UM Football Recruiting - by WM Wolverine

[Niffla]

While I agree that Gary was better than his numbers -- I also agree that he ended his Michigan career largely an under performer. To say the least. He was billed as a one man wrecking crew. An unstoppable force and generational type of talent. He didn't come close to ever meeting those expectations. Granted those were some pretty lofty expectations to live up to. He reminds of me a bit of Deshawn Hand in a way. Hand never met the exceedingly high expectations that were expected of him at Alabama, although he was solid. Hand by the way from all accounts had a very good rookie season in the NFL.

Gary has the talent. I would not at all be surprised to see him become a force in the National Football League. But at Michigan his career came and went as a major disappointment.

[hack]

Yeah, exactly. For all that, you'd think there would have been at least one transcendent moment in his junior year in which he just dominated for a stretch.

Factor in the shoulder injury, to be fair. He's had it almost the whole time, right?

[WM Wolverine]

Unsure how much his shoulder affected his play, but he had it both his sophomore and junior seasons.

[Da Geezer]

Gary is still projected as a top-10 NFL pick in the next draft. If he doesn't produce there, it would be fair to say he is a bust. If he becomes a star, then the blame for his underperformance falls directly on the UM coaching staff, particularly on Brown and Matteson. It is just hard for me to understand why someone without Gary's skill set (Winovich) can outperform Gary so consistently on game day.

[WingsFan]

[Detroit Dan]

I agree that there have too many transfers out of the program. It's good to give everybody an equal shot regardless of reputation, but it would also be good to go the extra mile to keep the hard-won high-level recruits. Admittedly, I know nothing about the circumstances of any of the transfers.

The defense was really quite good again this year other than the one game where the wheels fell off. No way do you right off a coach or a player on the basis of one game. Michigan out-performed this year, and then a slew of negatives hit all at once, with the Dax Hill decommitment and Aubrey Solomon transfer providing peak BPONE.

Now we've got Florida and 8 months of recruiting and rumors to look forward to.

Ohio State should be playing Alabama, and we should be in the Rose Bowl. Better, the college football playoff should be expanded to 8 teams, with big conference champions getting automatic bids. Michigan would still probably be on the outside looking in, thouigh (after Alabama, Oklahoma, Clemson, Washington, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Georgia, and UCF).

By the way, the way Bush announced his not playing in the Peach Bowl and his entering the NFL draft was very well done. Football is a violent game, so you make to hay while the sun shines, so to speak.

Good to see Liney back!

[Detroit Dan]

I hope we get Crouch and more, but I won't be as excited as before, after seeing what can happen after a couple years. I was such a fool.

[Jeff Buchanan]

This is an interesting breakdown of M recruiting on offense since "after Bo." You have to spend some time with it to appreciate how robust the display created by the author is. I've seen it before but didn't spend anytime with it. In light of such questions as, "can Harbaugh recruit,? or how does M stack up in recruiting as a member of the blue-blood elites. Here's my take on some of these burning questions. I don't know if there will be one of these on defense - it will be interesting if there is one.

In the since Bo time period, Harbaugh is the best recruiter but Carr is not far behind. Moeller, Hoke behind GM but about equal, RR a distant last. Harbaugh can recruit compared to his M peers.

M is pretty far off the mark when it comes to two recruiting things nationally: Getting players drafted and having recruiting classes with a lot of 4* and 5* dudes. Harbaugh is not as good a recruiter as the elites M would like to favorably compare to.

These two things, to me anyway, demonstrate why M is typically an also ran. So, yes, recruiting matters and in a very big way..... and with that I will join Detroit Dan as a purveyor of obvious conclusions.

The comments section is also a good read in this piece but I limit my reads only to posters I recognize as having something useful to add to the discussion.

After winning the NC in 1997, Carr reeled in ....."the #1, #2, or #3 ranked player in the nation at 6 different positions: DE, RB, QB, WR, CB, and K. M got an additional top 10 ranked player at 3 more positions: ILB, TE, FB. So at 9 different positions, we got at least one of the top 10 ranked players in the country. In some of those positions like WR, CB, and DE, we got two top 10 players at the position.

