantly watching our team get destroyed by the Buckeyes, Spartans and Domers on national television, watching us miss bowl games, watching our team struggle to beat Air Force by six and UConn by a field goal, watching a putrid brand of identity crisis football that featured a 67-65 triple OT win over Illinois in 2010, a 12-10 "field goal only" win against MSU in 2012 that I was disgustingly desperate to be proud of, and the dreaded "Moon Game" against Northwestern that ended in a 10-9 win which also featured six interceptions combined from each team......and you want me to be bothered by early red zone issues with a young team in the third year of Michigan's "renaissance," while they are still undefeated and growing as a team. No. Just, no. Stop it right now. 

I really didn't suffer through The Dark Times as a fan of Michigan football for us to get impatient and lose our collective minds now while we are still ascending. This 2017 Michigan team isn't perfect, has a lot of youthful talent across the board and most certainly has things to work on to become an elite squad, but before you condemn Harbaugh, Tim Drevno, Wilton Speight, the right side of the offensive line or any of the players and coaches at all for that matter, remind yourself just how godawful this football program was only three short years ago and consider if what you are really complaining about is worth the ridiculous impatience you are showing with your attitude. We are out of the tunnel, into the light and now we are headed up to the mountaintop. Don't be the jerk that's whining because it might take us a bit longer to get there. We're damn lucky to even be out of the tunnel in the first place. 

GO BLUE! 

Why the "Year 3" argument doesn't work for Harbaugh

The Michigan Wolverines football team is currently 3-0, ranked No. 8 in both the AP and Coaches Polls, averaging 33 points per game while only giving up an average of 15 points per game. 

You wouldn't know it talking to a large portion of the fanbase, though. To hear them tell it, Michigan is 0-3, unranked and can only score field goals on a consistent basis against the "worst" opponents in the country. That's a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration, but this is what a lot of Michigan fans are exuding right now with an undefeated team just three weeks into the season. 

As far as fan reactions go, this might be the most polarizing 3-0 start to a season for a fanbase as large as Michigan's with some people saying redshirt junior QB Wilton Speight needs to immediately be benched in favor of sophomore Brandon Peters or even freshman Dylan McCaffrey, and others saying that anyone doubting this team in Year 3 is not a "real" Michigan fan and should go root for someone else. We've even got fans booing the team at Michigan Stadium and questioning the coaching staff, including head coach Jim Harbaugh's ability to recruit and develop talent, especially at the QB position. You know, the position he played for three years at Michigan and for 14 years in the NFL? Right. 

The incredibly irrational and highly irritating criticisms being levied by a lot of Michigan fans at the team right now are a thing to behold in itself, but the recruiting and development aspect is one that seems to come up more often than not lately. Many pundits predicted going into the 2017 season that Michigan would be an 8-4 to 9-3 team with just too much talent to replace on both sides of the ball, especially the defense that lost 10 starters to the NFL draft. So far this season, the defense has been nothing short of elite and is challenging to potentially being even better and certainly faster than last year's unit, but the offense has had its struggles with consistency in the passing game and the red zone, scoring just one red zone touchdown out of 10 red zone possessions so far this year. The game against Air Force seemed to be the biggest culprit of this with sophomore kicker Quinn Nordin having to hit five field goals during the course of the game because Michigan failed to convert on third down. Michigan won the game 29-13, but questions mounted among the fanbase as to why in Harbaugh's third year at Michigan he doesn't appear to have the juggernaut that many fans and others with higher expectations than 8-4 or 9-3 seem to think that he should. 

It was also noted before the season by many that two of Harbaugh's most notable coaching peers, Alabama's Nick Saban and Ohio State's Urban Meyer both won national championships at their respective schools in Year 3 of their tenures there. This has no doubt added fuel to the fire of those who think Harbaugh should be on the track to do the same at Michigan this year, and are more than frustrated that his team doesn't appear to be offensively......even though they are 3-0 and have won every game by an average margin of 18 points. 

Let's put aside the sheer lunacy of a lot of the fanbase's complaints three weeks into the season and look at the "Year 3" argument a number of them are using. The contention here is that Year 3 is the time when a coach no longer has a majority of players from the previous regime that he didn't recruit himself and now has a team full of his own recruits that have spent two years in his system and are ready to perform. This is a solid and viable plan for success, provided that your first recruiting class is strong enough and talented enough to carry out that plan on the field in Year 3.

While there is no doubt that Michigan has a great deal of talent on the field this season, there is a notable difference between what Harbaugh has on the field this year and what Saban and Meyer as examples had on the field in their third years. 

This was Nick Saban's first recruiting class at Alabama in 2007: 

And this was Urban Meyer's first recruiting class at Ohio State in 2012: 

In both cases, Saban and Meyer had classes of 25 kids ranked as a Top 10 recruiting class. These were the first classes for each coach that were expected to take the reigns for Alabama and Ohio State two years later and they did with Alabama going 14-0 and winning the national title in 2009 and Ohio State going 14-1 to win the national title in 2014. 

Now here's Harbaugh's first class at Michigan in 2015:

Notice anything different? Not only was it a much smaller class but it was also ranked middle of the road and it wasn't for a lack of talent among the players in the class, it was purely for lack of numbers. See unlike Saban and Meyer, Harbaugh came into Michigan on the heels of a decommitment exodus. Eight highly ranked players left the recruiting class before Harbaugh was even hired on December 30, 2014. He had two weeks to do what he could to salvage what he had and made the most of it, but was unable to get Mike Weber to swing back to Michigan from Ohio State and couldn't flip any other four or five star recruits so late in the game, though it wasn't for lack of trying. 

Now, true to the Year 3 argument logic, most of this class that is still around IS on the field this year taking the reigns. Junior Grant Perry might be Michigan's current best receiver, junior Karan Higdon is one of our best running backs, Nolan Ulizio is starting on the offensive line with Jon Runyan pushing to crack that lineup as well, Tyrone Wheatley is one of the leaders of the tight end stable along with Zach Gentry and Tyree Kinnel is arguably our best athlete in the secondary. Defensive end Reuben Jones is also in the defensive line rotation as well. A notable loss here though is offensive tackle Grant Newsome, who went down with that serious injury in the Wisconsin game last year that nearly cost him his leg. He's making incredible progress rehabbing it now but if he were healthy, he'd be on that starting O-line for certain as one of the best we have. The other five recruits in this class that haven't been mentioned, defensive end Shelton Johnson, cornerback Keith Washington, wide receiver Brian Cole, QB Alex Malzone and kicker Andrew David all transferred prior to this season. 

So out of an already small class of 14, half are still at Michigan to carry the upperclassman workload for the team and one is out for the year rehabbing an injury. There are plenty of other upperclassmen carrying the workload for the team on the roster including Speight but they were all Brady Hoke recruits, not Harbaugh. In fact, there are more players left from Hoke's final class in 2014 (12) than there are from Harbaugh's first class in 2015. If you want to make the case that the presence of those players, almost all of whom are playing significantly for this team are the reason Year 3 should be dynamite for Harbaugh, that's a discussion to have with the caveat that he didn't recruit them initially, though as Meyer said recently in a rare moment that I agree with him, once you sign the contract they are your players. Harbaugh certainly sees it the same way, as he should. 

