Spartanmack said:

As for Staten, the line has never been that good - one of the All Americans went undrafted by the way and Clark went in the 7th round and is out for the season with a torn ACL very possibly a career ending injury for a marginal lineman. And you're only likely to struggle after losing experienced players if you're not developing and recruiting quality replacements. You're making excuses again - and acting like this is the only year the o-line has been a problem. It's not, it's just a bigger problem because the rest of the offense isn't good enough to cover for them.

And our boring predictable offense worked OK over the last few years but it didn't work so well when we really needed it too. We can't count on playing OSU in a hurricane every year. We couldn't contend for national championships with it, unless you think scoring ZERO points in the playoff is "contending" and we can't expect to regularly contend for B1G titles with it either now that uofm doesn't suck and we're in a loaded division.

Some of our problems are bigger than this year, they're not new, they're just glaringly obvious now that none of the position groups are picking up the slack and covering for them. Bollman and Warner suck - they need to go. Period. Staten sucks too, he needs to go. Barnett is looking like he's in over his head as a coordinator. I'm fine giving him another shot as a position coach or bringing in a "co" coordinator (wink, wink) so he can have the title and save face by technically not being demoted - however dantonio wants to handle it.

When you go from the CFB playoff to a C- as the best grade for any position group, that tells you something and it's more than just an injury bug.

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We can disagree on the OL, we've had a formula and that's been controlling the line of scrimmage and winning the turnover battle, we've done it for years. This year, the line is a weakness and that's showing. That's due to injuries, attrition, some recruiting misses, inexperience, etc. As for pointing out that Allen didn't get drafted, who cares? I'm not grading Staten by draft status, I'm grading him on production at MSU. I did point out Conklin and Allen being AA's and Clark being drafted to illustrate that we had good OL last year and in prior years. Give me a ton of AA's that don't get drafted and I'll be very happy.

I also disagree in the offense not working, against OSU, we did control the line of scrimmage, dominated it actually, on both sides of the ball. when you do that, you'll win football games, they were only able to score due to fumbles. We don't play OSU in a hurricane every year, if you look at our previous two games against OSU, we were able to move the ball well, 538 yards against their NC team in 2014 and 438 against an undefeated OSU in 2013. Boring and predictable can be highly effective with the right personnel. As for us not being able to score against Bama, you've got me there, Bama is much better than we are and they were dominant in that game. If you want to fire coordinators that can't pile up the points against Alabama, you'd fire 95% of the OC's in college football. Bama is an outlier winning the NC every other year essentially.

Funny that you say that you're ok with MSU bringing in a co-defensive coordinator (wink wink). It might surprise you to know that MD actually has had co-defensive coordinators since Narduzzi left. I'm not surprised that you didn't know that though.

I am looking at the actual reasons for our situation now, it's not just injuries but they are playing a big part, along with attrition/dismissals, and inexperience. You can keep hitting the panic button though.

you can disagree all you want but OSU fired him for being boring, predictable and they consistently have top 5 recruiting classes and put O-lineman in the NFL all the time because boring and predictable was ineffective when it mattered.

you're right, I've been giving mike tressel a free pass here - my bad. I bet you think it's because Barnett is African American, and not because the defensive backfield sucks and has sucked since Dennard left.

I'm not hitting the panic button, I'm just not making excuses for poor performers. If you're happy to settle for mediocrity, that's fine. Just don't be lazy and pretend like you're the "thinking man" because you're happy to support marginal coaches.

Spartanmack said:

you can disagree all you want but OSU fired him for being boring, predictable and they consistently have top 5 recruiting classes and put O-lineman in the NFL all the time because boring and predictable was ineffective when it mattered.

you're right, I've been giving mike tressel a free pass here - my bad. I bet you think it's because Barnett is African American, and not because the defensive backfield sucks and has sucked since Dennard left.

I'm not hitting the panic button, I'm just not making excuses for poor performers. If you're happy to settle for mediocrity, that's fine. Just don't be lazy and pretend like you're the "thinking man" because you're happy to support marginal coaches.

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I think the way we play works for MSU, run the football, win the line of scrimmage and not turn it over. this year is a complete 180, I'm sticking with what's worked very well over the last decade and not letting one inexperienced team change my thinking. Of course if we could get a coordinator that made us better, we should do it, but I think there's a lot of risk in those moves.

Barnett's race had nothing to do with you not knowing that we had co-DC's. Trae Waynes was a pretty good DB and it's hard to judge last year considering we were down 3 or more starters for a large part of the season. Copeland, Meyers, Williamson, and Hicks all missed large chunks of the season. Colcquhon actually developed into a solid DB by the end of the season.

