‘Wrong Before the Ball Was Snapped’

Afternoon. Same time, same room, so that part’s holding up.

Availability, nothing. Nobody’s hurt. We came out of Saturday clean, which is mostly luck again and I’m going to keep saying it’s mostly luck. No changes anywhere on the chart.

On Saturday. We won 56-7, we were supposed to win by about that, and I don’t want to spend a week on it. I’ll say the two things I actually liked and they’re both boring. One penalty. And we substituted clean, all day, both sides, including a couple of possessions that changed fast. That’s a lot of people doing small jobs right.

The first drive we were bad and we’ll get into it if you want, I’m assuming somebody wants.

Eastern Michigan. Chris Creighton has been there over a decade and that program is not what it was when he got there, and he did that, and I don’t think people in this state give him enough for it. They’re 1-1. They’ve got a seventh-year quarterback and three captains on defense and they’re not going to do anything sloppy. So that’s the week.

That’s it. Go ahead.

Yeah. More than I thought I would, honestly.

I figured I’d be too busy to feel anything, and that was true for about three quarters. Then late in the fourth there was a stretch where there was nothing for me to do, and I looked up, and it’s a full stadium and the band’s going and I’m the head coach here. That got me a little. I stood there being a person about it for maybe fifteen seconds and then Alessio threw a touchdown and I had to go be useful again.

The drive home was good too. I called my mom and she didn’t pick up because she was already asleep.

Yeah. Okay, so, the short version is we were wrong before the ball was ever snapped on most of it. Not the players. The way I had them lined up.

Here’s the thing. We spent all week on the option, and we played the option fine. Three times on that drive they ran it and three times we had the dive, we had the quarterback and we had the pitch, and it went nowhere. That part was good. If they’d run the option twelve straight times on that drive we’d have gotten off the field and everybody would have gone home happy.

What got us was the misdirection to the fullback. And that isn’t some wrinkle they cooked up for us, either. It’s in their offense, it’s on their tape, it was on our sheet, our guys had seen it on Wednesday. So nobody got surprised by a play. They got surprised by where they were standing.

Because I had us loading up on the line. All week I was worried about the dive, so I put bodies down there, and when you put everybody down there the second level behind it is empty. And that is exactly, that’s the entire reason that play exists. They take one hard step one direction, our linebackers go, and then the ball’s going the other way and there’s nobody home. Nobody busted an assignment on that. I had all eleven of them looking at the dive and the ball went the other way. That one’s on me.

The other piece, separately, is they moved us up front a couple of times. Different problem, and I don’t want to hide it inside the first one. I built a front that’s lighter than what this league is used to seeing, on purpose, and then on that drive I asked it to sit in there and hold ground, which is the one job I didn’t build it to do. That one’s mine too.

What we changed was small. We took a body off the line and put him back where he could actually see the football, and we told the linebackers to quit triggering on the first thing they saw. That’s it. It took about four minutes on the bench and Joe had most of it before I got over there.

And then they didn’t get another first down, and I want to be careful about that number too, because it sounds like we solved something. Some of that was us. Some of it was them not being able to block us once they had to throw it. I’m not going to sit here and take all of that.

Anyway. That’s the drive.

Not really. I wish I had a better answer for you on that one.

It doesn’t come like that for me. You make the change and then you’re just waiting to see if it holds, and it holds once and you don’t believe it, and it holds again and you still don’t believe it. Somewhere in the second quarter I stopped bracing. I couldn’t tell you what play it was. I’ll go find it this week.

It’s the first one. That’s the whole answer and I know it’s a boring one.

I put him in there for that drive. That was the drive that offense exists to win, against people who’ve been running it since junior high, and I picked that as the week to get him those snaps because I wanted him out there and I liked what he’d been doing. Wrong week for it. That’s a call I made sitting down on a Tuesday with all the time in the world, and he had to go play it in real time on a Saturday.

I’m not going to stand up here and go through a twenty-year-old’s afternoon in front of nineteen people. That’s not a thing I’m going to do this year, so you can stop setting it up for me, and I say that with love, Stephen.

[laughter]

What I’ll tell you is he came and found me Sunday morning before I’d gotten to him, and he had it written down already, what he thought went wrong. Nobody made him do that. I liked it a lot.

On the premise. Ask me in October and you’ll get a real answer. Right now we’ve played one football game and anything I told you about the whole build would be me talking.

Sure. Two of those three were sneaks, and you don’t hand it to your tailback on a sneak, so that part’s not a mystery. The other one was a dive with the H-back and I liked that call and it got blown up. It was a good call and they played it well and that happens.

But the honest version is on second down I was already thinking about getting movement, and once I got in that lane I never came out of it. I went and looked at the sequence Sunday morning and it took me about four seconds to go, why is the best player on the field standing next to you three times in a row. I don’t have a good answer for that. I got narrow.

Then the fourth one, I liked. That’s the call I’d make again. Crishon went up and got it.

I got an explanation. I don’t know that happy’s the word, but I got one.

The way it works, and I did not know most of this three days ago, is the booth initiates it, it goes to the command center, and what they’re looking at is whether the ball moves when he lands. That’s the whole question. Not whether he caught it, not whether he had it in the air. Whether it moves on the ground. And they decided it moved.

I sent it in Monday because you’re allowed to send things in and they send you a note back. I don’t expect anything to come of it. That’s not a complaint about the note, it’s a fine note.

And we won by forty-nine, so I’m not going to be the guy standing up here on a Tuesday relitigating a play that changed nothing. I did like that our stadium was that loud about it. Fourth and goal at the end of a half in a game like that, and it was actually loud in there. I noticed that.

