I think our basketball team is very similar to Oregon football.
With a great QB at the helm (Burke, Mariota), we have one of the most prolific, efficient offenses out there. Ask Florida how good it was in the 2013 tourney game against them.
And when the offense was great, both teams were good enough to make it to their respective sports’ championship games, where both teams lost close games to very good teams (I’m thinking of the Oregon loss to Auburn, not OSU).
But with a lesser QB at the helm, and worse talent at the other positions, the scheme is still good, and the offense is still very effective against average to bad defenses, but it struggles against the better teams.
Meanwhile, defensively, neither team has ever been “good,” but they’ve been good enough to win at a high clip because the offense is so good. But when the offense takes a bit of a dip, and the team loses more games, the defensive deficiencies become far more noticeable and significant.
And Oregon football, to me, is a pretty great template for how to build an excellent program (though they’ve struggled the past few years) when you aren’t a blue blood program, and your state doesn’t have a ton of local talent. They built a great system, and found players to excel in it. And I think JB did much of the same thing with Michigan basketball, which is also not a blue blood program.
With that said, of course Oregon football (two recent title games) was operating at a higher level than Michigan basketball, and obviously it wasn’t infallible, as Helfrich is now gone.
