First – and most importantly – I’d like to remind you all that there are 27 more days until September 5th. 27 more days until, as Michigan fans, we are pleasantly surprised, extraordinarily disappointed, drunk stumbling around the house because we are 12 beers deep, breaking stuff around the living room, etc. 27 DAYS. Let’s face it, on a different level, football is football and it excites me that I’m going to be able to start watching football early in that first week with some decent matchups.

So a few things going on as tomorrow marks the start of the first fall practice…

• Obviously, there are people around the country that feel Michigan is in for another long, potentially dreadful year of struggle and inexperience on both sides of the ball. Not so fast, naysayers and most obnoxious people that live in and around Ohio. I’m not promising anything – and I’m guilty of being a little over-optimistic at times (one look at my other blog and you’ll see why) – but lots of folks closer to the program and objective people that understand the dynamics of Rich Rodriguez’s offense have a gut feeling that the Wolverines could bounce back this year in a big way. Even if Michigan goes 7-5 or 8-4 – I think you are going to see some flashes of what is to come in the near future. An eight win season probably means that Michigan is a handful of players and maybe a year of experience away from contending for the Big Ten title. The Big Ten Network football crew talk of a Michigan bounce back season here and will be at Michigan this Friday.
• In Rich Rodriguez’s interview with The Sporting News, RR talks of how he initially began developing the meat and potatoes of his spread attack from the Detroit Lions and Houston Oilers some time ago. RR says…
  

  It was more born out of necessity and trying to be different. The staff and I had studied some run-and-shoot teams—Detroit and Houston were running it in the NFL. But we wanted to have our own version of it in the run game. The zone read, one of the staples of the spread nowadays, came about almost as an accident, a byproduct of practice.

  Back then, nobody was running shotgun run plays other than maybe a quarterback draw. To run the zone out of the shotgun was simply just a handoff. I had a quarterback in practice where the exchange didn’t happen right, and the quarterback ended up keeping it around the end. I started to get on him, and he said, “I was reading the end.” I said, “Well, that one is going in next week.” I realized, hey, by putting the quarterback in the shotgun, he has time and distance to read that end. It’s almost like a reverse option.

  Somebody may have been doing it somewhere out there, but I had never seen it. We kind of looked at each other as coaches and thought, Hey, we might have something going on here.

• In a story on AnnArbor.com here – New Michigan Defensive Coordinator Greg Robinson says it’s his goal for Michigan to be “the best tackling team in America”. Really? Wow, that would be quite the turnaround as Michigan has been about the worst tackling team that I have watched over the past few seasons. So many missed opportunities for big stops because of broken tackles by guys that escaped simply because the Michigan defenders simply had poor technique and didn’t wrap up. I can’t wait to see the changes on defense – I’ll be disappointed if there is not a noticeable difference.

Related Posts:

• The Season Lies at your Doorstep
• Winning ways – please come back to Ann Arbor!
• 2009, and Looking Ahead to 2010
• Positive Thinking…
• Michigan’s Story of 2009 – Chapter 6