The bottom line here is that the "Year 3 with his own players" argument doesn't work for Harbaugh because of the tough situation he was put in with the low numbers on that first class, especially since it only had one QB that ended up transferring because he couldn't crack the lineup. His first true QB recruit is the sophomore Peters and his second is the freshman McCaffrey. They're waiting in the wings, but when you have two upperclassman QB's in Speight and senior John O'Korn who both earned their positions over Peters and McCaffrey, there's no reason to throw underclassman QB's into the fire. Alabama avoided it by starting junior Greg McElroy in 2009 and the only reason Ohio State didn't avoid it and started J.T. Barrett as a redshirt freshman in 2014 is because senior Braxton Miller went down with a season-ending injury during fall camp. 

Now again to be fair, the argument could be made that a Year 3 featuring nine Brady Hoke recruited upperclassmen from the 2014 class, combined with the seven upperclassmen from Harbaugh's first class in 2015 should be enough to have a great year, but then you might also have to acknowledge the fact that Brady Hoke did recruit some solid talent and that Michigan is in fact still undefeated and currently having a successful season despite all of the caterwauling and whining being done about offensive inefficiency three games into the season. No one is saying there's no work to be done on offense, but it certainly isn't the dire situation so many fans are making it out to be. 

What Michigan's dominant win over Florida really means

DETROIT FREE PRESS

Forget the hype from the fanbases, forget the gamesmanship from the head coaches and forget the ten players suspended for Florida that still didn't move the betting line further than 4.5 in favor of Michigan. For that matter, forget the numerous starters and talent from 2016 that Michigan lost to the NFL draft, all but guaranteeing by the feelings of many pundits and experts that Michigan was going to be rebuilding in 2017, having missed a golden opportunity to win the Big Ten and get to the College Football Playoff with an upperclassman-laden team last year. 

Predictions of anything from a 6-6 to a 9-3 record in 2017 were heaped on the Wolverines all off-season, and almost all of them included an 0-1 start at the hands of the Florida Gators on neutral ground at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas. That didn't quite go as many of the experts planned, though. In fact, what was seen and billed as a low-scoring defensive affair between two teams with better defensive units than offensive units was actually just two quick turnovers erased away from being a complete blowout. In fact, if not for a wrong penalty called in the first quarter that erased a touchdown and a pair of missed field goals in the second half, it might have been one of the worst losses in Florida Gators football history. 

As it is, Michigan took care of business in a big way in Week 1, beating Florida 33-17 to start the 2017 season 1-0. It wasn't a perfect game by any means, but a lot more right happened than wrong for the Wolverines and the crazy part is that the 16-point margin of victory indicates a much closer game than what was actually played. It's Week 1 though, so the first thing that everyone tells you is to slow your roll and pump your brakes on the high expectations. One opening win against a ranked SEC opponent at a neutral site doesn't win you the Big Ten or put you in contention for the College Football Playoff. There's a few things that it definitely can tell us about this year's Michigan team, though: 

DETROIT FREE PRESS

1 - FAST AND FURIOUS DEFENSE

I've been watching Michigan Football since 1997 and I saw that national championship defense that put so many players in the NFL and is still the best all-time defense I have ever seen in college football history. 

This year's Michigan defense might be faster and more athletic than even that team was. Seriously, it's scary. 

Since Jim Harbaugh has been head coach of the Wolverines, the defensive line has been strong and dominant against the run and last year became particularly vicious against the pass. In 2015 though, linebacker wasn't a position on the team with much speed on it so stronger and faster running backs at the time like Jordan Howard at Indiana or Ezekiel Elliott at Ohio State absolutely victimized the defensive backfield, especially when run stopping specialist Ryan Glasgow left the D-Line with an injury late in the season for both of those games. Since then, attention has been paid to that position in recruiting to make it faster and more athletic and it appears to be working. Devin Bush was a nightmare for Florida all game long and between him and the speed of the D-Line inside and out, the Gators were helpless for most of the contest offensively. 

That was Game 1 defense. There are a minimum of 11 more to be played this season. That was against a Top 25 ranked SEC opponent that wins its division on a regular basis and hadn't lost a season opener in 27 years. That was on national television at a neutral site in an NFL stadium. That was after losing 10 starters on defense from the previous season. Scary, isn't it? It's just one game, but the possibilities are staggering for what this defense can evolve into over the season. 

DETROIT FREE PRESS

2 - THE RUNNING GAME HAS IMPROVED, EVEN IF ITS NOT WHERE WE WANT IT TO BE......YET

Michigan is 20-0 under Jim Harbaugh when it rushes for more than 100 yards in a game, but it hasn't been in the imposing "three yards and a cloud of dust" style that a lot of people are expecting from a Michigan offensive line. In Harbaugh's first two years at the helm, jet sweeps and end arounds with speedy wide receivers were a more than common running play to get big gains on the ground, but hardly a stalwart running play to rely on when you need to chew up clock during the course of a game. For that obviously, you need solid running between the tackles which comes from your offensive line and your running backs doing their job. 

215 yards rushing for a single game is nothing to complain about, and that was Michigan's output against Florida this year, but while it wasn't the consistent "cloud of dust" imposition that we are all still looking for, it still wasn't jet sweeps and end arounds like in the past. In fact, WR Eddie McDoom only had one carry for four yards in the game. 40 of Michigan's 49 team carries were from Ty Isaac, Chris Evans and Karan Higdon, the current running back triumvirate for the Wolverines. Evans was shifty at times, getting stuffed in some places but also slinking his way through the line for some clock eating three to four yard clips as well. Higdon, who didn't play in the first half at all was the feature back on Michigan's final go-ahead drive in the third quarter and he scored the go-ahead touchdown himself at the end of it. That was the centerpiece of his 7 carries for 28 yards, while Evans finished with 22 carries for 78 yards. 

It was Isaac who gashed Florida the worst by far, with 114 yards rushing on 11 carries, a number of them coming third and fourth down runs that not only moved the chains but caught the Gators off guard enough to push Michigan further down the field without a pass attempt. It was sneaky good play-calling for the most part, but it was very effective against a fast and athletic defensive line from the Southeastern Conference. You could say the same about the O-Line as well, who despite a few off plays here and there and one too many sacks given up, played solid as a unit for its first game of the season. The bottom line here is that Michigan's running game has taken a step forward, even if it's not the giant step we all want to see. To get 215 yards rushing with pretty much only your running backs and not employing any trickeration or splash plays in the playbook to get it is definitely a sight for sore eyes. So is having the ball for 34 minutes and 13 seconds total in the game. Ball control is a Michigan staple and it was great to see that in Game 1 of 2017. 

DETROIT FREE PRESS

3 - THE PASSING GAME NEEDS WORK, BUT IT'S MOSTLY ON WILTON SPEIGHT

Everyone knows Wilton Speight didn't have a good game against Florida. 11 of 25 passing for 181 yards, one touchdown and two pick-sixes is a pretty awful day for any quarterback. The actual good news about that though is that it really is all on him to correct. With all of the talk about the youth movement at Michigan and all of the freshman that will be playing this season, there's been a great concern that a very steep learning curve would be taking place on both sides of the field, even with new wide receivers like Tarik Black and Donovan Peoples-Jones (DPJ), despite their immense hype and reported maturity. If the Florida game is any indication though, Black and DPJ will be just fine. Tarik had one pass that he nearly tip-drilled into a pick that he should have caught, but it was a high one in the first place and he made up for that with two stellar catches for 83 yards, one of them a 46-yard touchdown reception, the first of his collegiate career. 

