UFR Glossary: Here. Sorry this took so long to get out. If you're wondering, it was the 3rd and 2 when Mazi Smith turned down a free sack that caused a three-month rage quit.

Video Note: It looks like Gfycat is dying. I got half of the videos uploaded before uploading stopped working. They're still hosting for now, but I moved to Streamable to complete the job. Feedback appreciated.

Substitution Notes: Michigan started in a dime with all three CBs and Turner the dimeback, and used that a lot instead of a second safety. A lot less rotation up front than most of the season. Colson, Barrett, Smith and Jenkins went most of the way, Harrell and Morris had about 75% of the snaps outside. McGregor earned his way on the field in the 2nd half, but Graham, Upshaw, Moore, Okie, and Rolder had far smaller workloads than usual.Secondary was Moore the whole way, Paige when Turner wasn't diming, and the usual cornerback rotation. Quinten Johnson got in for one drive. Moten did not play.

Formation Notes: Double arrows means the players who normally play those positions have swapped roles so "HY" here means the slot receiver (H) and TE (Y) have done so.

I'm shortening the nomenclature for 4- and 5-wide sets to how the threats are arrayed, so this is 3x1:

And this is a "3x1 Stack RB":

…meaning the RB is on the same side as the stacked WRs. I'll list the field side first so if you see "1x3" that means 3 WRs to the boundary. TCU also went Unbalanced, meaning there's only a guard and a TE above the C here:

[After THE JUMP: Some surprising results]

Why would you do this?

Would you rather talk basketball?

There are other things in the world to talk about.

Such as?

The necessity of cutting Tom Bombadil from the screen adaptation of Lord of the Rings.

I think this is pretty much settled, but if you want to UFR one of the greatest films of all time you want Lindsay Ellis, not Seth Fisher. I'm your counterintuitive takes on Jesse Minter guy.

You have a hot take on Jesse Minter?

Yeah, because after this game I was telling every microphone in lipshot that Minter got out over his skis when trying to outsmart Sonny Dykes. I figured this exercise—give or take some nuance—would bear that out.

And it didn't?

It didn't. It's true that Minter turned the blitz dial all the way up. We've been tracking pass rushers per play since 2014 and 4.66 was the blitziest Michigan's been since the first year of Dr. Blitz.

It was also out of character. The only other super-blitzy game last year was Rutgers, and that was against a true freshman quarterback, nobody receivers, and an offense allergic to throwing downfield. Every other game was more on the Paterno end of the zone blitz spectrum than Dick LeBeau.

Minter's blitzes started up in the 2nd Quarter, or perhaps more precisely after a 12-play, 76-yard touchdown drive. There would be one 10-play drive after that, but that was the drive with 9 lives. The pressure put Michigan in position to kick TCU off the field in multiple, crucial situations. When they didn't get home, it was because Duggan was throwing pin-perfect drags while being hauled down 20 yards from the pocket, plus downfield defensive backs not getting off their blocks.

Like, there are negatives to assign for this, but not for the playcaller who got two guys unblocked to the quarterback.

I will hear arguments that Minter never addressed this particular weakness of his man blitzes versus drag screens. We talked about these rub plays all season—I might have to Neck Sharpies all of it over the offseason—because it was an obvious weakness even when opponents were getting their plays called back for throwing it downfield. When Michigan sent seven they tended to have their secondary play "man everywhere he goes" (MEG), which other coaches might call "man all day" (MAD), or "mad" because you're asking your corners to get through blockers on these screens.

I would say I was mad that they gave up five touchdowns.

The drive chart is listening.

• Touchdown drives of 83, 79, 78, 76, and 75 yards, three of those in three plays or fewer.
• Three turnovers.
• Three three-and-outs and three first-down-and-outs.

