There were a lot of things that went wrong on Saturday, and some things that went better than you would think from the 31-0 score. Like when David Price lost a 1-hitter this summer, it required consistent failure in high-leverage situations.
Tempo does a few things for an offense. You lose the huddle but keep tired defenders on the field and force them to commit to a vanilla personnel group against everything you run. You also give yourself a chance to survey the defense and adjust. Saturday's problems were much larger than slow tempo, but I couldn't let this…
…happen (the above resulted in a timeout, as the Wolverines only got to the line with 4 seconds on the clock) without seeing if there was a pattern.
The thing that bothered me during the game is it seemed Michigan was damaging themselves by taking a looooong time to get to the line of scrimmage, which not only limited their total opportunities to come back, but apparently forced Gardner to rush his reads in key situations, to awful effect.
So I went through the game and tracked how many seconds were left on the play clock whenever Michigan's offense arrived in their alignment. Data are here if you wanna play with it. The results: here's the success rate of the offense this week by the amount of time on the clock when Michigan got in their formation:
Click biggers making
I used the different colors to show the plays in blue where they're subject to the 40-second clock. The two on the far left forced Michigan to burn timeouts. This does show tendency but not that success came from it except when they were extremely slow. When Michigan couldn't line with more than 9 seconds on the clock the results were two burned timeouts, three negative yardage plays, and five positive ones.
[after the jump: did they speed up after they got down by 21?]
Hello jumpers. The answer is no.
All those blue notes are with the clock running. They ran a pair of hurry-ups in the 3rd quarter, one which got a crucial 1st down and a quick lineup and snap, the second resulted in a Magnuson false start. I'm particularly bothered by the clump of slow-as-balls plays in the early 3rd quarter. Down 21-0 Michigan was burning 35 seconds of clock per down on multiple occasions.
With Brian this complaint has gotten to the point of it's not worth restating because as long as we have Hoke we'll be a slow-to-the-line team. Advocating Michigan suddenly change that right now would be counter-productive; they are not going to get to any kind of hurry-up that puts pressure on the defense.
What we should be advocating is simply that they speed things so as not to shoot themselves in the face. Getting to the line more quickly will avoid wasting timeouts or running plays when the offense isn't prepared, and could have prevented them from burning several drives worth of precious clock when they were down three scores in the 3rd quarter.