The thing is, Speight was high on a lot of his passes and he overthrew way too many of them. A high attempt to Sophomore WR Kekoa Crawford created a tip-drill that was the first pick-six., while a high overthrow of Junior WR Grant Perry was the second pick-six. On top of that, he led a number of throws out of bounds, including one to a wide open Crawford in the fourth quarter that would have been a game-sealing touchdown. At one point, Jim Harbaugh was visibly frustrated with Speight on the sideline after missing Perry with another high and out of bounds throw in the endzone that would have been a touchdown for certain. So it was clear after the game yesterday that passing game problems rest with the QB, and while that might scare a lot of Michigan fans it's actually a good thing because it means that everyone else was doing their job. It wasn't a case where so much miscommunication was happening between players and a lot of people need to get on the same page, it's a case where the QB needs to play better than he did on that day. It will be up to Speight and his head coach, who is the "QB Whisperer," to figure that out. 

DETROIT FREE PRESS

4 - THE YOUTH ISN'T WORRIED ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT IT WILL WIN GAMES

It was clear listening to a lot of the younger players on the team that the youth angle that has been taken by a lot of the media regarding Michigan's potential success in 2017 is one that they are all aware of. Based on the Florida game, the learning curve may not be as steep as many have assumed it to be. Even with a nine-point margin, Michigan didn't change it's defensive game plan with regard to personnel shifts. On the sack-fumble touchdown in the fourth quarter by Noah Furbush, the Wolverines had freshman Aubrey Solomon at nose tackle with Rashan Gary to his left and Chase Winovich to his right. They also had freshman cornerback Ambry Thomas out wide with Sophomore Lavert Hill. Sophomore defensive end Carlo Kemp was also part of the front seven rotation throughout the game. As I mentioned before, Tarik had a solid day leading all receivers on the team in yards and DPJ handled his punt returning duties solidly. Sophomore cornerback David Long gave up a few big plays but was never out of position along with Hill and the rest of the secondary. In summary, the new young starters acquitted themselves nicely in the game, on a neutral site in an NFL stadium with national TV coverage. Nothing changed whatsoever in Michigan's game plan from last year to this on either side of the ball. That's a lot of confidence that the coaches have in this team and the players seem eager to prove that confidence valid. 

DETROIT FREE PRESS

5 - AS WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, MICHIGAN CAN WIN ANY GAME ON ITS SCHEDULE

My standing expectation for a Jim Harbaugh-coached Michigan football team is a floor of 10-2. The games I had circled as the possible two losses this year were Florida and at Wisconsin on November 18, as I believe those to be the team's toughest games on the schedule. Well, they won the Florida in convincing fashion so now what? Now it becomes clear that even after one game, there isn't a game on the schedule that Michigan can't win. That was always true from the start, but to see that first game up close and personal and see what this team has on the field for 2017 was certainly a sight to see. If that was Game 1 for the defense, imagine what Game 12 against OSU is going to look like. Getting ahead yes, but the point here is that Michigan has things to work on from Game 1 as dominant as they were and will spend the rest of the season perfecting them and getting things right on both sides of the ball. This team still has a lot of learning and growing to do, but it is clear that the raw talent that this team has right now is enough to compete with any and everyone on their schedule. They spotted Florida 14 gifted points in the second quarter and had their QB complete only 44 percent of his passes, yet they still won by 16 and had it not been for missed field goals and a touchdown wiped out on a wrong penalty call, they would have won by 26. Scary good. 

It's a long season and it was only the first game, but it was more than enough to get us excited for sure. Here's hoping that continues throughout the entire season. GO BLUE! 

Yes, Michigan CAN get to Alabama and Clemson's level......with patience

MGOBLUE.COM

I stayed up to watch the end of the National Championship Game this year. As a college football fan, I couldn't have asked for much more at all. For the second year in a row, I saw a heavyweight title fight between two heavily talented teams going shot for shot for a full 60 minutes. 

Like so many other fans tired of Alabama's dominance, I was elated that Clemson had won the way they did, if only to stop the Saban machine for just a single year. Then of course, I woke up the next morning and made the dreaded realization that some people had already come to beforehand: Clemson winning isn't that much better for college football in terms of parity. 

The biggest thing that a lot of people took from the title game this year and even last year is that once again, the southern teams in college football reign supreme when it comes to talented athletes. They have the market cornered, they get all of the best players in the country and no one else, especially in the midwestern Big Ten Conference, can ever hope to compete with either of them, with the possible exception of Ohio State who despite being the only bowl team to be shutout this season, did beat Alabama en route to a National Championship two years ago. 

Naturally as a Michigan fan, I can't agree with this idea. Paul Finebaum calls that "entitlement." I happen to think entitlement is punching your expensive high definition TV screen after your school fails to win its fifth national title in eight years while the rest of college football settles for second place or worst every season, but I digress...

Your team has won four national championships in eight years. You're mad because it didn't win it's fifth. My sympathy meter is way past empty for you. 

When looking at what the southern teams have done in the past decade and asking if that level of play can be matched, it goes way beyond the eyeball test which a lot of people use when it comes to this argument. They see Deshaun Watson, Jalen Hurts, Bo Scarborough, Mike Williams, Reuben Foster, OJ Howard, Ben Boulware and the rest of the great talent on those teams and couldn't possibly imagine any players like that coming up north to play in the cold for a school like Michigan. The general perception is that if you have talent and can really play, you go to a southern school, preferably Alabama because they put players in the NFL. 

The thing is, not every highly coveted player in the country goes down south. There is this guy, for example: 

Rashan Gary, the nation's consensus No. 1 recruit in 2016 went on national television at ESPN and picked Michigan over Clemson. He's been in MIchigan's defensive line rotation since Game 1 of the 2016 season. 

Alright, well that's just one five-star talent right? Michigan can't build up their talent level that high with just one five-star recruit every season. Fair enough:

These are Michigan's 2017 five-star commitments, WR Donovan Peoples-Jones and LB Jordan Anthony. As you can see from his helmet table, Peoples-Jones turned down two southern schools and Ohio State to come to Michigan. Anthony plays at IMG Academy in Florida and will be headed north this fall along with four-star OL Cesar Ruiz, regarded as the best high school center in the country. 

Ok, now that we've established that five-star athletes DO come to Michigan, let's get down to business. For starters, there is still a major talent disparity between Michigan and the southern schools like Alabama. That can't be denied, but what also can't be denied is that Michigan is on track to close that gap within the next number of years under Jim Harbaugh. 

Last year in what was Harbaugh's first full recruiting class at Michigan, he finished with the No. 4 class in the nation behind two southern schools and Ohio State with Gary as the only five-star athlete in the class. Alabama, as to be expected at this point had five in its class. 

This year, 2017 doesn't look to be much different: 

So that's two Top Five recruiting classes for Harbaugh and his staff at Michigan and he's attracting more attention from five-star recruits. While it can't be understated how important it is for Michigan to keep this pace up, the disparity is clearly indicated here with both Alabama and Ohio State bringing in six five-star recruits apiece. THAT is where Michigan has to catch up in the next few years. 

