Football, is infuriating. It used to be great… or at least good. Good enough that in my youth I could be enough of a fanboy to shit on fan’s of lesser sports, like soccer, or track for being a less exciting, no contact, Nance version of sports with not enough scoring and/or no defense. But in an all-too-common business strategy these days, NCAA TV executives have taken a perfect entertainment product and slowly made it worse in order to milk every last dollar out of its customers. Their users are so locked into the ecosystem that they’ll put up with more and more bullshit… because they have to. You have to have subscribe to Peacock to watch certain games. Want to buy a ticket? Have to do that online and then pay 50% extra for Stub Hub fees. You’ll still have to sit through ad breaks, but instead of the same TV spot with Nick Saban and a duck, you get to stare at a guy in a red hat and listen to Not-The-Band music over the PA system.. Even I put up with this for years. I did this in part because Michigan was good, and college football was entertaining. Yes, it was annoying but 1) you can start the game late and fast forward through the commercials and B) My team won the National Championship!
So we dealt with the ads, the stupid aspects of the redesigns (remember Michigan had Adidas stripes on their shoulders?), the data collection(probably). But after the first few weeks it seems like Michigan fans had had enough. If you’re a Michigan fan (Sorry Matt, another article not for you), and you watched this offense, you may have noticed that trying to run a dumbed down version of last year’s offense wasn’t working.*, offensive line letting pash rushers through like every play was a screen, and yet still being completely unable to run a screen…. “Let’s leave the guy literally names Superman on the bench,” the coach decides. Let’s not. This team has 3 good offensive players and that one only pretends that he notices 200 pound humans water-skiing behind him so as not to blow his cover. You don’t have a quarterback that can throw, so you might as well use one who can run. Sometimes things just aren’t working. Sometimes you think the best solution is to change. So the fans, and the coaches, decided to switch to Alex Orji.
This might have been a mistake. Now in case there are any Orji super-fans reading, I’ve got nothing against Alex. Alex is great for very specific tasks. He’s fast. It’s not light-weight. And he’s very good at doing some things like running over safeties. He’s also not an athlete that’s common for a quarterback, so there aren’t that many defenses that are prepared to attack him. I actually think if Michigan took the time to install an Alex-based offense, we’d really like it. But here’s the thing; It’s expensive implement. For a team that’s been running, and a coach that’s been teaching, a 1990’s pro-style offense for the past 9 years, it takes a while to make that adjustment. If they had spent, say, 9 months, spring, and fall camp, implementing it, I’m sure Evan Link wouldn’t be blocking the optioned defender. I’m sure Orji would be reading Defensive Ends and Linebackers until they pulled their hair out trying to defend both him and Kalel Mullings lead blocking for Donovan Edwards. They’d be screaming through defensive backs with ankle breaking moves in the open field. But they didn’t do that.
They have a game to play this week. And they can’t figure out how to get Alex pull the ball when he can walk to the sideline for 10 yards. So you know what they did? They ran the same damn offense as last year. And you know what? It will mostly be fine. Yes, it’ll be incredibly annoying that they’ll go 3 and out on multiple drives… and the performance probably would be better if they ran an offense designed for Orji’s strengths… But the defense is a tank. So for most of the time, it won’t matter. They’ll grind teams like Minnesota and Northwestern into a pulp. And the defense will at times be incredibly satisfying.
So, yes, if they’d had the foresight to prep this early and really repped using Orji as a runner, we’d probably be having a much more enjoyable experience this season. But they didn’t do that. They don’t yet know how to make Alex good. So for now, change is bad. They’re going to run the ball the same way they always have. It’s not going to be as perfect as we’d like, because teams are going to have an extra defender to stop it, but for many teams on the schedule, that won’t matter. And for now, that’s good enough for me. At least it’ll probably be fine until there’s a game so depressing that I almost forget there’s still a trophy in Schembechler Hall that #$%& Tony Petitti. But that’s probably not for at least a few weeks.
*Read: was awful