The Fifth Quarter — Michigan Football Forums

I want to be careful here, because I have been accused on this board of exaggerating for effect, and this time I am not doing that.

Michigan State plays Grambling State on Saturday. Grambling State. FCS. SWAC. A paid guarantee game. Every program in this conference buys one of these in September so the third string can get eleven snaps and the alumni band can do the halftime number your mother likes.

Their radio station spent an entire segment yesterday arguing about whether the Spartans can, and I want to quote this correctly because it is better in the original, "look normal." That was the standard being debated. Not win. Not cover. Look normal.

Their subreddit has a 400-comment thread about whether it is insane to be nervous. Their student newspaper interviewed students about being nervous. Somebody over there produced a graphic listing what a clean, competent, adult football game would consist of.

They are not playing us. They are playing Grambling State, and they have decided it means something.

We open against a team I could not name without looking it up, and I have not thought about it once. That is the difference and it is the whole difference.

When your program is healthy, the September game is a Saturday you spend at a tailgate. When it isn't, it becomes a referendum, and everybody in the building pretends that's normal.

We went through a version of this in 2014. I remember it. It was not enjoyable and I would not wish it on people, although in their case I might.

I listened to it on the drive back from Lansing. It is worse than the quote suggests, because the host was not being funny. He was genuinely upset, and the co-host kept trying to get him back onto the football game and could not do it.

Say what you want about our media. When ours is unhinged it is at least unhinged about a playoff.

I am going to be the dissenting voice, briefly, and then I will go back to being insufferable with the rest of you.

The nerves are not about Grambling. The nerves are about not knowing what your own team is. That is a real feeling and every one of us had it in 2021 before the first game, and we were right to have it, and then the season happened and we were wrong.

It is fine to find their week funny. Pretending we have never had the same week is revisionism.

We were nervous in 2021 about a season. They are nervous about a Saturday against a team that will get on a bus for fourteen hours.

Those are not the same nerves and you know it.

My brother in law has season tickets over there. He asked me last weekend, seriously, whether he should be worried about the option offense.

I told him I did not know what Grambling runs and that I had not looked, because our first three opponents are not going to require me to look at anything. He was quiet for a while and then changed the subject to parking.

The option thing is not nothing. I said so in my own thread this morning before it got closed for reasons nobody has explained to me.

Option offenses are a discipline test, not a talent test. A brand new defense that has practiced against itself all August has to be assignment-perfect forty-five times in a row against a scheme it has seen on a scout team run by walk-ons. That is a legitimate football problem and it has nothing to do with anybody's age.

I am not saying they lose. I am saying it will not be 45-0 at halftime and people here will act surprised.

Ross, nobody here wants the film breakdown. We want to laugh at a rival for a week. You do this every single time.

I am aware.

Related and I think worth its own consideration. We are #14. Fourteen. Preseason, with the roster we have and the quarterback we have, and nobody in the national media has been able to give me a coherent reason for it.

Meanwhile there is a Big Ten team playing an FCS opponent this week that has received more national column inches than our entire offseason. I am not saying those two facts are connected. I am saying I have noticed both of them.

Every thread here becomes a thread about our ranking within ten posts. It took ten. I timed it.

It is a Michigan football board.

I will admit to one thing and then I would like it stricken from the record.

I watched the entire press conference. All of it. He is not what I expected. He answers the question that was asked, which nobody in this profession does anymore, and when he doesn't know something he says so.

That is a low bar. He cleared it in a way that annoyed me.

He is twenty-eight years old and he has never played a down of football at any level. I am not going to be charmed by a man's press conference manner. We hired charming once. It cost us four years and a buyout that is still on a spreadsheet somewhere in Schembechler Hall.

The never-played thing has been beaten to death on both sides of this state and it is the least interesting objection available.

The interesting objection is that he is calling both the offense and the defense in his first year as a head coach anywhere. That is not youth. That is a structural decision and it is the one I would ask him about if anybody let me.

My daughter is a sophomore over there. She informed me on Sunday that "everyone" is going to the game and that she has never seen the student section full.

