Undone

Hopefully Emma Johnson's photo will emerge to a meme-level status around here.

And we could probably add the tendency to turn the ball over on offense during quite a few games throughout the season, also. That - combined also with offensive penalties - contributed to some of those lulls. In a nutshell, this was a team in total disarray coming into the 2018 off-season. Like you said Vince, I also believe we saw the effect that (at least relatively good) coaching had on our defense when we entered into the second half of the season. In my opinion, the only way we compete legitimately for a conference title next year against whoever wins the East is if we put up "2017 UCF" offensive points-per-game stats. Our defensive roster isn't positioned to carry the team to that kind of success next year quite yet without an insanely good offense. In losing Morgan, I'm not sure "insanely good offense" is possible but I absolutely expect a minimum of an increase in average offensive points-per-game of roughly 6-7 points more than this season, which takes us up from roughly 30 to the mid to upper 30s. If you combine that bump in offense with even just a super small bump in defensive performance, we have a decent shot of winning the West. But neither thing is any kind of a guarantee. Specifically to the topic of this thread, our defensive effort and performance over the second half of this season was very positive and if that translates over to next year, I think we'll win a minimum of 8 games.

This is also quite possibly partially a product of the three down linemen system. On every single down, your three down linemen match up against their five base linemen, not to mention the fact that the tight end is totally "a thing" in B1G play. This is where Chinander enters the stage, because our linebackers have to be in proper position against the "power" teams like Wisconsin and Iowa. You absolutely have to have linebackers that aren't just strong but are also fast, and are coached for proper run fit assignment. There were some flashes where I saw Tyrin Ferguson look like he was going to make a big impact here, but overall, we just didn't have the athletes (by and large) at linebacker to overcome the inherent problems that a three down linemen front creates against these power teams.

In theory this is where defensive depth comes into play to help the situation greatly. No offense to our guys...but we did have depth on the defensive line...it just wasn't talented depth. At the linebacker spot, we didn't have as much depth, especially when Honas got hurt. And had basically no depth at corner to speak of. These are all reasons in my opinion to be hopeful about the future, because with even just a small bump in defensive talent over the past 5-8 seasons' averages - along with the old skool 'Tom Osborne' formula of getting scout team and underclassmen players competing for starting spots combined with good strengh & conditioning - the depth problem can be fixed in just one more season. The more I analyze the full span of the season, the more positive I am about Chinander and the defensive position coaches. Now it's time to just try to beat our previous averages for defensive recruiting, and this thing really takes off. I'm convinced of that. But obviously, the recruiting part is no "lock" and is much easier said than done. February will be very, very interesting.

Good posts by both of you. As I've said in other posts over the past few weeks, I was in the camp of people that was really hard on Chinander during games 1-6 but have since changed my stance after seeing the defense steadily improve over the second half of the season. The improvement was slow and undramatic, but it was enough. If that same rate of improvement flows over to next season and our offense is able to muster up an average of seven more points per game, I believe we're definitely going to put up 8 wins next year. To boil down my argument, one season isn't enough to judge Chinander and his position coaches, but if I'm forced to judge based on this one year I actually like what I see. Add even just a realistically decent amount of average talent increase on the defensive side of the ball and our program is dominating the West because of how good Frost obviously is at putting an offense together.

I was going to start a new thread for this topic, but I'll just post it here instead. How many offensive points do you believe should generally be "enough to win a game?" I know there'll be some smart a**es that roll in with "more than the other team." But really, how many points are enough? For me the number is probably and reasonably 35. If we had gotten to that number more consistently, we probably would have gone 8-4. It's interesting to me that we put up 28 points on offense in three different losses. Against Purdue and Wisconsin, in my opinion our defense sucked and there aren't any excuses for how bad it sucked. In the second half of the season, our defense reasonably did a good job with the roster issues that we all know that we have. We had a lot of games where the 2nd & 3rd quarter were just really stale on offense; add one more touchdown there and we could have possibly gone 8-4.

Not you, but several others.

Definitely agree, but I'm not going to sit here and say that it's fixed in 2019 to give us some magical season.

Our inability to rush the passer this season was really terrible. It cost us the game against Purdue, Northwestern, and probably Iowa. I have a real fear that the roster and some tendencies by the coaching staff will continue the poor pass rushing well on into next season. Don't anybody flame me for this; it's a thought-out prediction and I'm just being honest. I want to be wrong so bad. If we fixed that, got our offensive linemen a bit stronger so that they don't need to hold because they're out of position, and continue the good special teams play from the second half of the season, we're no doubt worth 8 wins. Whether that wins the West, I'm not sure. Northwestern only plays one tough team for their cross-divisional games, so they're potentially set up to make a good run like they did this season. I have said and will continue to say that I think we will only win the West by having a 2017 UCF sort of a year where despite relatively mediocre defensive stats, the offense is so good that it just finds a way to win games. I see putting the whole thing together in 2020 and bludgeoning the f*** out of the nobodies that are Wisconsin, Iowa, Northwestern, Purdue...and giving whoever we match up against in Indy a real run and possibly getting into the playoff.

Our 2019 recruiting class ranking is going to either give more or less credence to this, depending on where it falls. But looking back, the difference between Pelini/Riley and Frost is neither Pelini/Riley had any kind of "national attention factor" to: -Land a really, really good quarterback -Land Top 20 recruiting classes Frost has already done the first thing. If he does the second thing, this program dominates the West and gets back on the map.

They just barely pulled it off. They had six games where they failed to score 20 points, and five games where they didn't score more than 14.

Wisconsin started to trend down when they lost to BYU. This is more or less a blowout loss to Minnesota. Wisconsin sucks. *Edit: Yep, blowout. Wow.

Harbaugh's defense got psychologically brutalized in this game. I know Bush got hurt...but still. The only real chance Michigan has of winning a conference title at this point is if Meyer just plain retires. It just isn't going to happen. Meyer has Harbaugh's number to a 'T.'

Harbaugh's offense is a slightly better version of offense than Riley's. It honestly really sucks.

Sort of feels like you might be arguing with a straw man. Assuming that the sentiment on this board is a halfway decent cross-section of the fan base (which may or may not be the case), I've seen a lot of people switching their opinion to one that believes the coaching staff has wound up actually squeezing out "more" from the "less" that we have during the second half of the season. If Chinander doesn't get credit for that, who does? I do agree about needing the better horses part, though.