UM Football Recruiting - by WM Wolverine

[Hannibal]

Michigan will sell half tickets and still announce attendance as 100,001.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Season ticket holders received thier order forms Friday along with a letter announcing that there will be no individual ticket sales this season. I'm not certain but I think that season ticket seats take under 50% of capacity. That number could see a further reduction in holders that won't renew due to COVID fears. That strategy could allow for appropriate spacing.

[lineygoblue]

And social distancing in the student section? Forget it. You may as well tell them that all students may not drink beer for the next 4 years.

[lineygoblue]

Michigan received a verbal commitment from prospect Tristan Bounds a 3-star OL from Wallingford CT on Monday. Bounds, 6' 8" 285 was offered by Notre Dame, Virginia, VA Tech and Texas among others as well. He cited Coach Warriner as having a lot of influence on his decision to commit to the Wolverines.

Bounds' commitment gives Michigan 4 OL in the 2021 class. Bounds will likely attend the Ross School of Business when he arrives in Ann Arbor.

This isn't a huge commitment, but it does keep a flow of new people coming in for the OL.

He could be anywhere from the next Grant DeBenedictis, to the next Steve Hutchinson. Who knows ….

[*JD*]

It's hard to get excited about landing a guy ranked in the 600's but you never know.

[lineygoblue]

Yeah, I agree. I guess we can hope he's been an overlooked talent, although at 6' 8" it'd be hard to miss him.

He's got room to add weight, and he supposedly played in a tough league.

[Jeff Buchanan]

It's hard to get excited about landing a guy ranked in the 600's but you never know.

It's hard to get excited about M football ...... at all.

Let's look at the bright side. Harbaugh needs the 5th round to end in a tie so that he can sit on the stool in his corner and have the ref call a time out for him to get patched up and regain his composure after being knocked down multiple times in the first 4 rounds.

That might just allow him to win the match by a decision in 12 rounds or a knock-out in and of the remaining 7 rounds.

Cancel the 2020 season! Restart training and preparation for 2021 in the spring.

[Hannibal]

The guys sounds like a lottery ticket. OL recruiting h as been decent the past couple of classes so I guess it's OK that we're taking those guys. I'm a lot more concerned about WR and DT this year.

[WM Wolverine]

And corners and Donovan Edwards.

[iam416]

Donovan Edwards is pretty much out of options.

The OL dude feels like a total Warriner recruit. In 2015 he signed 3 really tall "under the radar" kids (500ish). 2 of them never saw the field and transferred. The other -- Branden Bowen -- ended up starting (at guard, lol -- he is 6'7"). That, to me, is Warriner recruiting.

[lineygoblue]

Its also Lloyd Carr 2005-07 recruiting as well. Lots of 'can't miss' commitments and signings, on players who totally struck out. Offers went to kids because Carr "liked" them, and because they were "nice kids".

Brett Gallimore was a 4-star OL out of Missouri that Carr "liked". He signed with Michigan, came to summer camp, worked out with the team in the fall for 2 weeks and quit football forever. Never played again. Jeremy Ciulla, Grant DeBenedictis were also total OL strikeouts from that same class. All were "can't miss" 4 star athletes, and none contributed to the program. Then there was his banner child, QB recruit Dave Cone. Cone was a clone of John Navarre, but was slower and less accurate. He took a 4 year scholarship from Michigan and never played a down. Lloyd Carr recruiting at its finest.

That kind of recruiting, as much as anything else, has led to the stagnation of Michigan football, and the surrender of competing for conference titles and championships.

There is no chance of a revolution any time soon. Manuel and Harbaugh are content with the way things are.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Lucid.

[AlabamAlum]

Euclid.

[WM Wolverine]

Followed recruiting pretty closely during the end of Lloyd's last few years, '03-'07... His recruiting fell off immensely around '03-'04.

M loaded up on 4-stars that I pegged as low ceiling types. Back then the recruiting services gave the benefit of the doubt to a M (or ND, Buckeye) offer and imo would be way better evaluated today. Lloyd's fall off (and RR doing far worse) was very predictable if you were in tune with recruiting. Lloyd just didn't have the talent, athletes, depth that Tressel did, this was more apparent with every season starting in about '05.

[Jeff Buchanan]

This is a link that is to a very long read but has some interesting hypotheses to offer. Early in the article, the author points out that M's on-field football success isn't that bad. Lots of supporting data makes this a credible position to take. He's looking for ways for "M to beat the market." By this he means that M isn't likely to secure a class with as many highly rated HS players as the osu's Alabamas, Clemsons, LSUs and UGAs but there may be ways to recruit HS players that are not 5 or 4 stars but can reliably turn out to be more productive. His analysis that backs up that view is decent...... IOW, it has a lot more depth to it than the tiresome "truth" about you can win by recruiting "diamonds in the rough."

Next he demonstrates how several currently accepted measures of predicting a CFB team's success - numbers of star HS recruits, for example - doesn't always have a high degree of correlation to actual team or individual success. It is working for this decade's historically top 5 winning programs, after that, not so much. Confounding factors play havoc. Scheduling is one of them.

He also gives his view that the NFL draft is not strongly correlated with backward looking team success. He gives several examples and a very detailed analysis to back this up. He's very clear that the analysis he provides leads to more questions than it does answers and concludes with this:

Jon Rowe says I need some conclusions. Well, I don’t have any, at least yet, except that I think the market has enough slippage or inefficiency to beat. But whether it can be beaten is another matter, in this (sorry) non-conclusion, conclusion. However, this is just part one. I think there may be something to learn from the recruiting results of Nebraska and Wisconsin. The gurus, routinely I believe, have Nebraska recruiting at a higher level. Yet, Wisconsin has been a far superior program. That’s my next stop.

Finally, he reports that he has "heard rumors" that M is building a data base that (using AI I would think) lists traits of HS players that succeed in terms of production at the college level. Such analytics exist in both pro-baseball and football and Harbaugh is likely familiar with them. The homogeneity of all HS players though is significantly less than that of all pro-prospects and concludes that its going to be hard to develop and use something like this as a reliable method to "beat the market."

https://mgoblog.com/content/market-i...ting#read-more