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Kurt Wermers Leaves Michigan

Rich Rodriguez announced to the press at the Griese and Hutchinson Charity Golf event that Kurt Wermers will no longer be a member of the Michigan football team. The Personnel HQ has been updated accordingly.

Rodriguez also mentioned that “a couple guys” might be leaving the team soon, a statement that most people assume to refer to Kevin Grady, who has to serve 7 days in jail for violating the terms of his probation.

Posted under Football, Personnel

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Spring “Game” Recap

Paul and I both attended the spring game (with Brian of MGoBlog – we must have missed all of you at the tailgate…), and we worked together to put together a general summary of what we saw. My camera has gone MIA temporarily, so the photos will have to wait until later.

Tate Forcier

The defense wasn’t allowed to hit him, and he made his fair share of freshman mistakes, but anyone who watched the spring game has to be somewhat relieved that there will be a significant upgrade at the quarterback position over last year. Tate is by far a better runner than either Nick Sheridan or Steven Threet, and had better throwing mechanics and accuracy than either, as well. He has a much stronger arm than Sheridan, and by the time fall rolls around, it seems he will be able to better grasp the system than Threet did last year, or at least make fewer big mistakes. Forcier threw for three touchdowns, and ran for one more. He also had a few boneheaded moments, giving up a “safety” by fumbling into the endzone (in live scrimmage, it would have been a defensive touchdown), and throwing a pass right to a wide open… Brandon Herron. Another thing I’d like to see him work on is keeping his eyes downfield when he vacates the pocket. On design rollouts, he was fine, but on packet plays, once he started scrambling, he was going to run the ball. Still, for a high school kid, he wasn’t half bad.

Offense

It’s hard to judge the offensive line when it’s #1s vs #2s and vice versa, but an immediately noticeable improvement is that there are enough offensive line to have three separate teams. Hooray depth! The #1 offensive line was (left to right) Ortmann, Schilling, Molk, Mooseman, Huyge.  Schilling to LG was pretty much a done deal (at least for the spring) for the past for week, but the Huyge thing developed really quickly this week.  Considering the buzz around Omameh, it seems to be a good omen that Huyge was able to beat him out.  The OL looked like they were working well together, and they certainly opened holes, but it was against the #2 defense when the #1 didn’t have 2 of their 3 best D-Linemen.

Odoms didn’t play much (being a known quantity and all), but his play that stood out the most was when he let a punt bounce off his chest pads and out of bounds.  Stonum really struggled for most of the day. He was playing with the #2s, some people think because of his recent legal trouble, but I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Hemmingway just beat him out. In his defense, Stonum has all the physical tools and made a really nice, difficult catch in the end zone. He has the ability, maybe it will just take a while for it develop.  The real stars were the sophomore slots who didn’t play last year. Terrance Robinson was consistently getting to the open parts of the zone and making good catches. He also had a couple bubble screens and showed good shake.  Roy Roundtree got some playing time and had a few nice catches.  The quality and quantity of the slot ninjas will, hopefully, really make the offense run a bit smoother.

Plenty of different running backs got their turn. Minor started and looked how one would expect him to look. He ran strong and found the holes well, but nothing spectacular. Carlos Brown really stole the show. He broke a 50 or so yard run which featured a nice move to get by Emilien (not Vlad’s fault at all).  Brown definitely looked like the fastest guy out there. Hopefully he can stay healthy.  Smith had at least one big run, and looked pretty comfortable out there. One thing I’ve noticed about him is that I’ve never seen him really get hit. Granted, I’ve only seen him at practice and the Spring Game, but he seems like the kind of runner who is so shifty that he’ll never really get stood up.  It was nice to see Grady have some success out there. He did his pinball routine for a touchdown and didn’t fumble the ball at all.  I really hope he can get something going this year.

Defense

The good news: the offense looked much better than it did last year. The bad news: the offense looked much better than it did last year. The defense was suspect at best on this day. It could have been a particularly bad day for the Michigan defense (and they were missing several starters with injuries of varying severity – including Mike Martin, Ryan Van Bergen, and Donovan Warren), but even the #2 offense (Coner!) was able to move the ball against the #1 defense. When your #1 defense is giving up 30-yard scrambles to David Cone, they had a bad day. For his part, Cone looked decent for a scout-team quarterback. That is to say, be very afraid if he is ever pressed into serious playing time in a game that matters. For a 6-6 non-mobile guy, you’d think he would have a rocket arm or ridiculous accuracy or something, but this was not the case. The defense has a lot of work to do in the off-season, both in terms of getting healthy and hopefully getting on track with GERG’s schemes. The spring depth is scary, especially considering the #1s couldn’t even stop Michigan’s backups on offense. I can only imagine if the #2s get pressed into playing time during the season.

Format

This was a little more Actual Scrimmage-y than past Michigan Spring Games, but there is still a little ways to go in terms of making it truly interesting for the fans (and the Spring Game is an event that is undoubtedly for the fans, not so much the actual team). There was almost no drilling, and it was all real back-and-forth action between the offense and defense. However, the proprietary scoring system that 1) none of the fans know going in, and 2) most of the fans aren’t going to understand, is no good, and I’d much rather see a real game, played with two teams, 1s-v-1s and 2s-v-2s. The depth this spring didn’t allow for that, but hopefully in the future, that will be an option, and the Spring Game can look more like a, well, game. This, of course, will help out significantly with Atmosphere. As an aside, one thing that I think would be cool to do for next year is basically split the fans in half, and give away t-shirts to everyone, with half getting maize and half getting blue (and all of them saying “Spring Game 2010: I was there” or something equally stupid), and have distinct teams that each side is cheering for, to make it more like a home or away game for players.