Nick Saban has built a machine in Tuscaloosa and there's not a whole lot he needs to do short of flashing his national championship rings to get top talent to come to Alabama. The same could be said for Urban Meyer at Ohio State who has three rings of his own. Both coaches have been at their schools for at least five years now and have established their programs and cultures. Harbaugh has established his new culture at Michigan, but he needs more than two years to start bringing in more five-star talent to start to match Alabama and Ohio State with their athletes. 

The good thing is, he's on pace to bring more five-star athletes in every season. As much as people would like to believe that five-star talent is dominated by the south, the truth is that it's all over the country on the East Coast, West Coast, Midwest and so forth. There is top talent to be had from plenty of high schools across the nation and it's all about building those in-roads to find them and get them to come to Ann Arbor instead of elsewhere. 

Now, Michigan fans will tell you that they've heard this song and dance about five-star recruits before. After all, Derrick Green was a recent five-star athlete that didn't pan out well for Michigan at all. There's no guarantee that the five-star athletes that any school gets won't be a complete bust when they get there. 

While that's true, it doesn't seem to be a huge problem for Alabama or Ohio State who seem to have more success with five-stars than failure. That is where elite coaching comes into play, which allows these five-star players to be developed and molded into All-American players by a superior staff, one that Michigan did not have when Derrick Green was recruited. They certainly have it now with Harbaugh and his assistants, just as Ohio State has with Meyer or Alabama has with Saban. 

Jim Harbaugh and his staff are the exact kind of coaches that it will take to turn five-star talent into superstars that can match the level of Alabama and Clemson's talent. 

So a five-star athlete is going to get top level development at Michigan. It's reasonable to believe they will be successful there, so what about getting to the NFL? Well, that's where Harbaugh's 44-19-1 record in the NFL with three NFC title game appearances and a Super Bowl appearance come into play. He has an extensive NFL pedigree as a successful coach and longtime player in the league and he has filled his staff with assistants that also have NFL experience including Greg Mattison who was retained from the previous staff, Tyrone Wheatley a Michigan legend that went pro, Mike Zordich a former NFL safety, Tim Drevno who coached offensive line for the 49ers and Jay Harbaugh who worked quality control for the Ravens for two years. 

Oh, and there was Jedd Fisch who coached on six different NFL staffs before coming to Michigan and then recently being hired as UCLA's offensive coordinator, but Harbaugh replaced him with Pep Hamilton, a coach in the NFL for more than a decade that included his most recent position of offensive coordinator for the Browns. That's right, Harbaugh replaced one of his NFL caliber assistants with a current NFL offensive coordinator. If a five-star talent wants all the tutelage he can get to go pro, Michigan's staff is loaded with more than enough experience to show them EXACTLY how. 

Education doesn't even need to be mentioned. Michigan is one of the top learning institutions in the country. They have the facilities and money to make things work as well. 

So barring any individual and personal reasons for a five-star recruit that they wouldn't want to come to Michigan, such as proximity from home, level of comfort with the team and the campus among other things, there's more than enough reasons for top talent to come to Michigan......which means that it's ultimately going to take time for them all to make the exodus north on a regular basis. Harbaugh is going to keep recruiting the top talent from all over the country and as his program and culture continues to win and grow, it will build into the machine that many are seeing the foundation for now and it will get to the point where a Michigan recruiting class has multiple five-star athletes in it, ready to succeed. 

When that happens, Michigan will be every bit on Alabama and Clemson's level as far as talent goes and the Wolverines will seriously contend for a national title or two. It's not instant and there's obviously a lot more work to be done, but the seeds are there for Michigan to be every bit the powerhouse of those southern schools in time, even in the Big Ten. All it takes right now is a little patience. 

We need to learn an important lesson about the Najee Harris fiasco

Najee Harris was never coming to Michigan. We all know that now. 

The question is whether or not we should have known that from the beginning? 

Admittedly, most of us bought into the hype about him flipping his commitment to Alabama. It was a perfect storm of consequences regarding his visit to campus, his relationship with the coaching staff and his unwillingness to flat out shoot down the idea that he was going to Michigan and re-affirm his commitment to the Crimson Tide. The Orange Bowl only made that desperate anticipation worse as we saw up close and personal with Dalvin Cook just how dynamic a game-changing running back can be......and we wanted that in Michigan's backfield. Badly. 

In hushed tones under the cover of darkness, there was talk of Harris being a silent commit to Michigan and that he just wanted to get to Ann Arbor to avoid the chaos from angry Alabama boosters and fans that would want his head on a pike for such a dastardly betrayal. It would be another "moral victory" for Jim Harbaugh against Nick Saban and the SEC mafia, as they would have stolen arguably their most prized recruit and brought him north. All of it sounded so awesome, like a perfect dream. 

That's all it was, of course. A dream that a lot of Michigan fans including myself, desperately clung to for a variety of reasons. It would have meant a lot to steal a five-star running back from Alabama, it would have provided Michigan a potential game-changer on offense at the running back position and it would have cemented the idea that Michigan is once again a nationally elite program perception-wise. 

Now that the drama is all over and Harris is joining the machine that is Alabama football, it is time for us as Michigan fans to face a hard lesson or two about these top flight five-star talents: They're not all going to flip to Michigan.

I know that seems like an obvious take, but when you look at recruiting rankings and see six five-stars for Alabama and six for Ohio State but only two for Michigan, the stargazers tend to get a little pessimistic about the future. In the heat of the moment I get it, but in retrospect it's a foolish mistake. 

This will be Jim Harbaugh's second Top Five class in a row for Michigan since he was hired. 

I've heard a lot of people talk about Najee Harris as a "generational talent" and there's a lot of sour grapes right now among Michigan fans about "missing out" on him. The fact is that he had been committed to Alabama for a long time and it was going to take a flip to get him to Ann Arbor, so there was no "missing out." His mind would have had to have been changed and it's hard to talk a kid out of not going to the school that is on the cusp of winning its fifth national title in eight years and shows absolutely no signs of slowing down.

Michigan is still on the rebuild, albeit at a much more accelerated pace than what the pundits expected, but still rebuilding. Where Michigan is now timeline-wise is comparable to Nick Saban's second year at Alabama, when the Tide went 12-2 and lost the SEC title game to Urban Meyer's Florida en route to the Gators second national title in three years. For the record, Harbaugh's 20-6 record at Michigan in his first two seasons is ahead of Saban's 19-8 record in his first two years at Alabama. 

So to expect that Harris was coming at all was a bit foolhardy and that was one of the reasons. The other reason is because we as fans should not give any merit to the idea of a "silent commit." People will argue about this, but the bottom line is that a silent commit means nothing at all. Just ask UCLA commit Darnay Holmes: 

I'm not going to slam the kid for it because A: they all do it, and B: there's nothing wrong with it. A silent commit is not the same as a verbal because it's silent and secret. They don't want people to know, and if they don't want people to know then they aren't fully committed are they? They can do whatever they want without incident. Some fans will be upset about it, but that's on them for believing in silent commits. We've seen enough actual commits get flipped at the last second that we should know better than to trust ones that are silent and secret, especially when we are looking for a kid to flip his actual commit to a program in the first place. 

