Michigan Football, 2021 Season

[lineygoblue]

ASAP. I will chip in whatever it takes to ensure Warde Manuel never has to lead a coaching search again.

Agreed. Get Howard signed, and well compensated, and be done with it. This is not the time to count pennies. The NBA is going to come calling as early as April.

Pay the man. Now.

[Tom W]

The Athletic Department made a profit last year with the football team providing a home win for every paying fan. They'll find a way to make sure that Howard is properly compensated.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Seems to me Juan is enjoying himself. Is there a threat from the NBA? Probably. Does the U need to jump through it's ass to renegotiate a longer term contract and pay him more to stay? I don't think so ..... not yet anyway. And let's give Warde and whoever else might have been involved some credit for landing Howard to begin with.

The boil on the ass of M sports is the football team right now and that's huge roll-reversal for most of us so, we might be over-focusing on it as a reflection of how well or not well Manuel is doing his job. Yes, I know there are other red-flags but that's another story.

But it's been that way under Hoke and RichRod as well, and it was uneven in the last half of Carr's tenure. And it's that way regardless of who the AD is as well. If you think it's really *only* a Harbaugh problem, how you gonna solve that? Coaching search? We all know how those turn out

Football coaching searches. They're hard and it seems like Warde managed to avoid a cluster-fuck of one if he'd have fired JH. I can't be certain, all things considered, retaining him under the terms they did retain him under weren't the best option.

[iam416]

HARBAUGH!!!! recruits fine for an upper level B10 finish, but not for an elite team. HARBAUGH!!! apparently can't develop a friggin' QUARTERBACK. HARBAUGH!!!!'s finger prints are all over the offense and his offensive vision is, IMO, largely incompatible w/ success in the 2020s. HARBAUGH!!! trusted his defense to a man who knew one way to go about things AND recruited in a "moneyball" way hoping to game the system with diamonds in the rough. HARBAUGH!!!'s player development is inconsistent at best (seems to break down positionally). HARBAUGH!!!! is currently a sinking ship -- there is no real reason to believe he's going to be around in 2 years.

Of those elements, he's at least tried to correct the defensive issues. But, he's still going to need to overcome some really lax recruiting on that side of gthe ball. He could, I suppose, eliminate the sinking ship element if he busts out a great season in 2021. M has almost everyone back. That would typically signal big things -- if you didn't watch them play in 2020. M's offense, I think, is always going to suffer from HARBAUGH!!!! and it still remains to be seen if he can develop a QB.

All in all, it's not a particularly encouraging situation. You boys ain't Duke, yet, but you may be North Carolina -- except M hoops is better than UNC hoops for the near term (CBB can turn on a dime), and UNC football seems more promising tham M football.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Don't disagree with anything you said about HARBAUGH!!!! and won't defend him or M football - they are exactly what Harbaugh has made them .... a second tier also ran.

UNC football seems more promising than M football.

An interesting comparison. When Mack Brown left Texas in 2013 he left the program in bad shape and it still hasn't recovered. He was a HC in waiting at ESPN until the Tar Hells hired him in '18. I don't think anyone thought he'd do well there but he has. I think his strength was probably always organizational and knowing which coaches to surround himself with. I've never seen him as a cheer-leader in the PJ Fleck role or even Ryan Day who I actually think brings the best out of his players with that approach and of course what he picked up from UFM with organizational skills.

Harbaugh? I don't know, man. He's really flamed out and the M football program is where it is even though it's a lot of things and it's hard to put a finger on just one fileable thing Harbaugh has done ...... other than his terrible record v. rivals. I don't think he's in Mack Brown's mold as an organizer, lacks Brown's experience and success at the CFB level and Brown turns 70 this year, JH just turned 57. Mack has more years at football and way more success than Harbaugh.

My only hope is that Jim has recognized his weaknesses what ever those are and will turn out to be the Captain Comeback he was before whatever he is going through or went through is resolved. I just don't take much from the housecleaning he did - probably under duress and that never works out well. It could turn out to be a disaster because he is still who he is and whatever issues he was dealing with are still present and will continue to afflict the team like it clearly did in the last three years, maybe even before that. The points Talent raises are proof of the later.

[Tom W]

What better example of the difficulties of "coaching searches" is there than the ohio experiences in the last two decades? Heck, even the guy that they had fill in for a year probably would have had them in no worse position than they are now if he had stayed.

[Tom W]

Harbaugh? I don't know, man.

Ah, but you do know. We all know. We all looked the other way and didn't notice that Jimmy was damaged goods when the 49ers let him go. Then instead of letting him run his show (like Bo was able to), the administration neutered him. The "University of Michigan" brand is global and quite self sufficient.

The Harbaugh experience isn't going to get any better and it's not going to end very well.

[lineygoblue]

You know the ship is sinking when Harbaugh's best move has been to raid his brother's team's coaching ranks. How many former Raven coaches do we have now? 3-4? Its almost as though John stepped up and said, "Here, let me help you with this"...

I hope the new guys do well, but I have no confidence that they will. I mean, we have a DC who's never been a DC.

Best we can hope for is that Harbaugh is released at the end of '21.