He’s heavier and he’s lower. That’s most of it.

Against that offense you want somebody who can stay square and not get run through, and Cam’s a quicker, longer guy, and there are plenty of weeks where that’s exactly the guy you want out there. This wasn’t one of them. Cam didn’t do anything to lose anything.

He played well. He’s an old-school football player. He took on some blocks Saturday that most people would rather not take on.

Same graduating class, yeah. She was much better at math than I was and she would want that in the story.

[laughter]

She messaged me Saturday night. First thing she’s said to me in about ten years and it was four exclamation points and no words. Tell her I said hello if you get to her before I do.

I did not see one second of it. I was under the stadium with Joe and a whiteboard, exactly like I said I’d be, which was extremely annoying.

Somebody in our office sent me a video Sunday and I watched about nine minutes of it standing in my kitchen with my coat still on. It was great. Of course it was great.

Now, on whether the students stayed. I asked. And one person told me the student section stayed and then a different person told me that’s not really true, and I’ve decided to believe the first one.

Somebody shoved me. I don’t know who. I got shoved pretty hard from behind on the Merlino one and by the time I turned around there were about nine of them and none of them would admit it.

That was the best twenty minutes of my Saturday, and I want to be careful about taking anything from it, because I didn’t build that. I’ve been around rooms where the backup goes in and everybody suddenly finds something interesting on the ground. That wasn’t that. Those guys just like him, and they liked him in August when it went the other way, and none of that came from me or from anything I said in a meeting.

He’s sitting up here Thursday. Ask him and he’ll spend the whole time telling you about the offensive line.

Honestly, not much. I don’t think it’s information yet.

We were supposed to do that. Every person in this room picked us by a lot and every person in this room was right. Six hundred yards against Grambling State means we can get six hundred yards against Grambling State. I’m not being modest, I just don’t think there’s anything in there.

Now, if we’d won 20-14 I’d have been worried, so I guess the score did do one thing, it kept me from being worried. That’s about as far as I’d take it.

The stuff I liked isn’t in the score anyway. One penalty. The substitutions. Nobody ran onto the field who wasn’t supposed to be out there. That’s Marcus and the operations people and about four graduate assistants nobody in here can name, and it’s the only part of Saturday I’d point at.

I’ve thought about it more this week than I expected to, so let me try to do it right.

I’ve never met him. Never spoken to him, nobody I work with was here, and I can’t tell you what those two years were actually like for him. If I stood up here and described them I’d be making it up, and I’d be making it up about somebody who has to go play a football game Saturday.

What I do have a feeling about is the part after. He was twenty. He had a bad year at a place that was having a bad decade, and a lot of grown men with jobs and mortgages decided he was the reason for it. I’ve read some of it. It doesn’t go away, either, that’s the thing people forget. It’s still there. He can find it any night he wants to.

And then he kept playing. Three schools, seventh year, still getting his ankle taped on a Saturday morning in September. I think that’s an impressive thing to do and I’d say it to him.

Now, the football, because you asked me a football question and I’ve gone somewhere else with it. He’s been playing college quarterback for seven years and it looks exactly like that on tape. Our stadium being loud is not going to do anything to him, and he’s not going to hand us anything early.

Yeah. That’s true. He was standing in that locker room and I read about it on my phone in New York.

It comes up more than you’d think, and not about him. I’ll ask a guy about something from two years ago and he’ll look at me like, wait, you actually don’t know. And I don’t.

Yeah, I do. Thank you for the opening.

Boo the throws. Boo the third-down conversions, boo all of it, that’s the whole point of being in there. And boo me, I’m fair game, I have a contract and a parking spot. When he’s standing on that sideline between series, leave him alone. He didn’t do anything to anybody. He was a twenty-year-old quarterback on a team that wasn’t good, which is about the worst job in the state.

I know exactly how that lands coming from the guy who got here in December and has been the head coach for one game. Say it anyway, I figure. If it doesn’t work at least I said it.

And if he throws for four hundred on us I’m going to be in a horrific mood.

I looked it up this week. Not for any reason, I just looked.

There are Michigan kids on every roster in the MAC and on about half the rosters in our league, and there always have been. If we do this right for a few years, some of those kids pick us instead.

I saw it. Four separate people made sure I saw it and I hadn’t asked any of them.

No, I’m not going to put that game up on a screen Wednesday and go, see. They’re twenty years old, they’re not children. They watched it too.

We’re going to practice Wednesday and Thursday and if we’re bad Saturday it’ll be because we practiced badly, and that’ll be on the schedule I wrote.

Not today. I have a lot on it and you’re going to get all of it next Tuesday, I promise you that.

If I start on Notre Dame right now I’ll still be on it Wednesday, and Wednesday is the day this week actually gets decided. So hold that one for me.

You’re right, I owe you one. Let me try.

The problem is I don’t remember it. That sounds like a dodge and it isn’t. I’ve gone looking for it twice now and there’s nothing there. I remember the grass being wetter than I expected and that’s about all I’ve got from the whole first hour.

What I do remember is my headset dying on the second series and standing there holding it like an idiot while a very nice young man sprinted across the back of the bench with another one.

My mom did what she said she was going to do, by the way. Watched me the entire time. She told me afterward that I looked like I hadn’t eaten, and I had eaten.

We got three. Third one was after the turnover on downs in the third, and I looked over and everybody was already where they go and not one guy was looking at me.

So that was good. I was happy about that one.

All right, that’s me. Thanks, everybody. See you Saturday.