So the question becomes when is Michigan going to get those highly coveted five-star kids to actually commit to them as Harris did to Alabama? Well, they already have with WR Donovan Peoples-Jones and LB Jordan Anthony, and last year they got the consensus No. 1 recruit in the nation Rashan Gary so there's that. No, it's not six in one season but as I said before, Michigan is still rebuilding from the Dark Times and that above all is going to take patience to develop. Just because one doesn't decide to flip his commitment doesn't doom the program or its immediate future. 

Michigan's five-star commits for 2017: WR Donovan Peoples-Jones(left), LB Jordan Anthony(right). 

Najee Harris will likely follow in the footsteps of Derrick Henry, Eddie Lacy, Mark Ingram and others in terms of being highly successful running backs for Alabama, but he still has to develop into that running back and we have yet to see that. Even if he likely does, it still has no bearing on Michigan's success. There is no "we could have had him" or "if only we had gotten him," because the coaching staff is paid millions to develop the talent they actually get, not the ones that go elsewhere. Michigan currently has the No. 4 recruiting class in the nation as ranked by Rivals, behind only Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia. This is only Harbaugh's second full recruiting class and third overall since he was hired. Harris or not, this is yet another stellar class of talent coming in that shouldn't be dismissed so quickly because one player isn't added to it. 

Alright, two players since so many of you are still griping about five-star OL Isaiah Wilson, who committed to Georgia at the last second. Now that WAS a "missing out" of sorts since he wasn't previously committed elsewhere, but since then the Wolverines have added Cesar Ruiz, the top center in the country and four-star OL Chuck Filiaga. Both players can and will likely see the field in 2017 based on their current potential and developmental upside. On top of that, they will look to add RB's Kurt Taylor and O'Maury Samuels to a backfield that already has Chris Evans, Karan Higdon, and Kareem Walker among others to begin with. Harris would have been a great addition, but Michigan isn't hurting for running backs at the moment. 

Michigan's potential stable of running backs for 2017: Chris Evans (top left), Karan Higdon (top right), Kareem Walker (center), commit O'Maury Samuels (bottom left), commit Kurt Taylor (bottom right). 

Will any of them be as good as Harris could be for the Crimson Tide? A lot of you say no, but only time will truly tell on that one. There was a time long ago when an argument was made between Mike Hart and Adrian Peterson in terms of statistics. Of course AP turned out to be the better running back overall but it wasn't as though Hart was a slouch by any means. The same could be said for the running backs that Michigan currently has now in relation to Harris, so while it's a bummer to have not gotten him to flip, it doesn't lay waste to Michigan's situation at the position either. 

So best of luck to Mr. Harris down in Tuscaloosa as he does his best to follow in the footsteps of past talented five-star athletes for Alabama. One can only hope that fate allows him to run against Michigan's defense in the next few years and then we can finally see on the field if not getting him to flip was truly the big deal some people think it is. Right now, the jury is still very much out. 

Can we learn our lesson about Harbaugh to the NFL rumors? Here's hoping

This is going to become a yearly event, Michigan fans. And we had better wise up real fast because WAY too many of us lost our minds in the last 72 hours over a piece of fake news perpetuated by an OSU graduate NFL reporter that knew EXACTLY what he was doing when he made his statement to Colin Cowherd. 

For those of you that don't know about it, here's the fake news that was making the rounds over the last few days: 

From the beginning, this was filled with as much "fail" as you could possibly imagine. Articles popped up with every cliche you can think of from "he's notoriously nomadic" to "he'd love to potentially beat down the 49ers twice a year" as reasons as to why Jim Harbaugh, Michigan's head football coach who when he was hired, talked about building a home that he would like to live in and that's what he was hoping for in Ann Arbor, would bolt that dream job after two seasons to go coach the dumpster fire Los Angeles Rams. 

That wasn't the worst part of it, though. That came when so many Michigan fans tossed whatever sanity they had right out the window and started panicking as though this was actually going to happen. Conspiracy theories within our own fanbase started to surface:

"Maybe this is why Les Miles hasn't taken another job! He's replacing Jim!"

"If it's not true, why doesn't Harbaugh come out and make a statement refuting it?"

This is just a fraction of the lunacy among Michigan fans about this fake story. It only got worse when the Rams fired their head coach Jeff Fisher, not long after his contract extension was announced. The most paranoid of us Michigan fans absolutely freaked out, deeming it a sign that we were losing our prodigal son just when the fun was really getting started with Michigan Football. 

The truth is, this non-story from Albert Breer is nothing more than wishful thinking on his part, the part of all of Michigan's rivals and competitors, and the NFL itself. There was never any basis or fact to it and it was all just deviously well-timed smoke and mirrors. Why deviously well-timed? Because this happens to be a week where a number of highly ranked top recruits across the nation are making their announcements of where they will be attending school to play football and a number of them have Michigan on their lists along with other top flight schools. 

How convenient that this story pops up on the Internet about the Wolverines' head coach being coveted by the NFL once again, prompting the notion that he would leave his alma mater and return to the grind of Napoleonic team owners and egostistical general manager so long as the price was right. Just enough to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of young kids that might reconsider Michigan perhaps? This is all speculation, but no more than the speculation that Breer was paid to spread all over the Internet. 

A lot of Michigan fans took the bait, though. Sadly. There was never a reason to worry. Jim Harbaugh did not leave the NFL for Michigan because of money. He was and is being compensated more than any other football coach on the planet right now, but he came back to Ann Arbor because of Michigan, because of Michigan Football and the place it holds in his heart, same as it does for many of us. $10 million or more from an NFL owner isn't going to change those feelings like that, whether you believe it does or not. 

The thing is, we need to get used to this because it's going to happen every year. Seriously, every year so long as Harbaugh is our head coach. When you hire someone that had a 44-19-1 record of success in the NFL along with three NFC championship game appearances and a Super Bowl appearance, he's going to command attention and interest from the NFL until he goes back for two reasons: Someone in the NFL is always looking for a great coach like Harbaugh, and it's still impossible for NFL pundits and experts to accept that he left their precious pro league to coach kids that are looking to get to the pros. In their minds, he willingly took a step back and it simply must have been because the "right" job wasn't available in the NFL at the time. No other explanation, even the truth, is acceptable to a lot of the NFL experts. 

This happened last year when it was suggested that Harbaugh would jump back to coach the Indianapolis Colts and rejoin his old QB from Stanford, Andrew Luck. Now it's happening with this Rams situation this year. Next year it will be another NFL team, and then another the year after that, and another a year after that and so on. It's not going to end until Harbaugh is back in the NFL, should that ever happen. 

There's no definitive way to say that it won't happen at some point because none of us are Jim Harbaugh and he makes his own decisions, but you can be pretty comfortable in saying that it won't happen this year, likely won't happen until aftert 2021 when his contract at Michigan is up, and may not even happen at all. Right now, Jim Harbaugh is living his dream job, the same one that his legendary coach Bo Schembechler had for decades in building the tradition of Michigan Football, and so long as Harbaugh continues to build on the 20-5 record he has built in his first two years on the job, The University of Michigan will do all it can to keep him here and in charge of the football program. 