I told her that at our place the student section being full is not a news story, it is a Tuesday. She said, and I am quoting her, "ok."

I have been thinking about the way she said it for four days.

Something nobody in here has mentioned. They moved a 6-foot-7 offensive tackle to center.

I have been watching this sport since the Bo years and I do not remember seeing a 6-foot-7 center. There may have been one. I do not remember it. Centers are short for a reason and the reason is leverage and it has not changed since 1968.

Either that young man is remarkable or somebody in that building has read too many books.

The leverage concern is real and so is the case for it. The center is on every call and in more combination blocks than anybody, so if you have one lineman who is clearly the best athlete and one of the smartest guys on the roster, the middle is where that buys you the most.

The snap and the identification calls are the actual risk, not his height. He has not done either in a game.

That is a lot of words to agree with me.

Lurker at their place. They have a poll running about how many points they win by and nine percent voted that they lose.

Nine percent of their own fanbase. To Grambling State. I am not editorializing, I am reporting.

That is the single best thing I have read this month and I want everyone to sit with it.

Nine percent. Against an FCS team. At home.

We had a thread in 2020 titled "realistic worst case" and the top-voted answer was a number I will not repeat here.

Glass houses, gentlemen. Not many of them, but some.

I have a different objection to this entire week, and it is that we are talking about them at all.

We open Saturday. We are #14, which is a slap. We have a quarterback who I believe is going to be discussed nationally by October, and this board has produced three separate Michigan State threads and one weather thread.

We are supposed to be the ones who do not care.

You have posted in all three of them.

Both things can be true. We do not care, and we will all be watching at noon, and on Sunday we will pretend we were doing something else.

See you in the Saturday thread.

Posting this without comment, which is a lie, because I am about to comment.

Michigan State has offered Carson Coakley. The number one player in the country. A five-star tight end out of Maryland who has an offer from every program that has ever mattered and several that have not.

Their board this cycle also includes two of the top fifteen corners in the country, a top-40 center out of California, and a linebacker from Tampa. Twenty-one names total.

This is a program that has signed one five-star this century.

An offer is a piece of paper and a phone call. I could offer Carson Coakley from this chair if the NCAA gave me a login.

Wake me when a kid of that caliber takes a visit there. Not a camp. A visit.

The Coakley offer is noise and everybody in the industry knows it is noise. The part of that board I would look at if I were us is the bottom half.

Flushing. Walled Lake. Cass Tech. Those are three in-state offers to kids that staff has apparently actually evaluated, and those are three high school programs that have had no reason to return a Michigan State call in about six years.

I have said for a long time that the day they start winning in Detroit again is the day this gets less funny.

They will not. We have owned that city since the Harbaugh years and we own it now, and one twenty-eight-year-old sending letters does not change a decade of relationships.

I would also point out that our own class is currently ranked in the top ten and nobody in this thread has mentioned it.

Five posts this time. It is getting faster.

The interesting thing to me is not the names. It is that somebody over there decided the polite era is over.

For years that staff recruited like a program apologizing for existing. Regional three-stars, safe evaluations, nobody in this thread ever had to worry. Now they are calling Maryland and North Carolina and California and getting told no, presumably, but getting told no by people who now know the number.

That is worth about a two percent concern from us. Not zero.

Two percent is two percent too much. They have not played a game.

Recruiting is downstream of Saturdays. It has always been downstream of Saturdays. If they get embarrassed this week the entire board evaporates by Halloween and none of us will remember these names.

That is not a prediction. That is just how it has worked since I was in school.

That is the correct read and I want to be honest that it is also the comforting one.

There is a receiver on their board whose father played there in the nineties. Troy Leon. I had to look him up.

Legacy recruiting is the one thing a program in that position can actually do, and it costs nothing, and it works about ten percent of the time.

Their own message board has a moderator threatening bans over screenshots of teenagers liking tweets. I want you all to hold that image.

A moderator. Threatening bans. Over likes.

We have that rule. It is rule six. You voted for it in 2018.

Anyway. Twenty-one offers, zero visits, zero commitments, and a game against Grambling State on Saturday.

Let me know when there is news.

