Game day thread is dog shit. These things used to be filled with links to interviews, predictions, breakdowns, whiskey with his f/e+ or whatever. Sad days.
I'd try to offer some quantitative analysis, but there's just not much to work with right now. FEI and S&P+ are mostly based on pre-season projections this early in the season. FEI doesn't even break out into offensive and defensive rankings for another several weeks.
FWIW, here's how we stack up against Michigan:
F/+: UM (14) v. ND (18)*
FEI: UM (17) v. ND (18)
S&P+ (Overall): UM (15) v. ND (16)
S&P+ (Off v. Def): UM (8)** v. ND (29)
S&P+ (Def v. Off): UM (58) v. ND (19)
All three metrics rank App. State dead last (128th) and Rice somewhere around 100th. Which makes our win last Saturday slightly more impressive, but both opponents were dogsh!t, so we didn't learn much.
UM's OL sucks and is adjusting to a new OC. Our front-7 is young, inexperienced and adjusting to a whole new scheme. The game will be decided by that match-up.
Our pass-rush didn't inspire a lot of confidence against Rice. Maybe BvG went vanilla in order to spring a bunch of nasty surprises on UM? An Irish fan can hope. I'd feel better about stoning their power rushing attack if Councell, Grace or Deeb were ready for action, but we can't feel confident about any of them atm (Councell did play against Rice, though).
I do like our chances of hanging some serious points on Michigan. And I have a hard time envisioning UM hammering us successfully between the tackles given their OL issues. Funchess could go HAM, though he hasn't done much against us over the last two years.
I'll predict ND by 10, but that's a shot in the dark. We won't really know anything about either team until the dust settles Saturday night.
*There's
very little daylight between 14th and 19th.
**lol
