Michigan Defense Theater: The Return - Experiment 1704: Purdilicus

INT. SCHEMBECHLER INSTITUTE

NOAH FURBUSH is piloting a spaceship while hitting a huge pile of AEROSPACE ENGINEERING textbooks.

WARDE MANUEL

What is he doing?

SUSIE HENDERSON

That's Noah Furbush, one of our top linebackers. He's probably working on a drone control algorithm for his capstone project. He's returning with the largest cache of Stephen Ross donations the world has ever seen.

WARDE MANUEL

That's really going to help with our funding problems at Schembechler Institute.

[blows nose with $100 bill]

A DISTRESS SIGNAL appears on the radar.

TV'S SON ON TV'S GERG

Five, four, three, two, one. Blog trap initiated. Mayday!

NOAH

Someone needs my help. This is Noah Furbush from the Schembechler Institute, I'm preparing to land.

A PNEUMATIC TUBE appears and sucks up NOAH FURBUSH.

THEME SONG

In the not-too-distant future, next Saturday A.D.
There was a guy named Noah, so much taller than you or me
He worked at Schembechler Institute
Just another guy in a maize jumpsuit
A distress call came it at five past noon
But an evil Sparty trapped him so he'll have to be a dude

I'll send him speedy runners, the best I can find
He'll have to stop, tackle them all, while I monitor his mind

Now keep it mind that Noah can't control when the runners begin or end
He'll try to keep his sanity with the help of his D-Line friends

Maurice!
Gary!
Chase Wino!
Mooooooone!

If you're wondering how he eats and breathes and other science facts
He's got a meal card and it's set on Earth so you should really just relax
For Michigan Defense Theater 3000!

INT. SATELLITE OF YOST

NOAH

Hi everyone, welcome to the Satellite of Yost. I'm Noah, and these are my friends Chase Wino and Mone.

MONE

You're not my friend!

CHASE WINO

Come on, Mone, Noah is our friend and trusted ally on the rare occasions that a runner gets to the second level.

NOAH

Since we've last been here, we've made a few upgrades. I've added an appetite simulator to Maurice - the good news is that he moves even faster but the bad news is he's always hungry. Gary handles all the higher functions on the Satellite of Yost so I've upgraded him to bigger and faster than you can possible imagine.

And everyone can fly now! But only on the football field.

A RED LIGHT flashes.

NOAH

Dammit, Moon 3-9 is calling.

In A Little While

Purdue quarterback David Blough (11) picks up his own fumble in front of Michigan linebacker Mike McCray (9) during the second half of an NCAA college football game in West Lafayette, Ind., Saturday, Sept. 23, 2017. Michigan defeated Purdue 28-10. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy)

I don't really know what to make of this game.  It feels like a slightly upgraded version of the last two weeks.  The offense struggles until it doesn't (thankfully not in the red zone today), the defense is fast, furious, and aggressive, making life difficult for everyone on the opponent's offensive side of the ball, and Michigan fans are nervous and angsty until they're not. 

We only fret about things we care about.  Even if those things are seemingly foolish or ultimately unimportant in the grand scheme of things, when we care, we worry.  We worry when things don't seem to be going the right way, we are uneasy when something feels "off".  So when Wilton Speight goes down (on an uncalled late hit) and is escorted out of Ross-Ade Stadium on a peripatetic search for an X-ray machine, we worry.  When there are turnovers, we fret.  When O'Korn looks OK, not great, we grouse.  But I have a new working thesis, in re Harbaugh.

I don't think Harbaugh intends for his teams to come out of the gate not necessarily firing on all cylinders, that would be foolhardy and potentially dangerous in the longer term of a game.  I do think Harbaugh is OK with taking the best punches from an opponent, letting them show their cards, and then adjusting at halftime.  I think this is the coach's son in him, or the Bo acolyte or some combination therein.  It's not enough to have a plan, it's summed up in von Moltke the Elder's statement from On Strategy (1871): "The tactical result of an engagement forms the base for new strategic decisions because victory or defeat in a battle changes the situation to such a degree that no human acumen is able to see beyond the first battle."  Every game has its own character.  Harbaugh could not have planned for Speight to go down.  He would have O'Korn ready to go in, but that is not the same as "OK, Speight's gonna get taken out on a sack."  He allowed the game to find its ebbs and flows and was likely displeased, but not dishearted to be down 10-7 at the half.

To everyone's relief, Michigan's defense flashed its claws.  It allowed Purdue a grand total of ten yards in the second half, having given up 179 in the first half.  But it was also the simple pitches and catches between O'Korn and the tight ends, coupled with some "find the hole, hit the hole" runs by the running back by committee and Michigan was cruising.  (A couple of timely, if wholly fair, targeting ejections on the Purdue defense may have also helped things along.)  People who didn't see the game, that will only see the final score, will see a Michigan team that went on the road against an upstart Purdue team and handled its business.  They won't see the hiccups, or if they do, they'll see 21-0 second half, probably keep them around #7-8 in the polls and let Michigan head into the bye week 4-0 with the Battle for Paul Bunyan looming.

