QB - fucking mess RBs - pretty solid depth and looking at a decent year from this group, gonna need it WRs - fucking mess TEs - Lachey is a really good prospect and will be a NFL pick next year OL - pretty much same as last year with hopefully better coaching and scheming to help them. Looking for an improved unit Offense - won’t be good but better than last year. Will need to rely on the run game and hope they can disguise it better than Brian Ferentz ever could. DL - really good but really thin. Injuries will really hurt this unit LBs - one of the top units in the nation DBs - only 1 unknown but really solid unit with 2 NFL players at minimum Defense - maybe better than last year Punter - had an unbelievable day at the open scrimmage but rumored to be more inconsistent in practice. Will still be fans favorite position on the team. Punting is winning
That’s essentially Michigan this year. Baller defense, with enough offense to be trouble, but probably not enough offense to win the conference.
Seems like you have elite top end talent on defense, two and maybe three first rounders, then a lot of transfers and other guys playing their first real time as starters. The Texas game will be interesting, because they have no RBs, and if you get to Ewers he could have a rough day.
Derrick Moore and Josiah Stewart played roughly half the snaps last year and were basically starters at DE. I'm not concerned about them at all. Makari Paige started at safety when he was healthy and is fine there. The others are more along the lines of what you're saying as either transfers who started elsewhere or backups from UM's roster. The only position where there's very limited experience is at CB opposite Will Johnson and whoever replaces Mike Sainristil, although the likely starter there (Zeke Berry) has been getting very positive reviews for months. He was hurt his first two years and has barely played. People are pretty excited about the LBs. Especially Jaishawn Barham, who transferred from Maryland and started there two years. I don't think anyone is really concerned about replacing the starters who are gone. The concern is replacing the guys who replaced them. The days of running 2 deep across the entire defense most games are probably gone this year.
I think that and the schedule are why some are putting them in the playoff. Thinking the offense can’t be worse, but there ain’t a chance in hell it’ll be good enough to get them in the playoffs.
Only guaranteed loss and only time they’re underdogs is to Ohio st. They will lose twice if not three times though. Playoffs ain’t happening.
TBF I haven’t looked at their schedule but also don’t recall seeing them on any playoff lists, not that we are either, but those lists are about as worthless as handing someone a preseason coach of the year award
Iowa is an interesting matchup for us. We’ll learn nothing about our team in nonconference. MSU and for sure Iowa will show whether we solved our OL and QB problems.
Went 10-2 with the worst offense in all of college football and bring back almost the entire defense. I’ll bet the over on 7 wins. They may be out of the west division now, but that schedule still looks like a west division schedule.
For the Gophers: QB: Max Brosmer should be better than what the Gophers got out of Athan last year. He seems to be more of a game manager type that is more than willing to take checkdowns rather than to force things. I'd expect the Gophers to throw the ball a little more this season than we have in maybe the whole Fleck era (this isn't a high bar to climb). If Brosmer gets hurt, though, the top backup is a 3 star true freshman in Drake Lindsey who the coaching staff is high on, but very likely isn't ready to play as a true freshman. RB: Darius Taylor was great when he played last year, but he wasn't on the field much because of injuries, and he already is banged up in fall camp and it isn't 100% clear if he'll play against UNC in the opener. There should be more depth than last season, though, which makes this one of the stronger groups on the team. Marcus Major (Oklahoma transfer) has gotten a lot of hype during fall camp and will be the 1b to Taylor's 1a. Sieh Bangura (Ohio transfer) Jordan Nubin, and Jaren Mangham (MSU transfer) add more depth, probably in that order. Fame Ijeboi has looked good this fall, and could work his way into the mix. WR: Daniel Jackson will be a strong number 1 WR, and I'd expect him to be one of the more productive WR's in the league as he was last year. Beyond him, though, this is the weak point of the offense. The 2 through 4 looks like it will be some combination of Elijah Spencer, Lemeke Brockington, and Cristian Driver (PSU transfer). Spencer is probably the number two, but he had some expectations coming into last season coming in from Charlotte where he was productive, and he only ended up with 9 receptions. He and the rest of the non-Jackson options have all battled drops to some degree this spring and fall. TE: Nick Kallerup is the blocking TE, and Jameson Geers should be the top receiving TE target. But its a non-descript group. OL: If it isn't RB, this should be the strongest unit on offense. Have one of the best LT's in the country in Aireontae Ersery, and the OG's are solidified with Tyler