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The only difference between Dr. Pepper’s Fansville and the world Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh inhabits is the overuse of maroon and white in the former.
Harbaugh leads a bizarre existence. Go ahead and google “Jim Harbaugh and” and you’ll be left with “Jim Harbaugh and chicken,” “Jim Harbaugh and the pope,” and “Jim Harbaugh and Quavo” among the top searches. His presence at the 2016 World Series where he brought his baseball glove only seemed out of place because he wasn’t decked out head-to-toe in an away Michigan baseball jersey. Spikes included.
The all-encompassing bizarreness of Harbaugh, not maliciousness, or underhandedness, just bizarreness, is justly squared when it comes to his offensive football philosophy.
He’s a meat and potatoes, Lucky Strikes and a shot out of plastic-bottle whiskey bottle football traditionalist. Keep the air raids for the armed forces and the five-receiver sets for SnapFace or wherever millenials spend their time instead of playing in salt piles like children from past generations.
Harbaugh is at his most Harbaugh-est when he can grind out yards on the ground and rely on a power running game to dictate the tempo of the game. Even with a new toy in quarterback Shea Patterson fresh from a transfer, a stubborn ineffectiveness on offense made the Wolverines a run-first team in the season opener against Notre Dame. The attack totaled 58 yards in 33 rushes, an average of “blow up your entire offensive methodology running the ball.”
Slowly after the opener, through either the maturity, sheer execution of the offensive line, or an unit congealing over the course of a season, the Wolverines are the sort of offensive football team equipped to beat Ohio State.
The measurables department has Michigan with the thirty-second best rushing offense in the country. Statistically sexy for the B1G, but the rushing numbers, taken into conjunction with the team’s fourth-best time of possession and third down conversion percentage highlights the sort of operation that will grind out consistent offensive scores to the delight of Harbaugh.
I cannot picture the sort of matchup the better aligns for Harbaugh and Michigan to get his first win against Ohio State as a coach.
It’s a fitting callback to the Ten Year War that Michigan possesses the sort of offensive functionality to run the ball and run the ball until the first half averages of 3.5 yards per carry turn into 5 yards per carry come the second half. The sort of water torture the Wolverines plan to inflict on the Buckeyes will be B1G football at it’s second most enduring characteristic, the first being under-thrown passes and a halfback’s willingness to plow straight into the back of his right guard in hopes of falling forward for two yards. Michigan plays right into Ohio State’s weakness. There’s a perfect storm component to the matchup.
Ohio State showed no ability to improve its rush defense through the entire season, disastrously exemplified by Maryland’s 339 rushing yards last weekend on a 7.1 average yards per rush. When a rushing total amasses over 250 yards the average is almost always secondary.
Expect the sort of offensive game plan where Michigan finds themselves in a number of third downs with short distances needed to get a fresh set. Harbaugh and his Coalition of Offensive Decision Makers will not need to be coaxed into going with heavy packages to amass big yards against Ohio State. The opportunities will be there to spring a long run. Barring multiple fumbles, Michigan will march down field with relative ease in an offense befitting Harbaugh’s style.
Now that I think of it, there’s one more difference between the two versions of Fansville: Harbaugh’s streets are paved with scarlet and gray. The paving company arrives in Columbus this weekend with no intentions of leaving until late Saturday afternoon.
Nick is a writer for saturdaytradition.com. Your overuse of GIFs forced him away from Twitter. He removed himself from consideration in the Vanderbilt heading coaching search.