don't panic

Board lives here.

We have a lot to get to, with a brewing war on the horizon with USC (don’t panic), some major changes on the board at quarterback and cornerback, and the NCAA finally allowing on-campus visits and camps again after a pandemic’s worth of naught.

But first, we’ve got to talk about The D (NNTTD), for Michigan declared yesterday Detroit Day. This was the scene in Ann Arbor:

Not pictured: an unkindness of Ravens

For one day in Ann Arbor, all T’s were pronounced as D’s* all soft TH’s became Z’s, company names were given apostrophized possessives and pizzas were served square and bubbly. Coneys and looseburgers were piled onto the serving staff’s arms and washed down with pop, followed by Sanders on Stroh’s. Harbaugh shared his powerpoint Hall of Fame case for Lou Whitaker, traded gear for jars McClures from Eastern Market, and everyone went home with Pewabic tiles, most of which survived the potholed ride home on 94, which still nobody calls the Ford. I made an all-Motown team for the occasion. Also 30 area recruits for 2022-‘24 were on hand (free), which hand doubled as a map for a spirited, three-hour debate about which route everyone should have taken to get there. That list also turned out to be incomplete($). Rivals’ EJ Holland got reactions($), with Cass Tech OL Jackson Pruitt’s ⬆ the most interesting.

Whom they met along the way is best detailed by the 24/7 crew, who broke down who’s who on the remade recruiting staff on their latest podcast. Lorenz also broke down Michigan’s greatest positions of need which became a high-view state of the class and hosted a VIP chat($) for those looking for the gritty—it’s a few weeks old but has some good bits on Deone Walker and tight end recruiting. Steve is also keeping the visitors list as updated as he can.

The board is also shifting daily. This was expected—after a year and a half of no visits, few camps, and scattered football we knew the late-rising 2022s and all of the 2023s were going to be left unevaluated, both in terms of their football projections and their real interests in schools, until way deeper in the cycle than usual. We’re now starting to see all sorts of guys show up to camps and earn serious offers, and it’s only been a few days since they’ve been able to officially interact in person with these schools and gauge how serious they are.

⬆⬆⬇⬇⬅➡⬅➡BA

People liked the NCAA Football game-inspired arrows last time so I’m going to use them some more. Ups and downs mean trends based on where they were last writeup. Lock means commit or near to it. Peepers is we’re watching for something to happen soon. Right arrow is steady on, or no change despite news, or Connor Jones’s coach is giving quotes again. Left arrow is just there so I could reference a videogame code that’s twice as old as the players we’re talking about.

* [I once seriously confused my bud from from France when I told him to find us a restaurant in a specific New York neighborhood and he spent a half hour searching for somewhere called Liddliddle Lee.]

[Hit THE JUMP for the position-by-position breakdown]

Seth: Hi guys the pads are on and there's football news hype available how are we feeling are we fine I'm fine I'm doing fine love!!!

Brian: Nice meme /high five

Ace: MILTON HYPE ON 11 BABY

THEM THERE MOUNTAINS HAVE NO CHANCE

Seth: I've been taking the position that all quarterback hype this fall is now irrelevant.

Brian: Do we have something specific we are reacting to?

THEY MOVED DAXTON HILL TO CORNERBACK DO WE PANIC?

Ace: WelI… A bit.

BiSB: I mean, we always panic. It is the default position.

Seth: Sammy Faustin is getting Dudes of the Day honors. The latest is Gemon Green leads for the spot opposite Vincent Gray. My sense on the 2018 class is if they didn't play in 2018 or 2019 there had better be a good reason.

Brian: It's not great but honestly Dax Hill/Vincent Gray/Andre Seldon at CB and Hawkins/Faustin or Paige at S sounds much better than anything with Hill at S. If he can do it, it's clearly the thing to do.

Ace: I agree, though I’m worried it’s not the best use of his talent. It’s clearly a move made because they’re worried about corner/nickel. I’d prefer to see Hill roaming the field than being in predictable places.