Wow.

That was an Alabama / Saban-level class. (Which we used to help beat Alabama in the 2000 Orange Bowl.)

So, yeah, winning matters and that M had a chance to advance it's profile in 2018 by getting into the CFP and blew it probably cost them a player or three in 2019 and that stain is going to follow them around on the recruiting trail for the next couple of years.

Clearly, Harbaugh has to win the big games if he wants to advance M's recruiting prowess thereby advancing M's ability to compete with the elites that M is not competing with now. It's really pretty simple but there are other contributing factors. IMO, and as talent's eyes glaze over, M's football culture - as it is advanced by JH - has a negative impact on his ability to feast at the top of the HS food chain like Saban does, ufm did and Kirby Smart and Dabo are establishing that they can. I don't expect talent to either understand or acknowledge this fact of M recruiting life. Yes, winning matters but in M's case, winning is not the entire solution to M's incapacity to improve it's recruiting.

Frankly, I don't expect Harbaugh to change and become the king of the hill recruiter he needs to be in the modern CFB era to make it easier for Michigan to win the games it has tended to lose in the Harbaugh era. No M coach, including Bo, whom we all tend to compare eras to, has done that. Accordingly, M has had a less than stellar finish to just about every season I can remember - Hokes win over VaTech to close the 2012/13 season with an 11-2 record may have been the best finish in my memory (and that record turned out to be a fluke one aided by a bunch of luck). Obvioulsy '97 was no fluke - so those two years. That's pretty meager and, IMO, is reflective of where the M culture influences football priorities and outcomes. Whether that is a good or a bad thing is in the eye of the beholder.

It's a long standing thing though. You look at Bo's golden years from 1970 - 78 he'd go undefeated or close to it and then lose the Rose Bowl. The worst was in 1971 when he won the BIG and had a chance to finish undefeated and ranked #1, he lost to Stanford 13-12. In the period since 1990, M has 12 bowl wins in those nearly 30 years and it failed to make a bowl only 3X in that same period. M just doesn't finish and get over the top and hasn't in a long, long time. I don't know how to explain that record of also-running other than to assign some of it to how the University views the role of football and the student-athletes that play it in it's mission...... or maybe I'm just trying too hard to rationalize 1-14 among M football's other mediocrities.

https://mgoblog.com/content/jimmysta...-comps-offense

[froot loops]

Its a much different landscape than when Carr was coach much less Bo. The proliferation of bowls and television has been the great equalizer. Back in those days teams would actually recruit players specifically to keep them away from their rivals with no intention of really playing them.

[The Oracle]

Tulsa (Okla.) Booker T. Washington defensive coordinator Jonathan Brown played his college ball at Tennessee and was drafted by the Green Bay Packers in the third round of the 1998 NFL Draft so he obviously knows talent when he sees it. Brown sees a lot of it in Michigan signee and five-star safety
Daxton Hill
and couldn't say enough about Hill's physical abilities.


RANK
6.1
24
NATIONAL
1
STATE
1
POSITION
DAXTON
HILL
6'1" | 190 LBS | S
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
TULSA, OK
CLASS OF 2019

SIGNED LOI
12/19/2018
MICHIGAN

[Jeff Buchanan]

A little bit of Fred Jackson in Harbaugh's recap of the 2019 class with Zach Shaw from Michigan Insider. Good read though:

https://247sports.com/college/michigan/LongFormArticle/What-he-said-Jim-Harbaugh-discusses-Michigan-footballs-2019-signees-126751369/#126751369_1

[WM Wolverine]

Dax Hill is better than advertised, fluff article mostly...

I'll give my 2 cents on this class soon, in short it's good enough. Will always be reaches in a 27 member class.

[iam416]

Yep.

[Jeff Buchanan]

Attracting and building men of character at M instead of winning ......

Wait! Did I say that right?

[Jeff Buchanan]

........ and mirages but not a plethora of them.