Quick notes:

• I don't know how I feel yet about CFB on Fox, but that bumper that showed a flip-through of Michigan legends that ended in the Block M was nicely done.
  
• So, if Twitter is to be believed, Purdue's opposing locker room has no A/C and there's no X-ray machine at Ross-Ade.  I think when we focus on mocking Rutgers, we do a disservice to our rightful questioning of Purdue's continuing position in the Big Ten.
  
• We keep calling Chris Evans "The Human Torch", because "Captain America" status must be earned, but man, we're getting close to handing him the shield.

So Your Program is Doomed?

DOOOOOOOOOOOOMED.

So your [CHOOSE ONE: once-proud / erratically successful / perennial also-ran / perpetual tire fire / Eastern Michigan] football program is struggling this year?

• Yes.  Oh sweet jebus, yes.
• Nope. Not sure why I'm taking this fake survey.

What do you propose to do about it? (CHOOSE ONE)

• Do nothing. ROLL TIDE.
• Do nothing. Mediocrity is an impossible dream.
• Insist "They just need more time!"
• MAKE 'EM RUN STEPS
• Fire a coordinator
• Fire the coach
• Fire the AD
• FIRE EVERYONE
• BURN IT TO THE GROUND AND SALT THE EARTH.

Do you have any coaching candidates in mind? (CHOOSE ONE)

• HAIL SABAN.
• An absurdly over-qualified alumnus who won't bother answering your phone calls
• Pipe-dream hotshot coach who'd be insane to leave behind his current success / low expectations
• Genius coordinator who's never been a head coach
• Up-and-coming mid-major / FCS coach with no big-time experience
• NFL retread
• NFL coordinator with no college experience in the past decade
• NFL position coach
• NFL position coach who flamed out as a college head coach (and may have slapped himself)
• Your current OC/DC on an interim basis
• Some guy who had one good MAC season
• Charlie Weiss

On a scale of Rodriguez at Michigan to Saban at Alabama, how good of a cultural fit is your dream candidate? (CHOOSE ONE)

• Rich Rodriguez / Michigan (2008)
• Charlie Weiss / Kansas (2012)
• Randy Edsall / Maryland (2011)
• Al Golden / Miami (2011)
• Brian Kelly / Notre Dame (2010)
• Brady Hoke / Michigan (2011)
• Chip Kelly / Oregon (2009)
• Nick Saban / Alabama (2007)

What is making you so angry? (Check all that apply)

• Lost to a rival
• Lost to most-hated rival
• Lost to a perpetual tomato-can
• Can't recruit
• Team is hemorrhaging players
• Fans treated like walking checkbook
• Insolvent athletic department
• NCAA violations
• Players put in danger
• Felonies
• Covering up felonies
• Oversigning
• PEOPLE KEEP TALKIN' BOUT THIS OVERSIGNIN', PAAAAAAWWWLLLL, BUT THEY JUS' JEALOUS!

Would you still be this angry if your team was winning? (CHOOSE ONE)

• No, obviously not, because *something* would be going better.
• No, because winning is the only thing that matters
• No, because my team is perfectly OK except they're terrible.
• Yes, because I am lying.
• Yes, because I don't like football.
• Yes, because I am an incendiary rage-bot. SOMETHING is going to set me off.

What kind of doomed is your program?

• EMU: As DOOMED as DOOMED can be. 
• Toledo: Once in a while we can win the MAC and get our coach a better job.
• Purdue: The Cure as a football team.  
• Indiana: Our greatest teams have the ability to beat almost anyone on any down, so they most often beat themselves. Otherwise a conference doormat. 
• Illinois: Once in a generation Rose Bowl, but usually Zooked. 
• Iowa: Real success every four years; otherwise losing to Iowa State. 
• Pitt: Crushing mediocrity with no hope is the norm forever, despite national championships not that long ago.
• Clemson: Perennial success, but never on a national title scale. See: Wisconsin.
• Notre Dame: We're living in the past, so the present is disappointing even when we're good.
• Texas: We have every advantage possible and are somehow terrible and in the middle of a gut-wrenching transition. See: Florida, Michigan (Michigan bonus: In our darkest hour, we hope to be Notre Dame.)
• Ohio State: Not quite a national title contender this year, but always a threat to win our league. See: Oklahoma
• Michigan State: Suddenly we're the pre-eminent program in our state for the first time in 50 years. Not anyone's default pick for a national championship team, but we have legitimate hope. See: Texas A&M, Stanford.
• Oregon: We don't really have a history, but we don't care because GOT MONEY and are successful now. We watched the first half of a video on the Miami Hurricanes, so we know this never changes!
• Alabama: Whether or not you choose to recognize it, we won every national championship since 1892. ROLL TIDE.

Engineering

Let's be clear, we've seen this movie a number of times and we still love it. (AP Photo by Michael Conroy)

(The great irony of this column is that I am the only member of the writing team here who does not hold an engineering degree from Michigan.  So I may get some of the details wrong, but I am not letting that stand in the way of a clever premise.)