So take this opportunity Michigan fans to learn an important lesson about these Harbaugh rumors as they come up. Until you start hearing it from the man himself, they are nothing but a needless, trolling distraction meant incite clicks and lather up the paranoids out there. Spare us all that chaos and just exercise caution next time, please. Jim Harbaugh is Michigan's head football coach. That's not changing anytime soon......if ever. 

The curious case of Jabrill Peppers as a Heisman candidate

It's a fair statement that if you don't know who Jabrill Peppers is, then you either don't follow Michigan Football or you don't follow college football in general. Seemingly since he was recruited, he has been one of the most hyped-up and talked about players in the nation, earning a reputation as two-way player that can fill multiple positions on the field in any given game. 

This has led to a lot of fanfare and attention for the young man, especially given that he plays for the University of Michigan, a school long thought by many incorrectly to be "irrelevant" given its lack of success on a conference or national basis from 2008-2014. Things have turned for the better in a huge way with the hiring of Jim Harbaugh as head coach, and Peppers has been a great beneficiary of that as has the entire Michigan football team. 

But it's safe to say that if Harbaugh is the most publicized figure for Michigan Football, Peppers is right behind him in terms of attention. ESPN has dedicated great focus to him several times the past two seasons, counting how many snaps he's taken, how many positions he has played in one game and coming close to dedicating an entire camera to following him on the field and the sidelines. 

So the question is, does Jabrill Peppers deserve this much hype and in turn, does he deserve to be one of the five finalists for the Heisman Trophy? That's where the sparks fly and you start to get into trouble with people on the subject. 

Statistically speaking, Peppers doesn't stand out. He just doesn't, that's the truth. He has one interception in the Ohio State game at the end of the year, three sacks and 66 tackles on defense to go with 170 yards and three touchdowns on offense plus a punt return for a touchdown against Colorado. This is usually when someone will come in and say that he should have had three touchdowns, given that he fell at the five-yard line on a return against Penn State and had a punt return touchdown called back for a phantom block in the back against Rutgers, but those obviously don't count. 

When you compare Peppers number-wise to QB Lamar Jackson at Louisville or QB Deshaun Watson at Clemson, there's no contest. The QB's are always going to have the better stats no matter what. That's what the Peppers detractors are going to hit you with mostly, that he didn't make enough of a contribution statistically to warrant being a Heisman candidate. Then they'll add that his versatility kept him from standing out at any one position. In fact, many will argue that Peppers isn't even the best player on his own defense and while he had potential to be the best running back, he was never used exclusively enough in that manner to make it work longer term. 

The Peppers defenders really only have one angle, and that is the versatility. It can't be denied that his presence in the game on offense was something that teams had to actively adjust for, even if the plays called for him didn't amount to much on the scoresheet. He clearly was part of many teams' defensive strategies against Michigan which whether he was used on offense effectively or not, still allowed Michigan an exploitable opportunity to keep a defense off balance. How much it actually worked or not is debatable, but it still existed. 

Depending on who you read or who you listen to on the radio, you'll get a different opinion on this. Some bloggers and personalities on the Internet are singing Peppers' praises, while other radio personalities local to the state of Michigan spend entire shows dedicated to talking about how ridiculous his Heisman candidacy is and how it is some kind of disgrace to the nature of the award and how it is given out. There is an ultimate bottom line here and it lies within college football itself if you really think about it. 

Jabrill Peppers is a fantastic player. Period. Anyone that thinks otherwise is either being an outright hater or incredibly foolish. Or both. The thing is that his "campaign" comes in a year where the Heisman candidates are not nearly as definitive or alluring as they have been in the past. Last year it was a clear three-man race between Alabama RB Derrick Henry, Stanford RB Christian McCaffrey and Clemson QB Deshaun Watson and all of those players had the stats to make their arguments. This year, even though Jackson has been all-world with his numbers, he plays on a three-loss Louisville team that doesn't move the needle in the bigger markets and didn't play for an ACC or national championship this season. Watson's got solid numbers, but Clemson was arguably a more dominant team last year and people have seen that. After them, who's attractive enough to move the needle in the discussion? JT Barrett? His passing numbers are down. McCaffrey? He's been injured AND his numbers are down. Same could be said for RB Leonard Fournette at LSU, a team that underwent coaching turmoil this season. 

So when it comes right down to it, as solid a player as Jabrill Peppers is, he is benefitting from a great publicity campaign to hype him up in a year where there are no clear cut runaways for the Heisman Trophy. Marketing is a part of winning the award, make no mistake about it and Michigan and the media outlets have done a fantastic job of marketing Peppers and his skills to to the nation. It was more than enough to get him invited to New York, but it almost certainly won't be enough for him to win it. 

As much as I could sit here and tell you that it makes no sense statistically for Jabrill Peppers to be a Heisman Trophy candidate, I have no desire to do so because I have a life and I like being happy. I won't take anything away from the young man at all and I while I don't think he has a shot at winning it, I wish him the best of luck this weekend and we will see how the votes fall. Rest assured, if he does win it somewhat miraculously, my life won't be ruined and I sure as hell won't consider it a sham. I'll let the other overly-pathetic people on the radio and in the media stoke the fire on that one. 

I might have written this on the heels of listening to one of them, yes. If you live in the Detroit area, it won't take you that long to figure it out. 

What the Orange Bowl means for Michigan and its fans

It's been more than a week since the Ohio State game ended in controversy. The Buckeyes are in the playoff along with Alabama, Clemson and Washington and it's going to be three of the most boringly lopsided games played all season, likely with the Crimson Tide coming out on top again. 

Penn State, ranked 5 in the College Football Playoff rankings and on the heels of a 9-game winning streak and a 38-31 comeback win over Wisconsin to win the Big Ten Championship Game will head to the Rose Bowl to play USC on January 2. 

And Michigan? Ranked 6 in the CFP and headed back to sunny Florida to play in the Orange Bowl against No. 11 Florida State. 

On the one hand, for a team that started the season 9-0 and then lost two of its last three games to Iowa and Ohio State, this is a huge disappointment to not win the Big Ten and not reach the College Football Playoff. On the other hand, if you're going to get a consolation prize of a top-tier bowl game to play, the Orange Bowl is nothing to sneeze at. 

The problem of course is that fans, fickle as they are cannot agree on just which one it is. Be thankful to be in the Orange Bowl against Florida State or be dejected and bitter about not being in the CFP, especially with the shoddy referees in the Ohio State game. 

I'll make it clearer for you: Stop being dejected and bitter because what was justifiably defiant outrage on November 26 is now just whiny sour grapes on December 5. 

Look, I was as angry as the most militant Michigan fan after the refs literally took a win away from the team with a blown 4th down call, adding to a game's worth of blown calls that day. It was most certainly an injustice that those players on that Michigan defense did all they could only to be robbed at the end. 

But even in taking it that way, I couldn't ignore the three turnovers from the offense. A fumble that took away a Michigan touchdown at the goal line and two interceptions that led directly to 14 of Ohio State's 17 points in regulation. I couldn't ignore 91 yards rushing and a general inability to run the ball at the end of the game to get a few first downs and never even give the Buckeyes the ball back to tie it up. I couldn't ignore missed blocks from the offensive line and the running backs, dropped passes from the wide receivers and tight ends, all plays that would have rendered the bad referees null and void in the end. 

