Saturday, November 5, 2011

Iowa ReCap: The More Things Change The More They Stay the Same

Michigan clearly didn't get their wake up call in Iowa City this morning because they slept walked through most of the game.   A pretty poor Iowa team beat Michigan due to many mistakes by the Wolverines. 

Mistakes in order of memory:

  • AL Borges not losing his play calling sheet
  • Winning the coin flip and electing to take the ball
  • Missing an extra point
  • Dropped passes
  • Denard fumbling
  • Denard making a terrible (tipping point) decision to throw into coverage at the end of the first half at the goal line.  
  • Putting Devin in when Denard was ready to go out.   (I LIKE DEVIN BUT HE IS CLEARLY NOT READY TO LEAD THIS TEAM).  This was a huge missed opportunity for the Wolverines.
  • Running the same damn sweep play like 4 or 5 times in the second half with out any luck.
  • Denard missing a wide open Roundtree on a post route
  • The original call on Hemingway's non touchdown catch - should have been a touchdown.  Like the Vincent Smith play they should have used replay to overturn it if it wasn't. 
  • A clear pass interference on the last play of the game
Iowa is a decent team but simple on offense.  They run the ball and throw to McNutt.   The Michigan defense for the most part played pretty well.   The Michigan offense was just plan out terrible.   They were stopping themselves against one of the worst run defenses in the Big Ten.  

Al Borges is lost, he needs to let Denard be Denard and create plays by running some tempo offense.   Use your running power game and hand offs to Fitz, but get Denard more involved in the game.  In my mind, they didn't run any type of of sound offense until it was too late.  

Denard lost this game with mistakes in the passing game and Al lost this game with predictive play calling.   Michigan should have won this game by 21 points and lost.  I can't believe our defense is stepping up and our offense is letting us down.   Not sure what is going on with Big AL but WR's are not open, Denard feels like he needs to force balls instead of scrambling and Michigan's running plays today were predictable and didn't show any mis-direction.   All Iowa had to do was send lots of defenders to the ball.

This team better figure out how to play better on the road and against good defenses or there might not be another W on the schedule.   Brady and Al also better figure out how to coach on the road in the Big Ten pretty quickly.  They are 1-2 right now and had to fight back to beat Northwestern.   They have pretty much been out coached in all three road games. 

4 comments:

JQP said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
JQP said...

It's pretty incomprehensible that with the ball on the three, Michigan chooses NOT to let one of the most electrifying runners in NCAA history try to run it in. I don't get it. Al's emasculated Denard and our once potent offense.

What happened to the "not trying to fit a round peg into a square hole" talk? Seems to me that's exactly what's happening. As you say, let Denard be Denard. I think he could gain three yards in four tries by running on any day, against any team.

uncle ron said...

"Q" I said it all through the game "let Denard be Denard" all through the first half they kept trying to run that damn 2 QB series, to no avail. Bob your right Devin is no where near ready to run this team he has "happier feet" than Denard used to. I think Denard is so scared to throw the ball anymore because of INT's that he is saying I'm throwing where nobody can catch it un less he has a M jersey on. The one INT. ws not his fault if the damn receiver just catches the ball, there is no INT. Just think what the attitude would have been had we made all the catches that were just dropped on crucial plays, I blame the receivers as much as anybody. AB should scrap 60% of his damn playbook.

JQP said...

What happened to the whole man-ball philosophy? Seems like we're trying to out-think and out-gimmick the opposition rather than saying, look, we've got Denard, let's see if you can stop him.

For all his faults, RR managed keep DR productive despite the opposition keying on him. With last year's offense and this year's defense, we'd be undefeated so far.