I think you need to differentiate between excuses and valid reasons. We're bad in the trenches, that creates a snowball effect that impacts all other aspects of performance. You can get on the case of the DB's all you want, but the DL isn't doing any favors for them considering we have 5, yes, 5 QB sacks on the year, which I think ranks 118th in D1 football. on the OL, David Beadle is simply not up to the standard that we're used to. He wasn't good enough to crack an 8 person playing group last year and he has been a weak link this year at a critical position. Injuries, dismissals, inexperience, and some recruiting misses are the culprits.

did we win the line of scrimmage against Oregon and Alabama? no, and not only did we not win, we got demolished. Our best offensive line ever couldn't block 'Bama's 4 man rush. The closest we came was at OSU, in a hurricane against a very uninspired buckeye team - we did dominate the line of scrimmage that night, but that's not been the norm for this team against elite competition.

I appreciate that you can finally acknowledge that criticizing an black person doesn't make someone racist - that's a big step for you. Trae Waynes was pretty good, but I think he got premium valuation because of his speed. He was faster than Dennard but the comparison ends there. Dennard had way better instincts, was better in coverage and was light years ahead as a tackler. While I don't think Waynes was as good as most seem to think, he was certainly better than anyone on this crew.

I've already distinguished between excuses and valid reasons - I've been pointing that out for at least 2 pages now. It's not enough to dominate the 2nd and third tier B1G teams, even though that's most of our games, to say the o-line is great or even really good. Those battles don't count - what matters is how you do against the tier 1 B1G teams and the elite competition we've faced. By that measure, we've been bad in the trenches on offense for awhile now and it's finally getting exposed now that the rest of the offense stinks too.

Spartanmack said:

did we win the line of scrimmage against Oregon and Alabama? no, and not only did we not win, we got demolished. Our best offensive line ever couldn't block 'Bama's 4 man rush. The closest we came was at OSU, in a hurricane against a very uninspired buckeye team - we did dominate the line of scrimmage that night, but that's not been the norm for this team against elite competition.

I appreciate that you can finally acknowledge that criticizing an black person doesn't make someone racist - that's a big step for you. Trae Waynes was pretty good, but I think he got premium valuation because of his speed. He was faster than Dennard but the comparison ends there. Dennard had way better instincts, was better in coverage and was light years ahead as a tackler. While I don't think Waynes was as good as most seem to think, he was certainly better than anyone on this crew.

I've already distinguished between excuses and valid reasons - I've been pointing that out for at least 2 pages now. It's not enough to dominate the 2nd and third tier B1G teams, even though that's most of our games, to say the o-line is great or even really good. Those battles don't count - what matters is how you do against the tier 1 B1G teams and the elite competition we've faced. By that measure, we've been bad in the trenches on offense for awhile now and it's finally getting exposed now that the rest of the offense stinks too.

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I know you say we can't beat elite competition with our coaches and our offense, that's kind of the cornerstone of your argument. How do you explain MSU winning 8 of our last 10 against AP top ten teams?

Sbee said:

I know you say we can't beat elite competition with our coaches and our offense, that's kind of the cornerstone of your argument. How do you explain MSU winning 8 of our last 10 against AP top ten teams?

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Easy, there aren't ten elite teams. Also, there's timing issue to those statistics. Look at how many times supposedly elite Oklahoma has gotten waxed and not finished the season as a top 10 - but the team that beat them early has a win against a top 10 team - probably a top 5 or even 3 team. Just like Wisconsin has wins against 2 top 10 teams this year, the season isn't half way over and neither of those teams are even ranked. I don't know how many of our top 10 wins fall into the latter category but I'd say a lot of them can be discounted when you consider the first - who is truly elite.

Spartanmack said:

Easy, there aren't ten elite teams. Also, there's timing issue to those statistics. Look at how many times supposedly elite Oklahoma has gotten waxed and not finished the season as a top 10 - but the team that beat them early has a win against a top 10 team - probably a top 5 or even 3 team. Just like Wisconsin has wins against 2 top 10 teams this year, the season isn't half way over and neither of those teams are even ranked. I don't know how many of our top 10 wins fall into the latter category but I'd say a lot of them can be discounted when you consider the first - who is truly elite.

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I'm going to correct myself and say that we're 8-3 vs top 10 teams since we lost to Wisconsin this year and they were top 10. I guess the argument should be, prior to this season, we have beaten a number of top 10 teams.

