The Blue Board

2010 Wisky D after 5 games

http://web1.ncaa.org/football/exec/rankingSummary?org=796&year=2010&week=5

2011 tOSU D after 5 games

http://web1.ncaa.org/football/exec/rankingSummary?org=518&year=2011&week=5

I love the NCAA stats. The drop-down menus at the top let you look at team week by week, year by year across a wide variety of categories.

I think you'll see that tOSU's D is a step above Wisky's after week 5.

Comparing OSU's full season defensive stats from last year to its stats through the first six games of this year is seriously flawed. You are smart enough to know that. You are right, however, that as more games are played OSU's defensive stats will become more accurate. Unfortunately for OSU, those stats are going to take a major hit when they play the better offensive teams in the conference, including Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan.

Raw stats are fuzzy. The eye test is something you can go on when the stats are so ridiculously -weighted based on non-conf schedule to this point. This is all a guessing game by us anyway that is only slightly tethered to what will happen.

My point is just about the MSU team as it LOOKS NOW. Of course they could win every remaining game and be better than last year or lose 5 more games and you would even admit they are worse. Who knows? But, I think they look worse at this point than how they finished last year.

None of this is accurate science. It is a combo of factors. MSU would have to play the same schedule in the same order to prove anything about this year's team compared to last years. The truth will be known in December, but last year's team was only blowout once in the regular season. This team already has that blowout, so they will have to play great FB to match last year.

UM's team AT THIS POINT THIS YEAR looks better than last year's finish. We don't know yet, but it appears that way.

I don't think MSU is THAT much worse and I don't think UM is THAT MUCH better (to last year), but I think they would have been about even last year without DRob panicking and throwing into coverage. (Your DBs should not be in a position to step in front and grab a ball or else it should have not been thrown.)

Not at all. You guys should be 8-4 if the wheels fall off, and I think I'm going to be eating some crow in regards to my records predictions with xxmgobluexx. At this point I had you guys at 5-1, then a slide to be started by MSU, a W to Purdue, and then you losing out. Regardless of the outcome of our game, I think you beat Purdue and Iowa; the @ IL game I predicted as a trap game L, now it may just end up being an L to a good team on the road.

In reality, I don't think there's a team on your schedule that you can't beat in a single game scenario. I don't think you'll go 12-0, but 9-3 (5-3)? I could definitely see that. Your back 6 is definitely tougher than your first 6 games; 3 home vs. 3 road games, and the only sure W will be IL. As long as your coaches make the adjustments they've been making, and Robinson doesn't get hurt, I have a hard time seeing you losing more than 3 games from here on out, and maybe even that's a stretch. I don't see a sure loss on your schedule.

Preseason I said 7-5, +/- 1 game.

An MSU L to UM this Sat. would make it hard to finish 9-3, but not impossible. Wisky is better than I thought they'd be (and I thought they'd be a top 15 team this year), but Nebraska and Iowa both look vulnerable. I'm much more worried about playing powerful Ds on the road that powerful Os, and both Nebraska and Iowa do not look like vintage NU/Iowa teams defensively. It also depends where those teams are at in their seasons when we play them.

I expect sure Ws over Minny, IU and Northwestern, so I'd say 7-5 is the floor for MSU right now.

I'm not ignoring that, just saying that tOSU has a pretty strong defense.

Also, I pointed out last week that your scoring D and yardage D were out of whack; you were allowing a point per 31.7 yards given up prior to the Northwestern game. For reference, since 2004, the best a team has finished in that area was Nebraska in '09 (with Suh and Co.), which was at 26.0 yards/point. Anything over 17 yards/point is very good D, from what I've seen; most of the very good to great tOSU and PSU teams of the past 5 years were between 18 and 22 yards/point.

Basically I said that you guys were giving up too many yards for your scoring D. True to form, you gave up 438 yards and 24 points to Northwestern or 18.25 yards/point. That's still great D, but it's a far cry from the earlier average. I've also heard that Northwestern's yardage was pumped up by the final garbage time drive. If you choose to say that, and say Northwestern gained 60 yards on that final drive, it puts your defense at 15.75 yards/point.

Again, either you're going to start giving up more points, or you're going to have to hold teams to lower yardage outputs. It'll be something worth keeping track of as the season goes on.

I think this is the main thing. Another reason is that I think people expected cousins to improve greatly in the off season and are comparing what he is doing this year vs what they expected him to be doing.

And last year's team took it in the shorts so OSU could undeservedly go to BCS. Bama curb stomped them.

