UFR GLOSSARY is here.

FORMATION NOTES: For personnel counting purposes I treated Jaylin Lucas as WR unless he was the lone back and called him the A-back for labeling purposes. Once again parentheticals are covered receivers, e.g. Gun 2RB Twins (Y).

This also got orbit motion from Lucas but the motion tags were making the tables look awful so "A-orbit" is in the description. I called this formation "Empty 4x1 Flex." I called Michigan's front "Nk Eagle." Also Michigan is playing a safety at Durkin depth for some reason. I put an asterisk next to the "1" in the "Hi" field when that happened.

[After THE JUMP: Diagnosis of a Blowout 7: The Annoying Snags.]

Why is this UFR different from the other six this year?

Brian said it in the postgame column: the overview of the defensive performance has been pretty much the same all year. There's one flukey touchdown, plus a field goal-ish drive that moves the ball with some annoying thing that works for a minute until Michigan shuts it off. Then Michigan makes their adjustments, the DL gets to wreck face, the score gets out of hand, and then we see how long I feel like .

There was a difference in this game however.

The order of events that made the first 40% of this game feel annoying?

Well that, and Indiana was the first team we face that was actively trying to move events away from the defensive line.

You can do that?

You can do anything at Michigan Zombocom. Anything at all.

...until Michigan decides they've been using you for practice against Ohio State long enough and shuts it off.

So what was the annoying thing this wee....oh right the snags.

The snags.

Let me guess: this was something having to do with playing a lot of zone coverage with a light box, and varying who shows up in each zone.

Yeah, so like the quick outs from ECU, that one skinny post against Bowling Green, the Rutgers hitches, the Nebraska slants, and the Minnesota stretches, Indiana adjusted their offensive attack this week to get some stuff against Michigan's base defense, which is Cover 3 with a light box (UNLV is a system offense and used the opportunity to practice it against elites).

Anyway the snags are part of the same family of quick throws that attack well-known holes in zone coverage. They are like slants except they don't actually make it to the hole defender's zone.

I saw a lot more split coverages this game. Here they caught Cover 6 with two guys high and the curl/flat defender given an immediate threat in the flat. Barrett takes off after the running back just as the snag receiver is turning around and the hole defender is finishing his drop.

As before, Michigan tried to take these away by dropping defensive ends into these zones, and the ends had neither the subtle feel for their timing nor the size/athleticism to cover for its lack. This one has Derrick Moore simply going to the wrong zone:

#8 the DE on the top

It's hard to tell with Michigan's switch zones but I'm pretty sure Sainristil is playing the curl/flat and Moore has no business heading after the back, but maybe I'm wrong? If he just plays the hole he's dropping right into this. That should free Colson to help with the guy on the other side of the field.

The one Harrell messed up is a bit more straightforward.

#32 the DE on the bottom

He doesn't have a threat in the flat, but he's a DE who only took zone defense as a minor, and "When to spend a little extra time playing the curl part of your curl-flat" is a 300-level course. The 400-level stuff is what you'd like Colson to do in our first example, which is to recognize when the back goes to the flat that it's going to draw Barrett away, and cut off his drop to slam down on the snag. You can see how hard it is when they had Amorion Walker try it late in the game:

Walker is a true sophomore receiver convert, and understandably awkward at trying to threaten both sides of his curl/flat zone. You can kind of see his thought process in real time as he tries to take away #6 then hop down fast enough not to give up yards to the RB in the flat. There's a lot of "oh gosh I'm supposed to be *here* wait oh no [windmilling arms] I have to be *here* oh crap the first one was right." The senior version of this sees the cornerback reading the quarterback, acting all cool like he's tooootally not going to step in front of the snag that he's clearly favoring, and once that convinces the quarterback to throw to the flat the CB's muscles immediately convert to racing after it.

All this is difficult, made more so when it's apparent the offense spent most of their practices getting the timing and spacing just right to throw this. Snags are effective against zones of all levels, but they're expensive to install for a college offense.

How did they shut it down?

Man coverage. Watch Wallace, the CB on the top.

Slants work against man because the cornerback is in trail coverage, but if you run a snag and stop, you're having the receiver move back towards the cornerback. Offenses still get away with that because their receivers (especially tight ends) often have a size advantage, and because referees often call Pass interference on defensive backs who are running into a space a receiver suddenly decides to occupy. But man shuts down snags.

I thought Michigan ran a lot more man in this game than they have this year and sure enough it showed in how they were aligning the cornerbacks before each play.

It also changed over the course of the game.

Cornerback alignment isn't a perfect stand-in for man/zone coverage, but it's a strong hint since their alignment makes playing one or the other easier. I only charted two plays in the 4th quarter, and both were press-man. So was this play, which had three receivers go to the first down marker and turn around, IE nothing that would work against man coverage. They didn't even check out of it when they saw the coverage tip pre-snap.

You wonder if the Hoosiers even practiced more than one man-beater last week. Probably not, because they knew Michigan was going to treat them as a scout team. Whenever Michigan decided to play the team in front of them instead of the team six weeks in front of them, we got the above.

What happened on the touchdown they scored this week?

We covered it on the podcast and in the game column but the gritty is Keon Sabb, the sophomore safety they're trying to get reps so he will see all the weird things that offenses can do to you, forgot to check if there's a #4 receiver going vertical before activating against a screen.

