Dear Coach Carr,
I am writing to say what many people likely know, but few are willing to admit: the game of football seems to have passed you by. A team as talented as Michigan's should not be barely squeaking out a win against San Diego State, and when it does, the only place to look for the intellectually honest among fans is at the coaching. Now, I realize that you have a long history with the team, going back to the heady days of the legendary Bo Schembechler. The problem is that you seem to be stuck there.
Now, I know that once upon a time, the ground-obsessed, run-it-up-the-middle offense common to Big Ten football was more than enough to get by. But now, other football programs have branched far beyond such primitive tactics, and you don't seem to have noticed. The two most recent games, the last Rose Bowl, and that horrible debacle known as the Citrus Bowl (where Tennessee destroyed us) are excellent examples of ancient Big Ten football no longer being adequate to hang with the rest of the big boys. It pains me to say it, but unless you can bring your offense into the twenty-first century, I think you need to let someone else take a crack at it.
Also, this business about not running up the score is patently ridiculous. This isn't little league baseball, it's college football. Your assinine, stubborn adherence to this policy has cost Michigan more than one football game. And let us not forget how disingenuous it is for you to talk about the sportsmanship of not running the score up on the one hand, while scheduling St. Mary's School for the Blind and Pioneer High School (I'd use San Diego State as an example here, but somehow, you nearly managed to blow it against them) for the opening games of the season. If you really cared about sportsmanship, you'd stop scheduling the cream-puff, "easy win" teams at the beginning of the season. It doesn't take any football coaching experience at all to realize that it is utterly and mind-blowingly stupid to play conservatively at the beginning of the second half when you're only leading 21-7, because you "don't want to run the score up."
Then there's special teams -- why can't a powerhouse Big Ten program like Michigan get a freakin' decent special teams unit onto the field?
And don't even get me started on your moronic handling of the Tom Brady/Drew Henson situation. You need only compare their current professional careers to realize what a huge mistake you made buying into the Drew Henson hype.
Now, I understand that there are those that point to your win records and that nearly decade-old National Championship as proof that you're the go-to coach for our team. I would point out that many of the 1997 season's wins were flukes that could easily have resulted in losses in games that shouldn't have been close at all (especially if you had "run up the score" a bit).
Coach, when we go to watch Michigan football, we want to see wins, and we want to see decisive wins. What we see instead are Keystone Kops-like offensive and special teams play, and a defense that crumples under the staggering burden of carrying the entire team sometime during the second half. We want wins. Big ones. If we wanted good manners, humility, and conservatism, we'd see a UMS opera. We're here for football, Lloyd, my friend, and we want wins. Knock off the unwarranted conservative play-calling. Update the outdated, 1960s, Big Ten, run-it-up-the-middle-on-every-down offense. Run up the score. This is football, and if the other team can't bring its A game, it deserves to leave humiliated.
And if you can't do any of that, then, for our sake, Coach Carr, step aside for someone who will.
Yours sincerely,
Geoff Brown
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