Atmosphere

I was very pleasantly surprised with fan turnout. Going in, I got the vibe that nobody really expected the attendance to even approach Rich Rod’s stated goal of 40,000. However, as I rolled up to Michigan Stadium Saturday morning, the Crisler lots were already closed (a huge mistake in judgment by the AD or whoever was in charge of parking, as probably 10% of the parking spaces were still unoccupied), and the line for the locker room tours reached out the tunnel entrance, around the North/East end of Crisler, out the main Stadium Drive entrance, and back past Crisler towards Pioneer, with the end of it nowhere in sight. I skipped said locker room tour (been there, it’s really not worth any wait, much less multiple hours), and didn’t even catch the tail end of the flag football game, which I had been planning to do. The stadium was mostly packed, since the top 40-ish rows on the East side and 25-ish rows on the West side were closed. There was still plenty of open space to stretch out in the upper levels of each end zone, though. Next year, when there isn’t construction to worry about (at least not closing seats), I think Rich Rod’s goal of 92k+ might be attainable – as long as the marketing of the event continues on its current trajectory.

Posted under Football, Spring Coverage

Quick Links

Practice notes from MGoBlue, including KC Lopata nailing a 56-yard field goal in scrimmage.

Grady pleads guilty to DUI.

The position previews are coming along nicely, and when they’re all done, we can start worrying about Utah.

Posted under Misc.

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Podcast: 7/13/2008

Audio only this week. Enjoy.

Posted under Recruiting

The Grady Punishment

For the first time in a while, the sports media are somewhat abuzz with talk of the Michigan Wolverines. Of course, I’d prefer them to discuss anything other than the potential punishment of a player, but such is life.

So why is everyone talking about how stiffly Kevin Grady is going to be punished? Because nobody knows exactly how severe the potential punishment will be. Grady is the first player to have a (public) misstep since Rodriguez took the helm in Schembechler Hall, and with such model citizens as Adam Jones and Chris Henry on his resume under the “former players” heading, there is a certain curiosity about what he will do to Grady, morbid though it may be.

The proposals range from doing nothing (as Ohio State fans think will happen, for some reason), to kicking Grady off the team. Jeff Chaney, a columnist for the Grand Rapids Press, said today on the radio that he thinks the latter is the most appropriate and likely outcome. Naturally, I disagree.

The logic Chaney followed was this: Grady is a third-teamer, and therefore must serve as an example to the rest of the team. Of course, this doesn’t take into account that making an example is widely thought of as a terrible idea. Nor does Chaney realize the modus operandi of the Rich Rodriguez staff. Just as upperclassmen and projected starters were not cut any slack in the training room, why should Grady’s status as a non-starter (which Chaney infers, rather than actually knowing) mean that he has less leeway with the coaches?

In rodriguez’s world, that isn’t how it happens. The most likely scenario is that Grady is punished during the summer, and possibly suspended for a game or two in the fall.

Posted under Coaching

The Big Reveal!

Worried about the new home jerseys? Fear not, for they have been revealed!This is similar to, but not the same as, Phil Callahan’s description:

The home jerseys have a maize block “M” on the shoulder, the number is a little thicker and seems to be placed a little higher than on past jerseys. There’s also a small (1/4 inch wide by 1-2 inch) vertical maize strip running down from the collar that has Michigan in blue.

The strip on the collar (later clarified by Callahan to have a Block M, rather than the word “Michigan”) is there, the shoulder “M”s are not. No word yet on the away jerseys, described thusly by Callahan:

The away jerseys have a thin maize piping straight across the chest. There also have a small maize strip on the back of the collar that says Michigan in blue.

TV. The TV times for the first three weeks of the Big Ten Network schedule have been revealed as well, and Michigan isn’t on The Network in this timeframe. This means that the home opener against Utah and the non-conference tilt against Miami are on the Disney networks (Notre Dame is away, and therefore on NBC).

Since the BTN is guaranteed at least 3 games per team (and at least 1 conference game), this means that Michigan’s contest against Toledo will likely be relegated to a station that nearly everyone gets now. Two conference games (probably against “lesser” opponents like Northwestern (sorry, LTP) and Minnesota) will also have to end up on BTN to meet the minimum.

Grady. Through a friend-of-a-friend, I know one of the people he was “going out to get drunk with” (as described by the person in question’s mother). He blew a .281, achieving his goal and then some. Rodriguez will handle discipline internally after meeting with Kevin.

Posted under Misc.

Kevin Grady Arrested for DWI


East Grand Rapids’s own Kevin Grady was arrested last night in Wyoming, MI (which is no where near Ann Arbor (apparently they don’t have such technological innovations as “Google Maps” in Ohio), though I do enjoy the smug/hopeful tone of this post, which was apparently written by a 3rd grader. I have no idea what “Grady had implications [sic] of becoming a starting running back (sharing time with Travis Minor [sic] amongst others) after recovering from an ACL tear last year” is supposed to mean, nor do I know who Travis Minor is).

This will likely be a minor setback for Grady, who is likely to be punished internally, or suspended with reinstatement by the start of the season, for the offense. His presence in the Utah game would be very helpful, as I believe the inside run game is the Utes’ biggest deficiency on defense.

Posted under Personnel