Those are plays that as much as a lot of Michigan fans don't want to admit it, are ones that better teams make to take the referees out of the game and take control of it by force and in the end, that's what Michigan failed to do and they would tell you as much: 

From Senior TE Jake Butt: 

From Freshman LB Devin Bush: 

From Junior LB/Everything Jabrill Peppers: 

You see that? That's called accountability, and the Michigan players have taken it as they should. Sadly, a lot of Michigan fans are refusing to follow suit, calling for everything from boycotts of college football and the playoff altogether to calling for Michigan to leave the Big Ten in protest until the result of the OSU game is changed. Complete and utter lunacy from my beloved fanbase......and our team's got a game left in Miami against an ACC squad that knows a thing or two about being in the Top 10 and is only three years removed from its last national championship. 

So what does the Orange Bowl ultimately mean for Michigan? It's an opportunity to end the season on a high note with a win over a top-ranked opponent, one that while suffering it's own disappointments this season in the ACC is still a more than formidable opponent to deal with in terms of talent and ability. It's a chance to get an 11th win, which technically would be a minimal improvement over last year's 10-3 record that everyone said was overachieving. 

It would send off the seniors on high note after coming into Michigan Football on a rather low note, suffered through the hell of the 2014 season and were resurrected as star talent in the last two seasons under Jim Harbaugh and his staff. Many of those seniors are likely headed to the NFL, a few of them in the first round for sure, which would be quite the turnaround from where they were sitting just a few years ago. 

It would be an opportunity for the freshmen and underclassmen to play in a big primetime bowl game and get them used to playing on grander stages in hopes of actually making the playoff within their careers wearing the winged helmet. A chance to show the nation one more time why they were good enough to be in that playoff this season, even though they left it to chance on two fateful Saturdays this season in Iowa City and Columbus. 

There's a gargantuan amount of reasons why this Orange Bowl is not just a throwaway game for Michigan or our fanbase, and it's largely due to the fact that in spite of this season's disappointment, the light at the end of the tunnel keeps getting brighter for this program. What happened this season in terms of national expectations wasn't supposed to happen until Harbaugh's fourth or fifth year here and now before he's even coached a team full of mostly his recruits, he has put Michigan on the map once again nationally for recruiting and competition for the playoff. The expectations have risen in such a short of amount of time for this program when you consider how much work it was believed he and his coaches had to do to get this team as far away from 5-win seasons as possible, and he's already done that. 

Think about the fact that a lot of fellow Michigan fans are irate about settling for the Orange Bowl when Jim Harbaugh has only been here for two years. Before that, we spent seven years in a fresh hell where we prayed to even make a bowl and not get embarrassed in it by anyone, and that was considered a fool's errand. 

Think about that the next time you want a pound of flesh from the Big Ten or the CFP committee or think that the Orange Bowl isn't important, because I guarantee that there is a team full of seniors, underclassmen and coaches who will vehemently disagree with you and right now they are preparing for Jimbo Fisher and RB Dalvin Cook on December 30th, under the lights, in primetime. 

Playoff or not, that still means a lot to them and it means a lot to me as a rational Michigan fan. 

GO BLUE! 

Big mistakes AND bad officials cost Michigan against Ohio State

It's been almost 48 hours and I'm a lot calmer now than I was on Saturday, so I can finally write about the latest gut-wrenching Michigan defeat at the hands of Ohio State. Obviously, I'm disappointed for a ton of reasons but there's one big thing that is disappointing me greatly with all of the fans and pundits out there:

Everyone is taking sides on why Michigan lost this game. On the one side, you have bitter, skeptical Michigan fans that are crying foul over the referees who managed to call an extremely lopsided game with penalties largely being given to Michigan and almost nothing being given to Ohio State, including a stunning lack of holding calls on an offensive line that allowed Buckeye starting quarterback JT Barrett to be sacked eight times, all before a controversial 4th and 1 ball spot in double overtime that gave the Buckeyes a first down when replays continued to show that Barrett was short of the line to gain. 

On the other side, you have people blaming Michigan's three turnovers, Jim Harbaugh's "conservative" play-calling and undisciplined behavior as the reason for the loss and calling the people angry at the referees complete whiners, unable to get over the fact that they lost fair and square. 

The truth, as always lies in the middle. Both sides are right......and wrong. 

Michigan had many chances in regulation to win that game. Defensive coordinator Don Brown showed the nation exactly why he's the best in the business and exactly why Harbaugh hired him, because he spent the entire afternoon making Barrett's life a living hell. The aforementioned eight sacks and an uneasy 124 yards passing. Curtis Samuel was nullified for most of the game. Mike Weber was non-existent. The most that Ohio State could legitimately drive the field for offensively was one field goal at the end of regulation to tie the game. 

The problems for Michigan were all on offense. Two interceptions, one of which was run back for a touchdown and another that led directly to a short field touchdown in the red zone gave Ohio State all of the offense it needed, and a fumble lost at the goal line by Michigan QB Wilton Speight that stopped a Michigan touchdown drive. 91 total yards rushing and an inability to run the football in the second half, a problem that the Wolverines have had all season, didn't help the situation. All they really needed was one more score to get to 24 points OR just a few more first downs to run more time off the clock and give the defense a real breather and it would have been a Michigan victory. Take out the turnovers and it might be a shutout with the way the defense was playing. None of that happened, the game remained too close and the Buckeyes were able to force OT and took control from there really. 

Even Jim Harbaugh himself who made it clear he is "bitterly disappointed" in the officials performance in the game would tell you that all of the above is true about his team. He loves his guys, but he still knows the missed opportunities they left out on the field to ice the game before OT was even a possibility. All of the people that tout this as the reason Michigan lost are making a valid point. 

Here's the problem: You CANNOT make excuses for bad officiating, especially in a game of this magnitude. In spite of all of Michigan's mistakes on offense, it still did EXACTLY what it needed to do to WIN the game in double overtime, including a 4th and 1 stop of Barrett to seal the victory. The referees gave him a generous spot, reviewed the call on the field and refused to overturn it, despite ample "un-doctored" evidence that he was short. The defense did their job and were told "no" by the referees. That's what happened, whether you think it is whining or not. Everything that we think they SHOULD have done before that point doesn't change the fact that they DID everything they needed to do to still win it and it was taken away from them by the officials. 

Ignoring that and simply saying that losers are the ones that whine about referees is completely taking the referees off the hook for being incompetent and that's unacceptable. It's not just a problem in the Big Ten either, it's rampant across college football and other sports as well, we've all seen it. As a longtime fan, you expect that high profile teams are going to get a benefit of the doubt on calls being at home, even against a rival, but far too many of the calls in the game were beyond suspect and the one-sided nature of the penalty flags just can't be tossed aside or made to be insignificant. Michigan needs a team that can outplay Ohio State and the referees as well and they were punished for only being able to outplay Ohio State. The refs got them in the end, plain and simple. 

Teams never lose a game because of one definitive reason. It's always a combination of reasons as to why they came up short in the end. The Michigan defense did all it could to fight through the deficiencies of the offense and did a damn good job of it, putting them in position to win the game in double overtime. Their reward for that work was to have the officials tell them it was worth nothing in the end. Sad, but undeniably true. 