This is a bit more complicated than "Y U NO STAY HIGH." You number receivers outside->in, so #1 is the guy at the bottom of the screen, #2 is the TE under the hash, etc. By the time you get to #4 on one side it's usually the linebacker's responsibility, since you don't usually even get to a #4 unless there are trips to that side and then you add a running back. Here the #4 is Jaylin Lucas, an RB/WR, and he goes vertical. Sabb is the overhang and is supposed to get on top of any route that goes vertical, but there's also an underneath defender--man or zone--who should be preventing a vertical release.

Michigan's playing trap on the other side, and doesn't want to give away the coverage by having Barrett line up over Lucas, so he's got a free release. Shouldn't be a problem if he's the only vertical guy on this play, but Sabb has to see it or Barrett has to let him know. You can see in the clip that Barrett (the LB on the top hash) is trying to let Sabb know. Then you see Sabb has definitely not gotten the message.

Here's a better look:

The next time they tried it (or something like it), IU brought the fourth receiver from the backside on motion and Sainristil was the guy on top of the route.

Simple enough to fix. Probably just one of those things they hadn't gotten to with Sabb yet. This is why they're getting him reps.

Okay I understand why we leaked yards to a thing that worked for a minute, how we shut it off, and what flukey thing led to this week's one touchdown. I'm ready for scorecard that's 90% stuff that happened on the defensive line.

Actually the chart has some linebackin' in it this time.

Wait, we got information on the linebackers?

Yes!

New information or confirming stuff we knew about them by the end of last year that hasn't changed?

Uh... CHART!

I did not know Barrett was a steely-eyed missile man.

Yes you did! I said last year that he was Michigan's best linebacker, and before that I was saying he was Michigan's best blitzer. Here's Barrett in Game 7 of last year:

#23 the linebacker threatening to blitz (SPOILER: He blitzes!)

Barrett is Michigan's best linebacker at doing regular linebacker things, so they haven't let him do a lot of this, but it's always been in his repertoire. When it was finally time to Don Brown (IE play press Cover 1 and bring five) the Hoosiers into submission, Barrett was let off the leash and this happened.

No, he wasn't blocked, but he also created that by selling the left side of the line on a blitz in their direction. Carpenter spends a second on Kenneth Grant (who be Kenneth Grant), and that is one second more than he has. The acceleration that made Barrett the Don Brown choice for Viper serves very well for blitzing, because it cuts down on the increments of seconds that the quarterback has to process the pressure, decide what to do about it, and react. Sorsby here wastes his 0.75 seconds waiting for the RB to win a snag route against Colson, Colson does not give it to him because he's in man coverage with that guy, and...wait, say, where'd my football go?

Barrett's acceleration also makes him an ideal late blitzer, and when you combine that with his size it's too much to handle for running backs and most tight ends.

If that's all he was he'd be a fun gadget player, but Barrett has also fully realized his potential as a linebacking-linebacker who linebacks. That is, he reads the play, reacts, and pays it off without wasted motion. Watch him blow up this arc read from start to finish:

#23 the linebacker at the bottom

A couple of retraceable steps to keep himself playside of the tight end, trusts the guys behind him, gets his hands out to blow off the lead blocker (who doesn't even try to block him) and then the acceleration kicks in. This is our Tackle of the Week, even if he technically gave the tackle to Walker, because leaders help build up young guys' confidence too.

The one minus I gave him might not have been fair--he followed a slot into Colson and they converted a short hook behind him. But he might have been in man coverage and IU just caught Michigan with a man cornerback playing high. I also saw Lavonte David do the same thing on Sunday. Then you go back to how Barrett was the one yelling at Sabb to get back and you realize how far this guy has come from a year ago, when I wrote this under "What does it mean for Michigan State and beyond?" because we were still worried he might die if he ate a block:

Michael Barrett: fine. PSU ran power, he slipped around it or didn't matter. He's also getting incrementally more comfortable at linebacker.

PFF graded him a 95.7 pass rusher this week with 3 pressures on six opportunities.

https://twitter.com/PFF_College/status/1713994970888114294

They also had him for just 12 more pass rushes in the five previous games. The nature of this season and this defense, and the considerable drop from Barrett to Michigan's other linebackers when it comes to doing linebacker things, means we're probably not going to see him get six blitz opportunities a game. But I'd like to see four. And I'd like to see him getting more snaps than his compadres as we enter the portion of the season where Michigan might be in some football games.

It's never going to happen for Colson is it?

Some guys just don't have the instincts for linebacker, and at this point in his career I am running out of explanations for Colson's play that aren't that. He still does things that make him a plus on the field. Like this pass rush.

#25 standing up on the line between the bottom DE and the NT

He put that right guard in a blender, and then messed up the tight end outside so bad he ends up blocking his own teammate while Barrett sneaks in behind him. He's got that speed and agility that allow Michigan to have him cover a guy like Jaylin Lucas in man. He belongs on the field.

But midway through his third year as a starter he's still not dominating it. Sometimes he's not even executing his assignment. On the play Michigan brought down a safety to give them +1 in the box. Colson should be aware of the call, and that it means Moore will be in the gap to our right. And instead of attacking his own gap, Colson's just hanging out behind the DT.

That's an opportunity to set up 4th and a long field goal that becomes a 1st down, and there is no explanation for it other than Colson wasn't sure what to do. He's better than he was as a true freshman, and better than he was as a true sophomore, and still a great tackler and useful at things that don't involve figuring out what the offense is doing and reacting accordingly.