You could also argue that if MSU doesn't have 2 defenders taken out by 1 guy @ ND (KR TD), and kicks a field goal at the end of the half instead of an idiotic fake FG call that doesn't happen 99/100 times, MSU loses 24-16 and no one is pointing to that game as a sign of MSU's weakness. I've heard similar arguments about the 438 yards you guys gave up to Northwestern, that a chunk of them came in garbage time. Should MSU's D get credit for a shutout against tOSU, because we gave up a TD with 10 seconds to go in a 2 score game? Does MSU get credit for holding tOSU to 0.9 yards/carry after tOSU ran for over 220 yards and 6 YPC @ Nebraska? I heard all last week that tOSU's O was weak and MSU's D isn't proven . . . then tOSU puts up 27 points in 3 Qs before their QB gets hurt. That same QB was pulled against MSU for ineffective play and finished the day with -27 rushing yards; was over +90 against Nebraska.

I can see our game on Sat. going either way. I think MSU's D is a bit more stable, and that it's at home should be a nice factor in our favor. I definitely think Michigan's offense is more explosive and your D is opportunistic. My problem with your defense is that it appears when it isn't generating turnovers, it's giving up long drives. They don't necessarily result in scores (9/16 RZ conversions allowed, which is still a high # of RZ opportunities), but to me that's a dangerous trend.

UM has recovered 10 fumbles on the year (again NCAA, so no WMU stats, sorry), which is #1 in the nation. This may just be me, but fumble recoveries are one of the most random occurrences in football. You can teach your players to strip the ball and hit hard, but in the end the ball has to bounce to one of your guys before an opposing player can get it. I know your D has improved, but averaging 2 fumble recoveries/game makes me feel that your D stats have a higher "luck" factor than MSU's do. I'm not saying your D improvement is solely predicated on luck; far from it. I'm just saying that to get the high scoring D # you have in comparison to the amount of yards/game given up, the lucky bounces of some fumbles are playing a solid part in that. That's not going to be there game to game.

That's the only game that was tougher compared to '11, and it was at home. The argument was about the defenses faced.

I'd say Youngstown State and Northern Colorado are a wash.

'10 WMU is better than '11 CMU

'10 FAU is definitely better than '11 FAU

@ '11 ND is tougher than '10 ND at Spartan Stadium

@ '11 tOSU is easier than '10 Wisky at home

So one game negates the other 4? And we don't know how tOSU will finish; I'd argue that even a tOSU that's weaker on a neutral field is still formidable @ the Shoe. Despite their struggles, I think they boast a stronger D than Wisky last year.

Ok . . . . then why can't I say, based on the eye test, that Cousins has faced correspondingly tougher defenses in '11 than he has in '10? Also, the only stat that's down is his total # of TDs. INTs, completion % are the same, and he's thrown for slightly more yards.

You can say anything you want. But since you didn't play the same five teams last year and this year, the stats really cannot be compared. That is my point. If by the eye test, you think Cousins looks as good or better this year as last year, fine. I don't. In fact, MSU's offense in general has been a bit of a disappointment IMO. Of course, five games is a very small sample size and everything could be different by the end of the season, but given all the offensive weapons you had coming back, I thought your offense would be one of the best in the conference. It just hasn't been thus far.

Edit: Here is another way to look at it. Notre Dame has played six games so far. In one of those games, MSU put up 13 points against the Domers. That is comparable to what Pitt (12 points) and Purdue (10 points) put up against them. It is far below what Michigan (34 points), South Florida (23 points) and Air Force (33 points) put up against them. I know this is not a perfect way to look at it, but it's at least as fair a way to look at it as you are trying to use. And it shows that MSU's offensive production has been lower than expected and not just because ND has some super awesome brick wall of a defense.

Edit 2: You can do the same thing with your game against OSU. MSU put up 10 points against OSU, which is fewer points than every team except Akron. Even Colorado (17 points) and Toledo (22 points) put up more points on OSU than MSU did and those games were also in the Shoe.

This is ludicrous(speed)! I'm sure there is a correlation to Cousins production and his offensive line play. When they play well he will play well. Simple. No? Any ways I'm hoping our defensive line can help facilitate a regression of MSU's offensive line play.

I agree with that, and the OL through 5 games has been much worse in '11 than in '10. If anything, that probably weighs in favor of Cousins playing pretty well this season.

The line play is going to be huge in this game, as it usually is. MSU's D-line may be the best single unit of the 4 (MSU OL/DL, UM OL/DL), but MSU's O-line is certainly the worst (going off what we've seen thus far) unit of the 4 as well.