Undone

Looks like Wisconsin wins 28-17. Hopefully there can be some kind of discussion in this thread and not just pissing and moaning. :) Last year I looked up the stats of the last 15 years of head-to-head matchups between Wisconsin & Iowa. Wisconsin never mustered more than 37 against the Hawkeyes. In yet, we've been blown out by Wisconsin multiple times. Chinander has two weeks to inspire a starting lineup of 11 guys to stop Wisconsin's run game. Two weeks to figure out how to prevent out ILBs from biting on the motion man and getting out of position. Wisconsin will look at the film of this Michigan game and give us hell...if we let them. We have the asses up front and the physicality from our linebackers to match up against the Vagers. Just need an inspired group of 11 defenders to play their assignments.

Pretty great. Have to see the lighter side of things right now to keep the sanity!

We have zero vertical threat when there's no protection. We've tried to throw outside, and we've tried to run outside. Didn't work. So normally you'd go vertical at that point, but we just can't do that when there's no protection. Conrad is really struggling. The whole offensive line is.

It was some especially bad line play today. Conrad & Foster are struggling. Badly. If our offensive line play doesn't improve greatly in conference play, getting to five wins could be pretty difficult.

I can't get my head around how bad Wisconsin could exploit this type of run inside the left tackle. Like, beyond brutal.

I'll be disappointed in Frost if Jackson doesn't get benched against Purdue. Sweet f****** hell. Wow.

Dedrick Young does not deserve one. There are some seniors that just aren't good enough to be on this team with the goals we have. Honestly I'd probably bench Conrad and bring in fresh blood for experience right away.

In terms of Gebbia transferring, I think he just wanted to go play on a team with a better offensive line.

Agreed. Hopefully Frost & Co. gleaned a lot of things from watching the tape from Troy. My thought is, if it's 3rd & 2 and Ozigbo's in there, play action, roll out, and throw it to him into the flat, etc., etc. There were so many things that went wrong in the fourth quarter offensively against Troy.

Yeah... I think as Knapp and others alluded to either earlier in this thread or another thread was that the play calling also probably should have been a bit different in these situations. Combining that with how we seemed kind of one-dimensional with Bunch in the game, we just needed something different.

Yep. I thought about this a lot this week. It seems that one limiting factor is that we try to "go fast." I have a feeling Frost isn't going to budge on that and probably isn't going to be very likely to slow it down and get Ozigbo on the field in these situations. Probably only for goal line situations. I had the same exact thought after it happened a couple of times - "Why isn't Ozigbo taking these 3rd & short runs?"

This should play from the correct starting point. Watch the block that Frost throws on a reverse to Newcombe:

LOL. Ryan Reynolds The ESPN Analyst...I'm growing a hypothetical, irrational dislike for him just thinking about it...

It could hypothetically mean that Jim Harbaugh has AIDS, it really could.

I was just going to say that same thing, Hilltop. It's possible that Harbaugh's biggest hurdle is the constant and seemingly unstoppable recruiting boon that Ohio State has and will probably have for the foreseeable future. Ohio State has won the last six head-to-head games, and somehow I just don't see that trend changing any time soon. I'm interested in seeing how Michigan plays against both Penn State and Wisconsin this season.

You & @Nebfanatic are making really good arguments here and I think I'm convinced at this point that you're both right. Because Colorado and Troy are probably roughly on the same level. And that level is "decent." I'll bet that Colorado winds up 7-5 and Troy competes hard for another conference title. And against Colorado we pounded them for 377 on the ground. Let's get a healthy Adrian Martinez back out there and things change.

I believe I had seen that we had a good body weight differential against Troy's defensive line (*Edit - @knapplc just posted the stats, thanks!). My comment was directed probably more at that in the 'we should be able to push them around' comment than in terms of just general expectations of Husker Homer. There were some extremely well-executed run plays against Colorado where pretty much all of our primary blockers did just that - executed the play to perfection. Particularly on several of the Martinez runs. Against Troy, kind of as you stated, there seemed to have been several things not happening.

Yep. One thing that would give our team a huge boost one way or the other would be a healthy Martinez that goes out there and allows our offense to open up. The playbook against Troy felt kind of limited with Bunch in the game (even though that's hard to prove) and it's honestly fairly depressing thinking about what Michigan's defense is capable of doing against our vanilla run game. If Troy held us to under 20 points...sheesh. And just to end with at least one positive note, I really think we can beat Wisconsin with a healthy Martinez...so if he's in a spot where playing full speed on Saturday aggravates the injury, don't play him. We could still win the West this season. We really could.

Good post. The main observation I have in the Troy game is that our offensive line was pretty ineffective in the fourth quarter at muscling Troy off the line. Something has to give there, and I'm not sure I care whether it was the heat, our strength being an issue, our conditioning being an issue, or whatever. I expect this offensive line to perform better in the fourth quarter against a Sun Belt team no matter what and it just wasn't good enough. I'd almost go as far as to say it was borderline poor. Going to have to continue to improve that unit for conference play if we want to avoid a losing record.

Without a perfectly healthy Adrian Martinez that is firing on all cylinders I don't see how we score more than roughly 14-17 points, and I'd definitely expect them to average at least seven points per quarter against our defense. We're huge underdogs in this one for several different reasons.

Well, what are all teams' records when going in as an underdog of 10.5 points or more? Probably somewhere along the same percentage of 6.6% (1/15), I'd wager.

Yep. And not criticizing Martinez at all, but if he swings to the sideline it might have even gone further. Great play either way.

Am I crazy for believing that Will Honas should replace Dedrick Young and play alongside Mo 'The Body' Barry on Saturday? Is that crazy?

I can sleep at night now, thank you.

Totally agree. I would never presume to know more about what each player's assignments were on any given play than Frost himself...but that last touchdown drive they had was pathetic defense. I'm told that I was incorrect that Young was to blame on that touchdown run and that Reed was supposed to cover the middle but holy crap...there was nobody home in the middle at all. I really believe that Chinander is going to produce a really great run defense - even as early as this season. But there are a couple guys who just don't read the field well at all still. Need to correct that. Overall though - as the stats show - we've been stout against the run through two games.