Purdue gets a lot of play as an "engineering school" and there's obviously something fair about this*, after all, it is the #11 rated engineering graduate school in the country and it does have a lot of very successful engineering graduates.  But, here's the thing.  Michigan is also an engineering school, in fact, it has the #9 rated engineering graduate school in the country, in addition to highly rated law and medical schools to name just two more.  Basically, Michigan not only does the thing that Purdue does best as well as Purdue does if not better, it also does lots of other things better.

(*-I also think people think of Purdue as an engineering school because their mascot is a train and that's just how people's brains work.)

I think it was easy to believe that "Bad Denard" was going to show up because we only tend to remember the last thing we have seen.  But Denard's apology after the Notre Dame game, and all of the right things we heard from the team and the coaches during the bye week* brought me to the conclusions that this was going to be an OK day.  It didn't make me any less fearful about the game, but I had staked out my position ahead of the game on that ground.

(*-We call it a bye week, but technically it is not.  A bye is a round off in a tournament setting that allows you to advance to the next round of play without having played.  If anything, it's an open date.  This is also semantics.)

The first quarter was a clinic of what you can do with an extra week to prepare and to work on execution.  13 of 17 plays on a nearly nine minute drive were rushes.  Some were Denard, some were Fitz, a couple to Jeremy Gallon, one to Vincent Smith, but in the end, the variety and the execution put Michigan up 7-0 in the middle of the first quarter and everything started to click.  No matter how good people thought Purdue's front seven were on defense, Michigan looked better in all phases of the game.  Even the small things, like Brendan Gibbons dropping it exactly on the crossbar (which is actually harder when you think about it) or the bad exchange between Denard and Vincent Smith that led to the fumble and Purdue's late score in the first half and that slight tightening of the collar that you can't help but get when bad things happen.

But the predicted doom and gloom never came.  Michigan looked like a team that had two losses to teams ranked in the top ten and Purdue looked like a team who had three wins over some of the dregs of FBS.  We don't know a lot of things after September.  Some things are obvious, usually which teams are really good and which teams are really bad, but we also don't know a lot about the middle because of the imbalance of schedules.  Would we feel better about Michigan if the Alabama game had been, say, Buffalo or Ball State?  Probably, but we don't have that luxury now.  But we do know that no one who is eligible to play in the Big Ten championship game is really that much better than anyone else.  Today we saw Northwestern lose to Penn State, we saw Michigan State struggle with Indiana, a sentence I had difficulty typing over the sheer incredulity of it, and Nebraska and Ohio State trade points and make people question the existence of their defense.  Michigan answered its critics in a way that no other Big Ten team can claim today.

Michigan still has a way to go, but I liked what I saw today much more than I have at any point during this season.  Jake Ryan started out today strong, Raymon Taylor gives me hope, and I liked the tackling fundamentals out there.  Michigan isn't a great team, but it's a very good team, and a very good team may be all that is needed to win the Big Ten this year.

Never a dull moment!  Oddly, not pointing.  (AP photo by Michael Conroy)

So Homecoming week, a blast from the past to come, yet another game not starting at noon, and our second straight game outside the division.  Let's make it count.

Coming Home

(Great photo of Mike Martin and Denard Robinson from John T. Greilick of The Detroit News)

Five Homecoming things from the land of the Purdoomed and the land of the "I'm still trying to write up my epic Three and Out post that is now verging on 3000 words and I'm only a third of the way through the book):

1).           So we're working on the 4^th and an inch plan, right? I'm loathe to call anything "unacceptable", but man, seriously, we need to get on that.

2).           "Seven Nation Army", no.  "Hardest Button to Button", yes.

3).           Students, seriously, get to the game on time.  I will be an old man and tell you that it's embarrassing to see the alumni in the seats before kickoff and a student section that is less than 50% full.  Rocket Man could have safely landed in the student section with no collateral damage.  I don't care that it's Halloween weekend and some how in the last ten years, Halloween became a big deal on college campuses,* you make claims about being the engine that makes the Michigan Stadium experience go?  Get there.  Plan ahead.  Take the time.  Leave your pre-game fifteen minutes earlier, but be there for kickoff, even for Purdue, even in the cold.**  Otherwise, you're leaving yourselves open to the criticism you receive.

(*-As was once said to me by a fellow member of the Class of 2000: "I don't have a lot of regrets about college, but I do lament that we went to college in the era of shame based clothing.")

(**-Five years of student tickets 1996-2000, never got there late, never left early, not even during Syracuse 1998.  You can do it if you want to do it.)

(It's casual Devin and striding Denard!  David Guralnick/The Detroit News)

4).           Not that I mind, but since when does Michigan's Homecoming have a theme?  Moreover, if it's had a theme, since when have been told what it is?

(Michael Shaw finishes in style. John T. Greilick / The Detroit News)

5).           Fitz's long run was nice, but the little hesitation move that Michael Shaw put on his defender to get past him for the touchdown was exceptional.

Onward to Iowa.  RIP GopherQuest.  Leading the Legends in the first week of November, yeah, it's a pretty good feeling.