Team X ___, Michigan less
 | Bob Dylan - Shelter from the Storm |  |
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 | Found at skreemr.com |  |
So.
Oh, I'm sorry. I'm supposed to say more? I figured just listening to Bob Dylan would've been enough. What would like me to say? The offense is young, and will be good. The defense is terrible, just as it was last year, and honestly, nothing has been shown from anything or anybody to suggest that anything will be different moving forward. For the third straight year, Ohio State will lay an aborted Michigan season to rest. All the crybaby Ohio State fans bawling and moaning about Tressel and his conservative approach to football: shut the fuck up. I hope one day you're in our shoes, where the Michigan/Ohio State game doesn't bring anticipation and excitement, but the sweet release of the end of the season so you don't have to dedicate your Saturdays to watching your team harm you in ways that seem almost deliberate. Boo hoo, Tressel played it close to the vest and got us another Big Ten championship and we're going to the Rose Bowl, waaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh. Sit on it and rotate.
Okay, here's some new material: Jay Hopson and Tony Gibson should not be back next year. One of these is a no brainer. Hopson is not an RR guy, and the two players he's responsible for - Mouton and Ezeh - have been terrible all year. They were bad last year too, but showed marginal improvement at the end, giving us reason to be hopeful for 2009. Didn't happen. They've been consistently bad almost every week with no sign of getting any better. Whether that means Hopson's style of teaching just doesn't fit in Robinson's scheme or if Hopson is just out of his element coaching linebackers is irrelevant. He has to go.
Gibson, on the other hand...we're going to see what our head coach is made of. Gibson is Rodriguez's boy, on the level of Debord and Carr. This was supposed to be one of the positives about Rodriguez, that he was so obsessed with winning he put personal allegiances aside and put the best man for the job in charge. Well, and West Virginia fans (the sane ones) warned us about this, Tony Gibson ain't the guy. Unlike Hopson, Gibson is one of our better recruiters, so if you want to shift him to recruiting coordinator, fine, but he cannot return as DB coach. He's just bad at it. And you better believe Greg Robinson knows it. So after the season, when Robinson goes into Rodriguez's office and says "Look Rich, if you want this thing to work here, you have to let me make some changes...I know Tony's your boy, but we need to get somebody else in here", Rodriguez better listen. If he decides to ignore his defensive coordinator's advice, this thing is destined to fail.
Last year I wrote about how I never wanted to experience this feeling again. Well, here we are, a year later, and the same shit. The feeling of inevitability, of helplessness. That sick, cold feeling deep in your stomach? I have the same one. It's the one that says Ohio State's coming into our house on Saturday, and at the end of the game, for the 6th year in a row, they're going to have shown us just how large the gap is. The rational, logical side of me says that this obviously won't last, eventually the day will come that we beat Ohio State again, that we return some semblance of balance to the rivalry. But the pessimistic, devil-may-care side of me says "When the fuck is that going to happen, huh?" And when you look at the disaster on the field, you truly have to think...how are we going to reach their level?
I'll leave that for more positive people to debate. For now, I'm just going to sit back, put on some Blood on the Tracks, and wait for the sweet relief of the offseason.
1 comment:
Why do you think it's position corching?
Look, the secondary starts exactly one player who has ever played a division one football game at the position where he's currently being asked to perform. There's no depth. One guy's a walk-on.
The linebacking corps has a fundamentally different set of responsibilities in the 4-3 under from the task it performs in the defense used last year. Different gap responsibilities, different keys, different everything.
There is no margin for error on a defense with one inexperienced unit, and our defense has TWO.
You seem to be one of the good guys, for the most part, and I just wonder why your lack of confidence in the position corches isn't more than a little mitigated by the fact that the kids they are charged with teaching have only known them for 18 months, and in some cases for 8 months. This takes time. It is a learning process. Firing people, getting new teachers to impart the highly specific techniques and tasks that these kids need to master, is not going to make things better.
I hope this doesn't read like excuse-making, or indifference to the concept of accountability. One of the basic rules of project development in programming, where I work, is that you never bring new guys in to work on a project that is behind schedule. Why? Because the amount of time they have to spend figuring out what they do and don't know, and then in communicating their thoughts about how to move forward, is always better spent with the original team (who doesn't need to learn new things) moving forward with the repair packages they, who are already familiar with the project, are looking to implement.
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