Every year somebody has to post this and every year the same forty people are furious about it, so here it is.

The AP poll does not update after Week 0. Notre Dame lost by thirty-six at home and will sit at number three through Saturday. Miami won by thirty-six and is sixth. That is not a scandal. It is how the calendar has worked for as long as I have been reading these things.

We are fourteenth, which is a separate scandal and one I am happy to discuss at length.

Fourteen. Behind Alabama. Behind LSU. Behind a BYU team that will lose four games and everyone will act shocked.

I have been reading these polls since they printed them in the paper and this is the least defensible one I can remember.

Preseason polls are a guess and we all agree they are a guess in August and then we cite them in November as though they were evidence.

I would rather be fourteenth and correct in December.

Notre Dame getting run out of their own stadium by five touchdowns is a bigger story than any of this and it has been buried under a Grambling State preview all week.

Michigan State plays at Notre Dame in two weeks, which is going to be interesting for reasons nobody has thought through. An angry Notre Dame team is not the same as a good one, and both of those are worse than the version people are imagining.

If they go into South Bend and lose by six, half of that state will declare the rebuild ahead of schedule. If they lose by thirty, the same people will want a search firm.

Neither reaction will have anything to do with what happens Saturday against Grambling, which is my whole objection to the way that fanbase processes information.

USC played in Week 0 and won and I have not seen it mentioned in a single thread on this board.

Nor will you. That is the conference we built.

The poll will correct itself by October and this board will find something else. It always does.

What I would actually like to discuss is that our quarterback has an arm angle I have not seen from a Michigan quarterback in my lifetime, and there is a thread for it, and it is twenty-three pages long, and I encourage all of you.

Eight posts. In a thread about Notre Dame.

Louisville at Ole Miss is the game this week and nobody in this thread has said one word about it. SMU at Florida State is the second one.

We are all going to spend Saturday morning watching an FCS game in East Lansing instead. I include myself. I have already told my wife.

I have it on the second television. I want that stated plainly so nobody accuses me of pretending later.

Second television is where all of us are going to be, and on Sunday we will talk about our own game, and every one of us will know exactly what happened at noon.

I understand this is not what this board wants on a Thursday. I watched about ninety minutes of Grambling State from last season last night and I want to put this somewhere.

They are an option team and they are good at it. That is not a compliment I am handing out to be gracious. Option football is an assignment test. Every defender has one man, every snap, and if one of them is wrong the whole thing goes for twenty yards while ten people did their job correctly.

Michigan State is opening a brand new defensive structure that has practiced against a scout team all August. Lighter personnel. Wants to disguise things. Wants to move before the snap. That is precisely the profile that gets tested by a team whose entire offense is designed to make you declare early and then punish the declaration.

None of this means they lose. Talent is talent and the talent gap is enormous. It means the first quarter may be uglier than anyone here expects, and it means the people laughing about "look normal" are laughing at the wrong part.

That is all I had. I know how this thread goes.

You watched ninety minutes of FCS tape to defend Michigan State.

I watched ninety minutes of FCS tape because I like football.

Nobody on this board has watched ninety minutes of our own spring practice and this man is charting Grambling State.

Ross, respectfully, we come here to feel superior for eleven minutes before work. You keep bringing homework.

He is right, for what it is worth. Option teams have made a lot of September afternoons uncomfortable for people who were not ready.

We played one in the nineties and it was 17-10 into the fourth quarter and Bo would have had something to say about it if he had still been there.

We are now two threads deep into taking Grambling State seriously on a Michigan football board. I would like the minutes to reflect that this is where we ended up.

Their board has a guy who used to coach high school line and he writes the same kind of post and they call him professor and then they upvote him anyway.

Every fanbase has one. Ours is Ross. It is not a bad thing to have one.

The part of Ross's post nobody engaged with is the disguise problem, which is the actual point. You cannot disguise anything against a team that makes you commit before the snap. That is the whole reason the option survived this long.

Anyway. Underwood. Twenty-three pages. I will be there.

This post has been removed by a moderator.

This post has been removed by a moderator.

Appreciate it. I will put the rest of it in thread one where it will also be ignored.