Dear Diary Declares Dear Day or Deer Day

Foote in mouth. Larry Foote claimed, forgivably inarticulately, that Michigan's problem is we don't recruit enough kids who are used to a tougher road. I found a site that will take places in a spreadsheet and plot them on a map, and did so with the 2001 (Foote's and my senior year) and 2014 rosters, minus non-Kovacsian walk-ons. Yes there are errors still. Go ahead and zoom in.

Yellow is 2001; blue is 2014. Fullscreen

It sometimes does weird things like put Warren, Michigan, in the Upper Peninsula and I am fixing those one by one as I spot them. Findings:

Lloyd had four guys from the Memphis area while Hoke did much better in Southwest Ohio. That's where those guys are from.
Carr was able to penetrate deep into SEC country while Hoke has only managed to pick around the edges.
Hoke gets more kids out of private schools and magnet schools (e.g. Cass Tech) than Lloyd did. This is because when I was in high school the big prep programs weren't recruiting as much as they do now, so talent wasn't as concentrated.

The differences are minor and speak less to changes in Michigan recruiting than general trends. It all amounts to mostly nothing.

Off the top of my head, the players Michigan has who come from 1% means are Wilton Speight, who's a redshirting freshman right now, and Matt Wile, who burned his redshirt because of Hagerup and waited patiently for three years behind a guy who probably shouldn't have been on the team. Foote's starting QBs were Tom Brady from a nice place in California, and John Navarre from Cudahy, Wisconsin, which is suburban Milwaukee on the Lake Michigan coastline. Meanwhile Devin Gardner went to Inkster, which doesn't even exist anymore. If Foote had been 13 years younger it's likely he'd have been picked up DCD (Mo Ways), OLSM (James Ross) or Cass Tech. Talent comes from all over; Michigan's talent comes from where it used to.

Butterfly.

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Bye week is wife day, as per Six Zero's family tradition. The espoused among us are encouraged to move back from the football for a moment and pay service to whatever your weird marital tradition might be. If she'd like you to lose an entire Saturday to outlet stores, that's rough, but she's worth it. If your wife would rather just get random butterflies from you and spend Saturday helping you rake leaves, then you're married to the bestest in the westest. Congratulations only me.

[Jump: on the Wisconsin coach we can't steal and the LSU one we probably shouldn't]

See-See. The coaching candidates this week were Gary Andersen and in favor of Les Miles. Stealing Wisconsin's coach is probably less likely that stealing LSU's. Arkansas pulled it off, true, but we haven't seen what happens if Barry Alvarez puts up a fight, which I expect he would. Minnesota is one type of program; Wisconsin is another.

On Les, I don't think his coaching ability has regressed, or that anyone is saying that, so alum96 is arguing with a straw man a bit. The knock on Miles is that his natural regression with age will probably come in five years, and it could take three seasons just to get Michigan competitive; this isn't Nick Saban's roster he's inheriting, and these days LSU's recruiting advantages are at least on par with Michigan's, and retention advantages that exist there simply don't fly in Ann Arbor, however you think they maybe should. So the max upside is he finishes a Hall of Fame career coasting at his alma mater, with lots of downsides.

I couldn't get all the purple out.

I don't like that distribution. I do like the potential for a former Urban Meyer assistant with 20 years of coaching left in him who turned Mississippi State into something because he'd be working with more here than he has there (with the noted exception of tougher academic standards).

It hurts to hurt. Analysis of injuries in the Big Ten this year has Michigan and Purdue way ahead of the pack in starts lost. MSU and Iowa and Illinois are the unreasonably healthy ones. He added a "[season preview by Phil] Steele" column, which are the players who were lost for the season; this affects Maryland mostly.

Don't watch without hope. The difference between hope and no hope is whether you've DVR'ed it:

For various reasons (read: 1-year-old kid and new, time-consuming job), I've been watching the bulk of this year's B1G conference games on DVR.
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Now, the negative of seeing the games hours later is that I'm watching it a bit more dispassionately; I know the outcome, so like in wrestling when you know the finish, you aren't as drawn in by the close finishes. It also means that I know Gardner isn't going to "turn it around" after a couple of bad passes, that he isn't going to start hitting his receivers in stride or stop locking onto them as soon as they break the huddle. Instead, I have to settle in for 3+ hours of poor mechanics, off-center throws, and a guy who looks lost out there trying to not bungle away a game that Northwestern keeps trying to hand over.

"He'll get the next one" is a thing my brain constantly inserts whenever something goes awry. If you take that away…

The boxscore says otherwise.

Northwestern was 10 of 20 on third conversions to Michigan's 1 of 12. How in the heck did we win this game? Oh, yeah, that's right, we were playing Northwestern.

What if channels that broadcast sports only put things like "Northwestern was 10 of 20 on third down conversions to Michigan's 1 of 12" instead of the final score. Those who don't care to watch the game will get a sense of what occurred, and have their apps (often produced by those same channels) to get the score. Those who are planning on watching the game on DVR don't have to hold a hand over the scroll or whatever, and once in awhile there will be some nice surprises.

Too many games. If Michigan beats Maryland next week the season extends to a bowl game. If we don't, it ends Thanksgiving weekend.

Etc. Yards per play vs. points differential.