M-Borg vs. THE Flavortown U Thread, Orig. by Buckeye Paul, absconded w/by talent.

[hack]

I don't think subjective and objective are so easily sorted from each other, Jeff. Football isn't paint-by-numbers.

[iam416]

Buchanan:

Yeah, on message boards one may opt for qualitative statements instead of quantitative statements.

So, we're talking a relative measure and it depends on what it's relative to. Sure, relative to the other 125+ FBS teams, M's offensive performance is probably around the 50th percentile or so and that is average, not sucks. Relative to P5 teams, the offense drops a little bit. Relative to top 30 teams it sucks.

When I think of M's cohort, I don't think of Idaho or South Alabama or Ball State. I don't think of Purdue or Vandy or Oregon State. I think of top 25. But even extending their appropriate cohort to top 40, I still think the offense rates in the bottom 25th percentile or worse. Quantitatively, that's good enough for me to give my qualitative assessment. I hadn't really considered the quantitative basis, but I have watched M play offense.

I'm no #hottake guy either. I've spent the past few weeks reading about how OSU needs to dump JTB for anyone. I'm entirely familiar with and sympathetic to your concerns. All that said, what I've seen of the "Evverything is J.O.K.!" offense is bad. They may be fine against the Goofers, but that offense strikes absolutely zero fear in my heart when they play OSU. Speight did, btw.

So, that's my take.

We can both agree that the Nebraska is up against it.

[CGVT]

I don't think subjective and objective are so easily sorted from each other, Jeff. Football isn't paint-by-numbers.

Bingo!

[iam416]

Yeah, or what hack said. But, I like Buchanan and there's nothing Buchanan appreciates more than a thousand words when six will do.

Love ya, Jeff!

[Jeff Buchanan]

I'm fine with your quants, talent. That was a good post and puts M's offense in a relative sense in the bottom 25th percentile of top 40 teams. That's fair.

But you are probably one of a handful of fans posting in the various P5 blogs that will undertake the effort to gather the facts.

It bothers me that smart people think it's fine to make these off the cuff assessments of whatever team they happen to want to comment on. On occasion, I'm guilty of making comments about teams other than M as well but I try not to do it. I do know Michigan football so, it gives me fits when I see well reasoned and fact based comments dissed while these hot takes and feelings ball comments are accepted as accurate.

[iam416]

Correct. Anyway, Higdon looked good. Better vision than he's shown before. He could be growing into a back that defenses really have to account for. That's a big positive.

[hack]

"Well geez we had no passing game at all and O'Korn was lucky that flag saved him from an interception and missed some clear reads and couldn't make the throws that were there for him, and there wasn't torrential rain, but let me check the fancystats here before jumping to any conclusions."

Is that really what you expect out of people, Jeff? You think that's reasonable?

[WM Wolverine]

Higdon has always looked talented, appeared more explosiveness today hitting the hole. Helps a ton for there to be a hole...

Among ranked teams, I'd imagine it's tough to find a worse offense than M.

[Jeff Buchanan]

........Among ranked teams, I'd imagine it's tough to find a worse offense than M.

Well, we know that among top 40 teams, M is in the bottom 25th percentile.

Checking this mornings top 25, Power rankings (this is ESPN's method of evaluating a team - go to the web site if you want to see what this entails), M is 21 out of 25 at 12.1, MissSt is tied with M, GaTech and LSU are 24th and 25th. (Alabama is 30.6, osu 29.9). This is going to change a little after week 7 stats are incorporated.

Hack, I think it's pretty clear what hot takes and feelings ball posts are. They're usually overly emotional and after whatever emotions stirred a particular post have died down and others are starting to analyse an outcome of an M football game over time, the usefulness of such posts is reduced.

I'm not sure what you are getting at by the quote about "FancyStats." First, Fancy Stats is a spread sheet based method of picking all-sports winners. Fantasy Sports participants use it. Sean and I have been using it to pick NCAA football winners for a slate of games. Sean is in a pool that he paid to get in on. I'm just using them for AA's Pic Contest. They run hot and cold, IMO.

If I'm not mistaken, it's the WaPo that started these. They do have some relationship to a team's overall performance but betting drives how this method works. So, no, I don't use these at all to make fact based comments about a football game after the fact or use them to post pre-game analysis of an M game that I make. I do use material from mgoblog but I'll cite it if I do and I try to give a slightly different take than stuff that appears there or add something to it. I also will do a Cliff Notes thing usually of UFRs because I have the time to pour over them and I do. Other's here don't and I appreciate they are working and don't have the time.

I get a lot of harmless, good natured ribbing about the length of my posts. Frankly, they are too long for Web based forums. I realize that but, then again, I'm more or less writing sports columns. I enjoy writing like that. I'll never get published and I don't expect to be.

Bottom line, this is a football forum. It's for fans of all stripes to talk football and make whatever posts about it they want to make. My goal, and this applies only to my posts, is to make things I say as fact based and supportable by such facts as possible.

I'd say that talent, over probably the last 10 years, has had more to do with the care I take in making posts here (and this is the only Web based forum I follow and post in) than anything else but that would be giving him way too much credit. If you make a dumb post, he'll call you on it. We're actually all policing each other. Some people don't like that, I happen to like it a lot because it cuts down on stupid here. There's not a lot of that and it's one of the reason this is a decent forum.

[froot loops]

That Higdon TD run in OT was a good one and also instructive that no matter how many times you tell the DE to set the edge and do not crash down they cannot help themselves.

[entropy]

The team has quit on Riley.

#OhioState scoring margin, last two meetings:
#NEB: +101
#RUT: +114
#MAR : +107
#Indy: +28
#MSU: -2
#PSU: +22
#Iowa: +13
#MIN: +21


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[iam416]

#M: +32
#Wisconsin: +66

I believe that OSU had scored on something like 16 straight drives against UNL up until the final drive that ended on 4th down at the UNL 25.

Ohio State had 41 first downs last night. 41. That seems like really high -- like generationally high.

[iam416]

On the bright side, OSU's scoring total against UNL is trending in the right direction: 63 > 62 > 56

[hack]

Jeff, I'm trying to gently make fun of you for all this forest/trees nonsense. You are being as unreasonable on your end of the spectrum as any Fire Harbaugh people are at the other end of the spectrum.

[iam416]

Subtle sass is sass not all.