[iam416]

Heck, even the guy that they had fill in for a year probably would have had them in no worse position than they are now if he had stayed.

Heh. Fickell was the good solider in 2011, but he wasn't ready. And there's no way on earth he's able to match what UFM did from 2012 to Ryan Day. He might have had Ohio State at a Tressel-ish level. MIGHT. But, I really think he needed those years under UFM to really learn what it takes to be a HC.

But to the point at hand, as of this second, I might actually take Fickell over HARBAUGH!!! and that's almost inconceivable to me.

[Jeff Buchanan]

But to the point at hand, as of this second, I might actually take Fickell over HARBAUGH!!! and that's almost inconceivable to me.

I think that's a decent take. We don't know for sure but there is a consensus viewpoint that Harbaugh was, first of all and for all intent and purpose, fired as the HC of the '9'ers. It's now being said, in hindsight, of course, that he wasn't a great coach to begin with ("damaged goods"). After what was termed a mutally agreed upon parting of ways betwen JH and SF and the rumors started that Hackett was going to hire him at M, I started reading all the back-stories on his time and SF. Fans liked him but didn't love him. The front office hated him. As SF started to tank, players were in two camps, they supported him or wanted him gone or they wanted to be traded. Not everything was copasetic in River City (Music man and I know a lot of you have never heard of that Broadway show and later hit movie.)

OTH, M fans, and I was among them, were ecstatic when he got hired. I did not see him as damaged goods but, as Tom suggests, maybe I should have known. Second, something is off with his mental health. It's difficult for any of us to know about this and the details. But when there is a lot of on-going talk of it, rumors of discord and his clearly quirky behavior that has been a trademark of his since Stanford, it's hard to dismiss that this whatever it is affected him and the Michigan football team.

So, yeah, Fickell >>> Harbaugh for now.

[iam416]

Well, I know I've went back and looked at HARBAUGH!!!!'s career and concluded he wasn't quite the hire people probably thought he was. YMMV -- and many, including, e.g., Hannibal, steadfastly maintain that his track record is as good as it looks. And, it's always a little harder to say things are as great as your record -- because at the end of the day, your record is what matters.

I think his Stanford record is pretty stellar. You can see that he knows how to build a team from the ashes. What Stanford probably didn't tell us is whether he can take that program to elite -- and that is, fundamentally, a recruiting question -- and it's one I've always had about him. His Niner track record is a little murkier. His best teams were built defense first and their defense was really good. And all of that happened before he arrived. He caught ligtning in a bottle for a short stretch of games w/ Kap, but otherwise his QB play wasn't great -- they were a really good running team.

So, I think, in hindsight, what is clear is that he was the Quarterback Whisperer with Andrew Luck and Andrew Luck only and he was never a proven elite recruiter. There are other things that are clear, but those two points predominanlty explain, IMO, why his teams have failed to win the B10.

The player development issues and player retention issues are more suprising and perhaps get to exactly the point you made re "wearing out his welcome" and so forth.

I think the thing I'm most surprised about is that his best team, by far and away, was one Hoke built. Going into Year 7, he still hasn't built a roster and team that is anywhere near as good as the 2016 team that Hoke essentiall built. I know M fans are all about the great counterfactual -- "what if M beat OSU in 2016?" -- but, to me, the other end is "what if Hoke hadn't recruited like a mad man and HARBAUGH!!!! inherited garbage (like Hoke did)?"

[Hannibal]

Recruiting hasn't been the problem, for the most part. The fact that he can still pull in a Top 10-15 class with the program in its current state is pretty incredible. The '17 class was stellar and he pissed it away, big time. The '18 class was terrible but the '19 and '20 classes were adequate.

[Jeff Buchanan]

I think the recruiting issues for Harbaugh have been positional: QB and DL. You can still have a top 10 class but in the current game, those two position groups are critical.

The point about Harbaugh's best team being built by Hoke is a precise counterpoint to how M's defense tanked with Brown who we know had an ineffective approach to recruiting M's DL.

The point about Andrew Luck being the only great QB Harbaugh might have had a hand in with not a single impact QB on any M team since his hiring is really condemnatory and explains a lot of M's offensive struggles.

So, you put those two circumstances together and why M sucks is pretty much answered.

[iam416]

Recruiting hasn't been the problem, for the most part. The fact that he can still pull in a Top 10-15 class with the program in its current state is pretty incredible. The '17 class was stellar and he pissed it away, big time. The '18 class was terrible but the '19 and '20 classes were adequate.

It's not a problem if he wants to finish 2nd in the B10 East. He wasn't hire for pretty good. He was hired to be elite. He was never elite at Stanford (Oregon was elite, or rather, closer to it than Stanford). He's never been elite at M (with his closest team being 2016.).

[Hannibal]

There's enough scatter in the recruiting and enough randomness in individual game performance that finishing second in the B1G recruiting most years should net you a championship every now and then. Auburn occasionally beats Alabama and OSU has managed to lose to MSU, Purdue, Penn State, and Iowa since Urban showed up. Michigan is the only program in the country that never pulls off even minor upsets. Shitty coaching is the problem.