Hopefully a few points to provide at least a little hope:

-At least the quarterback situation is pretty clear now. Dantonio may say otherwise, but he’s probably just trying to add some extra study time for Notre Dame.
-We were 1-1 at this point in the season last year.
-We’ve still been able to put points up, so if the defense ever does realy click, we’re not in the worst spot ever.

Okay, that’s all I got for now.

In 2007, Michigan lost to Appy State and Oregon to start the season. They still finished 8-4 and beat Florida in a New Years’ Day bowl.

Not saying, I’m just sayin’.

…with how pathetic the experienced and supposedly talented secondary looked, with how little consistent pressure the front 4 were able to get on the QB, with the OL apparently forgetting how to run-block, with the defense forgetting how to tackle, with the receivers forgetting how to catch the dang ball, with the poor special teams plays, and with the slew of penalties … I say there is no hope for a New Year’s Day bowl. On the bright side, the Pizza! Pizza! bowl looks (slightly) more attainable.

…we ran the same sorta defense we always run against spread teams. LeFevour was able to make good decisions for most of the day and get it the open guy. CMU’s recievers were able to often make the first defender miss.

That defense worked fine against NW last year and for part of the ND game, after they started running a spreadish short, quick passing game. Neither of those teams could execute better than the MSU defense and the Spartans won both. The keys seem to be 1.) tackle better 2.) play a less precise and dialed in QB 3. control the ball on offense more, using more short passing if the running game isn’t doing it and 4. no melon farming penalties.

Is it looks like this may be the year of the mid-major. A few other major conference teams lost to them today (Colorado and Virginia spring to mind) and others were very competitive (Maryland and Wisconsin nearly lost to mid majors). Plus most of the Big Ten looks pretty average at best, so it’s looking like we don’t have to be that good to be 500 in conference, although a championship is pretty much out of the question.

Other than that, there’s not much hope. We all knew the offense would need some time to fire on all cylinders with some experience issues on the O line, an unsettled QB situation, and no experience or proven commodity at RB. So far our QB situation seems to be clarifying, but we’re still looking for a running back and the O line does not look all that good. They pass block OK but run blocking looks not so good.

The big surprise is how mediocre our defense is. Greg Jones is a stud but you need more than one better-than-average guy to field a good defense. The D line is meh – they generate no pass rush. We kind of figured that might be the case coming into the season. We could live with them being stout against the run but so-so in generating pressure if we had a great secondary, but so far the D backs have looked just as mediocre as the D line. They are better than the secondaries JLS fielded but so far they look only marginally better.

He would make them change in the hallway, because they don’t deserve the new locker room. Remember that?

Seriously, Dantonio has to treat ND like a real game, not an exhibition. No more QB by quarter. IMO, he has to play Jeremiah, if only on alternating series, and put Decker back in, Denson is clueless.

ND has basically the same offense as last year (23-7), and LeFevour is better than
Clausen. We may need another Herb Haygood play.

tackling fundamentals are also an issue for the defense, especially the secondary. I can’t count the number of times our Dbacks lowered their heads and put a shoulder into a guy rather than keeping their heads up and wrapping a guy up. The results were several glancing shoulder blows that failed to bring the CMU ball carrier down.

…the “dropsies” also have been an issue early this season, carrying over from last year. Furthermore, outside of Blair White, no one in the receiving corps has had enough sticky-tack on their gloves to be a reliable receiver. And, while the TEs have shown good pass-catching ability, they were incredibly under-utilized this past Saturday.

I haven’t looked at the full game yet, but in the first quarter the D blitzed the SAM and MIKE backers a lot. I initially thought this was to pressure LeFevour but it never achieved that; now I believe they crashed the gaps at the snap to prevent LeFevour from taking off on QB draws. This had the negative effect of removing 2 LBs from underneath coverage, where CMU picked us apart all day.

Two things really stand out from this game, and neither is making me feel particularly great about the remainder of the season:

- Our defensive scheme has been mentioned several times, both in what it was trying to do and how it failed. My question is, when it became very clear that CMU was going to go for that 5 yard pass every play, which both exploited the cushion our corners were giving and negated our blitz packages, why did we not adjust to this and try something different? We kept going with the exact same thing for virtually the entire game, even when it was abundantly clear it was not working.

- We had much of the same issue with the offensive side of the ball; we just kept trying the exact same thing we had tried and failed at doing previously. I could almost see the coaches in a huddle saying “well, gosh, running up the middle just HAS to work one of these times, right?”

At what point does Dantonio read our coordinators and position coaches the riot act and let them know that this sort of crap is not acceptable?