Welcome back to another edition of the Ballas and Skeen podcast. This is, what, week seven, I think.

I'm Chris Ballas with me, Doug Skeen, Michigan's five-time Big Ten champion, former NFL guy,

all Big Ten guy, blah, blah, blah, blah. We get it. He's pretty damn good at evaluating things.

And especially line play and skiing, that's where I want to start,

obviously on Saturday's Saturday night's game. You know how much shit we get for picking against

Michigan in these games. And I can't tell you how many times on the message board. Oh,

Dallas picked against us. That's great. I'm so excited because that means we're going to win.

And it's like, okay, everybody picked against them against Ohio State last year. Everybody, a lot of people picked against them against Alabama. You have to go with your gut and you have to be honest.

Well, credibility here. Balas, do the people that watch this, this podcast and the people that read all your great content on the website, do they want us to be the Lou Holtz of Michigan football and never pick against them? I did that in the early years. Desmond does that now on ESPN and people laugh at him. I think we try to keep it real here. Sometimes you're going to be right. Sometimes you're going to be wrong. Yeah. Yeah. That's all there is to it. But you don't go out west if you're Michigan and play very well in a true road game, apparently.

And everybody says, well, what's all there is to it. But you don't go out west if you're Michigan and play very well in a true road game, apparently. And everybody says, well, what's that have to do with this year? It doesn't have to do anything with this year. If you have a veteran team, I'll say this. If they had gone out there with the 2023 Michigan team, I would have expected them to win that game. When you go out there with a team that has not proven that it can do the basics against average competition at times or good competition, Oklahoma, for example, which got wiped, by the way, by Texas in a stunner. But then I'm not going to believe in you.

And especially when you got a freshman quarterback. And I'm not ripping on Bryce Underwood here because Bryce Underwood's done a really good job this year as a true freshman quarterback. He's going to have some mistakes, had a couple in this game. But when you've got an offensive line that has some veterans there and a guys that have played a lot of good football and play the way that they did on Saturday night, again, I hate to keep coming back to it, but to me, that's where it starts on offense.

And when people ask me about Chip Lindsay and the offensive coordinator and things like that,

I say it comes back to how the personnel groups are doing and being coached by the position coaches. To me, the offensive line still isn't there. So overall, offensive line, a C,

C minus.

And the other reason I put them in that passing category,

if you're going off of a high school grade point average,

is because we did run the ball for well at times.

Yeah.

We were effective at times, but not nearly enough.

So maybe it's a D plus.

I don't know, balance.

It doesn't matter.

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