Your point about us not beating elite teams is really not valid, unless you consider Bama as the only elite team. Yes, there are a few early season games against highly ranked teams who don't live up to expectations, like Oregon last year. For every one of those games, we did beat highly ranked teams late in the season, like bowl games or the big ten title game. We beat OSU twice, once in the rain (which somehow invalidates it to you) and once in the big ten title game, we beat a very good stanford team, a baylor team that was one spot out of the first CFP, an undefeated Iowa team. I'm sure you'll come up with some kind of excuse for each of these wins, but I think your argument really boils down to us having to make wholesale changes since we can't compete with Bama. They have one loss in two years and that was a fluke game where they had 5 turnovers. We're the only big ten team that has beaten OSU since Meyer took over and we did it twice. MSU's formula has worked and will continue to work, we just don't have the personnel or experience this year.

Sbee said:

I'm going to correct myself and say that we're 8-3 vs top 10 teams since we lost to Wisconsin this year and they were top 10. I guess the argument should be, prior to this season, we have beaten a number of top 10 teams.

Your point about us not beating elite teams is really not valid, unless you consider Bama as the only elite team. Yes, there are a few early season games against highly ranked teams who don't live up to expectations, like Oregon last year. For every one of those games, we did beat highly ranked teams late in the season, like bowl games or the big ten title game. We beat OSU twice, once in the rain (which somehow invalidates it to you) and once in the big ten title game, we beat a very good stanford team, a baylor team that was one spot out of the first CFP, an undefeated Iowa team. I'm sure you'll come up with some kind of excuse for each of these wins, but I think your argument really boils down to us having to make wholesale changes since we can't compete with Bama. They have one loss in two years and that was a fluke game where they had 5 turnovers. We're the only big ten team that has beaten OSU since Meyer took over and we did it twice. MSU's formula has worked and will continue to work, we just don't have the personnel or experience this year.

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I'm going to require more than your say so as an invalidation of my point. As for the rest of this nonsense, who cares if Baylor was one spot away from the CFB playoff - we made it to the playoff and got smoked 38-0, so if you're trying to say playoff and almost playoff teams are elite, your point is clearly invalid. Also, Iowa got their asses beat by Stanford - they were NEVER in the game. Iowa was not elite. Also, the Oregon team we beat was nothing like the Oregon team that we had a 2 score lead on that ended up rolling over us.

Spartanmack said:

I'm going to require more than your say so as an invalidation of my point. As for the rest of this nonsense, who cares if Baylor was one spot away from the CFB playoff - we made it to the playoff and got smoked 38-0, so if you're trying to say playoff and almost playoff teams are elite, your point is clearly invalid. Also, Iowa got their asses beat by Stanford - they were NEVER in the game. Iowa was not elite. Also, the Oregon team we beat was nothing like the Oregon team that we had a 2 score lead on that ended up rolling over us.

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Just as I suspected, you try to invalidate our big wins and focus on Bama. Bama is a machine, we can't compete with them unless something fluky happens. If Bama is the standard, we're not good enough. OSU is the next best program in the country and we've been very competitive over a larger sample size. I did discredit the Oregon win as one of those early season top 10 wins but we had a number of big ones in November, december, and January. We are competitive against the elite teams, you seem to think that teams that are in the national title picture late in the year aren't elite. That logic makes zero sense.

Sbee said:

Just as I suspected, you try to invalidate our big wins and focus on Bama. Bama is a machine, we can't compete with them unless something fluky happens. If Bama is the standard, we're not good enough. OSU is the next best program in the country and we've been very competitive over a larger sample size. I did discredit the Oregon win as one of those early season top 10 wins but we had a number of big ones in November, december, and January. We are competitive against the elite teams, you seem to think that teams that are in the national title picture late in the year aren't elite. That logic makes zero sense.

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Unsurprisingly, you suspected wrong. I'm not invalidating our big wins, i'm just saying they weren't against elite teams. They're big wins against good teams, just not elite teams, with the exception of OSU in the B1G champ game.

Bama IS a machine - that's what separates them and makes them elite, the most consistently elite team in the country the last ten years or so. Then probably OSU then there are a bunch that come and go like Oregon, USC, Texas, etc, etc.

Spartanmack said:

Unsurprisingly, you suspected wrong. I'm not invalidating our big wins, i'm just saying they weren't against elite teams. They're big wins against good teams, just not elite teams, with the exception of OSU in the B1G champ game.

Bama IS a machine - that's what separates them and makes them elite, the most consistently elite team in the country the last ten years or so. Then probably OSU then there are a bunch that come and go like Oregon, USC, Texas, etc, etc.

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Ok, we're not better than Bama or OSU, though we're the only big ten team that has beaten urban Meyer (could change tonight though ).

Bama and OSU are better than us and everyone else, time to clean house.

Sbee said:

Ok, we're not better than Bama or OSU, though we're the only big ten team that has beaten urban Meyer (could change tonight though ).

Bama and OSU are better than us and everyone else, time to clean house.

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yeah that about sums it up - glad to see you're paying attention.