I think Michael ends up being pretty darn close to Ahman Green as well. I still see star in that talent.
RB is kind of a catch-22 situation. Sure, you want him to be creative and instinctive on Sundays and find ways to make plays work. But you don't want that at all from Monday-Saturday. You don't want your RB to get creative in practice. It lessens the responsibility of the linemen to do their jobs properly. This is how the conversation goes during the week, and anybody here that has played RB or OL for any amount of time basically at any level has heard this exact conversation from a coach hundreds of times at practice, even if the RB improvises a huge gain:
"Hey, Turbin, why didn't you hit the right hole?"
"Because there wasn't a hole there."
"Then, next time, put your helmet in Sweezy's back and cleat marks up his arse. I bet you he'll damn well make a hole for you after that. Run the play again. On the ball!!"
Very few things on this earth hurt as bad as getting a facemask in the small of your back at full speed while you're engaged with a DT.
A guy like Christine Michael has heard this thousands of times in his life. He remembers this when the thinks about improvising. So certainly, you want him to improvise on Sunday and make a play however he can, but as a guy who is on the bubble and presumably is trying to do whatever the coaches ask him to do to make a team, he can't risk getting his arse chewed out for not running a play as it is drawn up.
I'm an O-line guy. If a play doesn't work right, it's the O-line's job to make it work right, not the RB's job to improvise around it. Nothing made me chew a guy out more than having my line do a nice job of making the right seam for a back only to have him improvise because he thought he saw something.
Again, I'm not saying you don't want a guy with great instincts. The great ones run 90% on feel. There is a great clip of our offensive staff designing a subtle adjustment to a play because of the way the defense is playing us. The hole is going to be moved a few feet from where it normally is, and Pete goes to Marshawn, who is sitting on the bench and says, and I'm paraphrasing:
"hey, on blah blah play, youre going to want to hit it right here instead of....." Marshawn cuts Pete off mid-sentence and rolls his eyes and says "I'll just read it."
Then Pete goes "yeah, but I'm just saying it's going to be--
"I'll just read it."
"Okay, yeah, just read it."
There was a back in the early 90's for Pittsburgh named Barry Foster. He came out of nowhere and caught lightning in a bottle and was instantly a pro-bowler caliber back, and he like led the league in rushing or something. Then, the next year, I heard him say in an interview "my first year, I didn't know what was going on, I just played off instincts. Now I'm learning that you have to prepare and watch tape and know what to expect." He soon fell off a cliff and was never heard from again.
The great ones run on feel. This is one of the reasons I don't mind Michael not being incredibly coachable. But for the rest, they're better served to hit the dang hole as it was drawn up and trust their line to take them there, because dancing and indecision is going to be a far worse crime than running hard into a pile and falling forward.