Delayed Michigan Assessment

Greetings All

Sorry for the delay. As I mentioned last weekend, I was back east for the game, then flew home early Sunday morning. Plus I had a conference all week that didn't allow for much time to sit and type during the week. I'll give this a quick try.

I debated whether I should read Godfather's post mortem before I wrote. I read it and he covered everything accurately and smoothly, as usual. Some additional thoughts from me:

I kept thinking after the game of how many people we could lay the "goat" claim on. Don pointed out AA's unsportsmanlike penalty--killer. How about all of Golden Tate's drops? That wasn't like him. I don't give JC an A--four of our six time outs were called to avoid a delay penalty, and we had 2 delay penalties. It wasn't crowd noise, although that is the loudest I've heard the place (as they mentioned many times). Realize some of the plays were coming in late, but I lay at least half of those on Clausen. He doesn't seem to have that internal clock synchronized just yet. He should by now.

While I won't disagree with calling a pass on 2nd and long on our last possession, I will question which pass. the sideline fade hadn't worked all day. No reason to assume it would now. It still seems on key plays, there's only one primary receiver and there's no Plan B. Like Don said, I would have trusted Rudolph to get open over the middle. I wrote down after this drive "Heckuva time to go 3 and out". Bad omen.

One more goat - the replay officials. I rarely complain about officiating, but I do not believe AA went out of bounds on the called back TD on our second drive. Certainly, we saw no "irrefutable" evidence on ABC.

The 3rd quarter Mo shift was really amazing. I was all jazzed that we came back from 11 down to get the lead. Although I wasn't happy we gave up that field goal at the end of the first half.

And yes, we came back again. Down 11 for the second time, we managed to get the lead. What we never managed to do was get a two score lead. If we had ever gone up 10 or 11, I think we would have been fine. Oh well.

I don't want to list all the freshman QBs we've made look like Heisman Trophy candidates this decade. (Rick Leach from our era comes to mind). And JaMarcus Russell (a sophomore, as I recall) should be sending 10% of his Raiders pay to the ND endowment every month. (Boy is he bad). So we'll see with Mr Forcier. I'd hate to be the other Frosh QB there, at least for now.

One last note. One of the items I keep track of is "big plays". I consider any gain from scrimmage of 15 yards or more a "BP". In the second half, the BP score was 5-1 against us.

I do believe we are a noticeably better team than last year. AA has kept true to his pledge not to go down on first contact. in the first quarter I wrote "AA is a bull this year". And that he is. Too bad for his bull#$%^ act in the end zone (although it wasn't that blatant). And our receivers are top shelf. O line is definitely improved. Defense is still a work in process. Probably somewhere in between a shutout (Nevada) and 31 points (UofM, minus the KO return; what was up with that??). I like our FG kicker, although we still can't recruit a "Touchback kicker-offer", seemingly.

Finally, my brother is out of the hospital; checked out Sunday. My analogy is he has the "Caesarian" of appendectomies. His appendix burst, there were complications, and his come back will much slower than a normal incident without rupture. He's home at least through next week, and is still recovering from having lost 20 lbs in a week. Not a weight loss method I'd recommend, believe me.

Enough on last week. Stand by for a short MSU prediction. Haven't had any research time this week, but THEY LOST TO CENTRAL MICHIGAN!

GO IRISH!!!! BEAT SPARTANS!!!

The Colonel