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Our offensive and defensive schemes lost us the game
louism2wash
Member Posts: 334
It's not the only reason but I think it accounts for the vast majority of why we lost.
On offense we had no answer for Michigan's pressure. It doesn't help that we were fairly one dimensional due to the injury to Dillon Johnson but regardless, there's more we could have done in the short/intermediate pass game. Our best drive came right before half when we ran our 2 minute offense. We dinked and dunked our way down the field hitting the tight end and hitting on a nice inside screen to Rome. Scoring on that drive looked easy. On every other drive we looked rattled. That's been a theme all year with Grubb's play calling... when the pocket is clean Grubb looks like an offensive savant. As soon as the opposing team's defense starts dirtying the pocket and getting Penix out of rhythm we look like a totally different team. The play calling looks desperate. Penix looks scared. The offense is on it's heels and we have no confidence. As soon as it feels like it isn’t easy for us to go deep downfield we start to panic.
Defensively we knew that Michigan wanted to run the ball. The front four of our base defense plays with two defensive tackles and two defensive ends. That front was by no means "run stuffing" this season so the idea that we were going to just play our base defense against Michigan and stop the run seems absurd yet that's exactly what we tried to do. I would have much rather us sold out on stopping the run and made JJ McCarthy beat us throwing the ball.
On offense we had no answer for Michigan's pressure. It doesn't help that we were fairly one dimensional due to the injury to Dillon Johnson but regardless, there's more we could have done in the short/intermediate pass game. Our best drive came right before half when we ran our 2 minute offense. We dinked and dunked our way down the field hitting the tight end and hitting on a nice inside screen to Rome. Scoring on that drive looked easy. On every other drive we looked rattled. That's been a theme all year with Grubb's play calling... when the pocket is clean Grubb looks like an offensive savant. As soon as the opposing team's defense starts dirtying the pocket and getting Penix out of rhythm we look like a totally different team. The play calling looks desperate. Penix looks scared. The offense is on it's heels and we have no confidence. As soon as it feels like it isn’t easy for us to go deep downfield we start to panic.
Defensively we knew that Michigan wanted to run the ball. The front four of our base defense plays with two defensive tackles and two defensive ends. That front was by no means "run stuffing" this season so the idea that we were going to just play our base defense against Michigan and stop the run seems absurd yet that's exactly what we tried to do. I would have much rather us sold out on stopping the run and made JJ McCarthy beat us throwing the ball.
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It was obvious Penix was having one of those games where he overthrows and is shaky. He had a similar game last year in the Alamo Bowl.
We abandoned the dink and dunk for no fucking reason.
Not sure how you don't gameplan for that and do it from the first snap in stead of after the half, everyone knew what Michigan were gonna do on offense.