Cooper and Quinn Carroll. The coaching staff is high on Greg Johnson at center, with the one battle coming in at RT between Martes Lewis (who started at RG last year while Carroll was at RT) and redshirt freshman Philip Daniels. Lewis probably gets the nod to start the year, but it wouldn't surprise me if Daniels took over the job at some point. DL: This should be the strongest group on defense, though depth is a little bit of a question. Jah Joyner, Danny Striggow, and Anthony Smith all return at DE. Joyner is the best pass rusher of the group, Striggow is probably the best against the run, and Smith is the youngest but the guy with the highest ceiling. At DT, you'll see Smith mix in on passing downs at times, but otherwise you are probably looking at Deven Eastern and Jalen Logan-Redding as your main DT's. The DE group is stronger than the DT group. LB: With Cody Lindenberg injured for much of last season, this was the biggest weakness on the team. Lindenberg is back, and many of the younger guys who played in his absence (most notably Maverick Baranowski and Devon Williams) should show some growth after being thrown into the fire last year. But they need to take a pretty sizeable step up to become even average starting Big Ten linebackers (aside from Lindenberg, who should easily be the top LB on the team), and I need to see that happen before I believe it. DB: The starting corners - Justin Walley, Ethan Robinson (Bucknell transfer), and Jack Henderson - all have a ton of experience, though for Robinson it does come at the FCS level. There isn't anyone I would consider outstanding (I think there is still some hope that Walley can take a step forward), but it should be a solid group. The depth falls off in a hurry, though, after those three. Safety is my pick for the weakest position on the team. Neither spot is solidified, and will probably see rotations early in the year until they figure out a pairing. But it's a large group full of inexperience and/or players who struggled when they did get a shot last year. There is hope that true freshman Koi Perich will at some point grab one of the spots, but he wasn't an early enrollee and he was recovering from an injury when he got to campus in the summer. Even if he gets a starting role later this year, he'll get picked on I'm sure, just as Tyler Nubin was when he started early in his career. There is a lot of variance in how the schedule plays out. The Gophers have two very likely wins (Rhode Island and Nevada) and two very likely losses (at Michigan, Penn St.). Every other game will probably feature a point spread within a touchdown or so. You get some good fortune, and an 8-4 record isn't out of the question. But it could easily go the other way and end up at something closer to 4-8. Most likely it falls somewhere in the middle at around 6-6, and that seems like a fair projection to me.
I think Nebraska is either going win in a blow out or it’s going be a rock fight where neither team can block the other one.
Alex Orji is a mix of Vince Young and Derrick Henry. It’d be shocking if anybody stayed within 2 scores of Michigan. But he could still get beat out by Davis Warren, whose most common comp is “Joe Burrow but if he didn’t have to go to HS in Ohio.” I’m not really sure what that last part means, but I assume it’s a good thing.
I’ll give you northwestern, maybe Purdue, Indiana, or UCLA but I’m struggling to see you being better than more than five BIG teams I’m struggling to see us get to double digit wins we all have our cross to bear
#Michigan State Spartans are you guys betting the over this week? https://www.espn.com/college-footba...ichigan-state-qb-says-take-total-opener-rises
Thur: Howard at Rutgers NC at Minnesota -1.5 Eastern Ill at Illinois Fri: Florida Atlantic at MSU -13 WMU at Wisconsin -24.5 Sat: Penn State at WVU +8.5 Illinois State at Iowa UConn at Maryland -20 Indiana State at Purdue Akron at Ohio State -50 FIU at Indiana -20.5 UTEP at Nebraska -27.5 Miami Ohio at Northwestern -2.5 Idaho at Oregon Fresno at Michigan -21.5 UCLA at Hawaii +12.5 Weber State at Washington USC at LSU (Las Vegas) -4.5
I think Chiles was probably referring to the MSU season win total O/U which was like 4.5 (I think it might have moved to 5 now though).
I don't blame BTN for this. Xfinity just did the same thing to the Bally Sports channels and took them off the air for 3 months because they refused to negotiate anything other than Bally being on a higher tier that costs $20-30 more. I'm guessing they're doing the same to BTN in those regions. It's absurd.
By “we” I meant to include Comcast in the mix. This bullshit has been hammered out multiple times now. And standard cable has even less leverage this time around than they did in the past. Just dumb. Do the thing that you’ve already done, guys.
These are new markets they get to negotiate with. And it's also a primer for how they're going to re-negotiate in the other B1G markets whenever those deals are up. Because they're going to do the same thing in all of our markets, too.
When BTN first started Time Warner reached a deal with the conference like the night before the first game of the season and they showed the OSU broadcast on some local access channel because BTN wasn’t setup yet Welcome to the club