TCU had two sustained drives, one which should have been a three-and-out if TCU wasn't farting the Brandenburg Concertos. They also had eight drives that Michigan shut down after little movement. Your fan brain isn't totally betraying you. I'd say about 80% of their scoring was from coming up Milhouse on high-leverage situations. Minter didn't go full Jim Knowles, but he definitely went in that direction, and got a similar result.

But: Big surprise, right? When you blitz a lot the other team is going to adjust, and the adjustments are going to hurt more. Even then, Michigan had a couple of ways out. The gut-punch 3rd & 7 after Michigan closed the gap was the one where my fan brain thought "Oh crap, they've got us pegged."

For all the opportunities the players had to stop this, Duggan saw the pressure was coming, the receiver knew to bend it back behind the line of scrimmage, the other receiver knew he was okay to block Johnson. They had this contingency dialed up, and we fell right into it. I'm not excusing Turner for his gamble, but the reason he was in that position in the first place was TCU got wise to the blitzing. However the reason it got 70 yards was because Turner tried to prevent a makeable 4th down, and Gemon Green was taken out off-screen. You can just barely make it out on the replay here, starting 1 second into the clip:

I couldn't tell if that was a shoulder or a tackle from the few pixels left to us so I charged Green for it. The point is Michigan's blitzes weren't generating completely free romps to the endzone; they were generating chances to break tackles and block downfield that TCU was executing.

The blitzing also helped. The very next drive started deep in Michigan's territory. On 3rd & 7 the defense shows an interior blitz and TCU calls timeout to flip the play. They don't need seven; this is four-down territory and TCU thinks they can power their way to a quick 5-yard gain versus a pass rush. Minter has the call changed to an edge blitz, and there's nowhere for Duggan to go. He has to give because Harrell's coming off the backside, and once he does the slanting Derrick Moore is right where the pullers need to go.

Overall I was impressed at the level of play. I've often said I couldn't UFR an NFL game because of all the minutiae—plays are still drawn up, but with way more in-play options ad ad-libs by highly trained professionals reacting to each other. I guess that's what you should expect from Playoff teams at the end of a season and bowl practices, but even when they played Georgia last year I didn't struggle this much to differentiate play-calls from making plays. It was great football—arguably the best football Michigan's ever played—but also played hell on our charting system when trying to assign points between the players executing high-level stuff and the coaches calling it.

Here's an example of when I Split it. Both teams set up like this and stayed like this after TCU called an audible:

TCU wants a high-low with the slot receiver and the TE at the bottom. Michigan takes away both, as Upshaw cuts off his edge rush until the TE is on the ground, allowing Barrett and Colson to stay with the slot receiver's route longer.

These are the margins that make a great coverage unit—every fraction of a second that Barrett can take away the top of his zone without the bottom of his zone being open is time for the pass rush to get through.

The reason Duggan still got a pass off to an open guy is Michigan's pass rush couldn't get anything. Upshaw ultimately came in unblocked, and I gave him credit for affecting the accuracy of the pass. He got a +2 on this play, so we're not knocking him, but also if you could get a guy faster than Taylor Upshaw there, you either draw the LT's attention away from Jenkins or probably McGregor was singled on the top but slipped on the crappy turf.

How bad was the pass rush?

Independent of the blitzing, bad. Hard to express how bad.

Surely you have some means of doing so. You have a keyboard, html, a bachelor of arts from a prestigious university, access to tags like and …

Those are table tags.

And yet you insist on calling it a chart.

YOU're the one who's always saying Chart.

Okay then Chart!

Chart.

Here we go again.

Here we go where?

You just posted some numbers and now you're going to use them to tell me why Jaylen Harrell sucks.

I wasn't going to say he sucks.

Rly?

I was going to get into a longwinded breakdown of his limitations that put the fact he's earned his playing time in context of what the defense needs from his position, and why he was probably the best man available for the job.

And you need to defend playing him because he sucks.

Only at pass-rushing and playing zone reads, and I'm happy to say he might have fixed both issues in the time it took me to get this out, because he was much better in the spring game. The scrape exchanges that both Maize and Blue were usi