Those that want to say this is talking out of both sides of my mouth will point to the three turnovers, the 91 total rushing yards and the 9 for 19 on third down numbers as to why I am full of it. Those that disagree with them will point to the 7 penalties for 59 yards against Michigan compared to the 2 penalties for 6 yards for Ohio State and wonder just like I do, how in the hell that is even balanced, especially when Michigan's defensive line was controlling the line of scrimmage for the entire game. Not one holding call? Really? 

In the end, bad mistakes on offense AND horrific officiating BOTH contributed to Michigan losing its 14th game in the last 16 years to the Buckeyes, a statistic that just gets more painful to think about every year. This one takes the real cake though, because the team battled through its own issues and errors to get into a position to win and STILL couldn't do it. 

One thing is certain: Urban Meyer was relieved to win that game and while moral victories are non-existent, it is clear that the gap between Michigan and Ohio State in terms of talent is all but gone now in just two short years with Harbaugh at the helm and the Wolverines, despite not leaving Columbus with a win are far ahead of where most people thought they would be......with Brady Hoke's players still largely starting on both sides of the ball. 

I think it's safe to say that "The Game" means something again, finally after all these years and it won't be too much longer before Michigan is on the right side of one of them. 

Of course, we'll have to wait another year for that to be the case. Right now it just stings really, really, really badly. 

How the Iowa loss could be Michigan's saving grace

As bad as this game was, the CFP selection committee didn't punish Michigan for it at all and that's an opportunity the Wolverines can't afford to miss out on. 

I've been watching college football for 20 years and it's absolutely amazing to see how the landscape of the game has changed in two decades. In 1997, a year that was nirvana for Michigan fans there was a weekend late in the season that was hyped up by ESPN and ABC as "Judgment Day." This was a day when four of the top five teams in the nation played each other, all undefeated and No. 1 Nebraska playing what turned out to be a tough thriller against Missouri. At the end of the day, Nebraska, Florida State and Michigan all won to remain undefeated while Penn State and North Carolina were dealt crushing blows to a pursuit of a national championship. That was the "rule" so to speak: You don't lose late in the season, especially in November. It will kill your season. 

Fast forward to 2016. Last weekend the Number 2, 3 and 4 teams in the nation, all slotted for the College Football Playoff, lost. To teams with 3 losses or more. Clemson lost to Pitt on a late field goal at home, Michigan played their worst game of the season in a 14-13 loss to Iowa on the road at night, and Washington got exposed at home by USC 26-13. The Huskies dropped from fourth to sixth, outside the playoff and Clemson dropped from second to fourth while Ohio State rose from fifth all the way to second. 

Michigan stayed put at Number 3. I'll repeat that. Michigan LOST a BAD game to Iowa on the road and STAYED PUT at Number 3. 

Alright, before we get into just how awesome this is for Michigan and what it means, let's get the obvious out of the way first: 

Well Adam, and all others who share his ridiculous sentiment, here's the explanation from CFP committee chair Kirby Hocutt himself: 

Yes, the committee is saying that wins over tenth-ranked Colorado and  eighth-ranked Penn State mean a lot, especially when combined with a win over seventh-ranked Wisconsin, no matter how much you and others try to marginalize it. You've just literally been told that you are wrong by the people who make the decisions. Are we clear? Good. Now onto business. 

The Iowa loss could be an incredible opportunity for Michigan for the rest of the season. Contrary to what a lot of Michigan fans have been spewing on social media for the past few days, it is DIFFICULT to go undefeated in college football. Alabama has only done it ONCE in the Nick Saban Era and that was his very first one in Tuscaloosa in 2009. It's far more common to see a national champion or even conference champion get tagged during the regular season instead of going completely unscathed. 

As a team keeps winning with that zero sitting in the loss column, the pressure mounts on them and these are still 19 to 22-year old kids out there on that field. It gets tough for a team especially if they haven't truly faced adversity. No, the 21-7 deficit to Colorado and the struggles offensively against Wisconsin are not adversity. They were tough moments, but not something that could really put the team's back against the wall and force them to adapt. Even catastrophic injuries to cornerback Jeremy Clark and offensive lineman Grant Newsome didn't seem to slow them down. 

Then came Iowa and the stunning upset. Now we have TRUE adversity for this team to deal with. 

As much as the "backdoor" scenario of getting into the playoff in spite of a loss to Ohio State may have existed, who really wanted that? Seriously? As a Michigan fan you're telling me that if you don't beat Ohio State and you don't win the Big Ten but you still get into the playoff, you'll be just fine? I wouldn't. Not by a long shot. You'd then be talking about a 13 year drought since last winning an outright conference championship and worse still, losing 14 of the last 16 games and five in a row to the Buckeyes. You're not a Michigan fan if you're okay with any of that, playoff spot or not. Period. 

But now that option is deader than a doorknob and Michigan must beat Indiana and Ohio State to win the Big Ten East and get to Indianapolis for a shot at the conference title, and thanks to the team's resume of wins against Top Ten opponents it still is in the driver seat for a playoff spot if it does everything it needs to do for the next two and hopefully three weeks. 

There was never an acceptable scenario for success that didn't include beating this team......unless you were okay with not winning the Big Ten a thirteenth straight year and going 2-14 in the last 16 games against the Buckeyes. 

So Michigan has literally been given a great opportunity here with one of the most incredible mulligan wake-up calls of all time. You lost a terrible game to a team you should have destroyed and it didn't kill your season. In fact, it did nothing. You get to regroup and move on as if it the game never happened aside from the "one" in the loss column for you. Now the pressure is off, so to speak. No more worrying about going undefeated, staying perfect, bracing yourselves for what might happen if you lose a game. You've done that now and you know how horrible it felt, and you were lucky enough that it didn't change your season drastically. 

This is no different than when 2015 National Champion Alabama lost to Ole Miss last season, or when 2014 National Champion Ohio State dropped its second game of the year to Virginia Tech......except that those losses were early in September while this one is late in November, making it all the more an incredible opportunity. You've built a great season of success and got your wake-up call at the right time, just before it starts to get the toughest it's ever been for you against opponents. 

And then there's the other X-factor from the Iowa loss: the possibility of John O'Korn getting his chance to shine on the biggest stage for Michigan at QB. From a fan standpoint, he's made an incredible leap from "presumed starter" to "who people wish was playing instead of Wilton Speight" to "guy we are terrified about now that he might be starting soon." Incredible in itself considering his two years as a starting QB at Houston and his two years in Jim Harbaugh's system at Michigan. By comparison, O'Korn is well ahead of players like Michigan State's Tyler O'Connor who was pressed into emergency starting last season for the Spartans at Ohio State, or Cardale Jones who took over as Ohio State starting QB in 2014 for the Big Ten Championship game and the playoffs. 

And neither of those players had "The QB Whisperer" as their head coach. You know, the guy who turned Alex Smith into an NFL starting QB, "created" Colin Kaepernick's only success and got Jake Rudock drafted? 

Imagine how much teaching and preparation the team has had this week just from the Iowa tape alone. We'll see how it translates starting this weekend against the Hoosiers, but the opportunity is certainly there for this team to really make it a special season for sure......after a loss to an unranked team on November 12. 

Man, college football really has changed hasn't it?