BiSB: True, but in terms of panic moves, it isn't like moving a Kovacs type to corner. Hill seems to have the physical chops to be a pretty good corner, and Michigan needs corners.

Brian: Me too but needs must since they had a couple of DB classes that are looking pretty rickety I don't see an alternative.  I guess my panic level about the secondary is an 8 and my panic level about this specific move is a 0 because it moves secondary panic level to 6.

Ace: That’s fair. It more confirms the previous panic than adds to it.

Seth: FWIW Brown's explanation was 50% "versatility" and 50% "if COVID hits." The thing it says to me—and the Green news backs this up—is that DJ Turner II isn't popping yet, and that was the first best option.

Brian: Yeah I was hoping that one of the second year corners would blow up.

Ace: It’s a position where that’s a reasonable expectation if you brought in a good class.

BiSB: There is something to be said for "you need one or two more cross-trained guys at every spot this season than most."

[After THE JUMP: our kingdom for Fullbacks]

So I was planning on putting up a post at the usual time and then I fell down the rabbit hole at the NCAA's new APR data-dump site, which happens to be a joint project with Michigan itself. After pounding at their online interface for a while, screaming "why?" the whole time, I just downloaded the whole dataset and set about doing stuff in Open Office's Excel clone.

First, a clear explanation of how the numbers are calculated from the site's Codebook:

A team’s APR cohort for a given year is composed of student-athletes who receive financial aid based on athletic ability; if a team does not offer athletics aid, then the cohort consists of  those student-athletes who are listed on the varsity roster on the first day of competition.  Each student-athlete in the APR cohort has the ability to earn two points for each regular academic term of full-time enrollment.   One point is awarded if the student-athlete is academically eligible to compete in the following regular academic term.   The other point is awarded if the student-athlete is retained by the institution (i.e., returns to school as a full-time student) in the next regular academic term.   Student-athletes who graduate are given both the eligibility and retention points for the term.  Squads can also earn a delayed graduation point if a student-athlete who left the institution without graduating returns to the institution and graduates.

At the start of each academic year, each Division I team's APR is calculated by adding all points earned by student-athletes in the team's cohorts in each of the previous four years, dividing that total by the number of possible points the student-athletes could have earned and multiplying by 1,000.  Thus, an APR of 950 means that the student-athletes in the cohort earned 95 percent of the eligibility and retention points that they could have earned. 

This answers a few questions I had before: walk-ons don't count, but walk-ons who pick up scholarships do. They even include a handy football example:

Example of APR Calculation for a Men’s Football Team (n=85 at start of year)

Semester 1 (Fall) Points Earned

75 student-athletes eligible and retained to next term (or graduate in that term)
75*(2 of 2) = 150 of 150
3 student-athletes are retained to next term but are academically  ineligible
3*(1 of 2) = 3 of 6
5 student-athletes leave the university while academically eligible
5*(1 of 2) = 5 of 10
2 student-athletes leave the university while academically  ineligible
2*(0 of 2) = 0 of 4

Semester Total 158 of 170 (929 APR)

There are also separate rates for eligibility and retention provided as part of the data set that only consider the appropriate halves of the equation. For example, the retention rate above is 78/85 or 918.

Also: it is super hard to get serious penalties. The 925 Mendoza line everyone has been throwing around is indeed the cutoff above which a player leaving ineligible does not hurt you, but falling below that line does not immediately bring penalties with it. It only hurts you if 1) you are below 925 and 2) you have a player leave ineligible. The punishment is an inability to use that player's scholarship the next year. You have to get below 900 before the NCAA comes in with a stick looking for trouble. Only three schools (Temple, San Jose State, and UAB) fell below that line.

Nevermind The Panic

A drumroll for Michigan's exact numbers:

A couple oddities are immediately apparent:

• Michigan's 2008 APR is higher than either of their individual breakout scores, which should be mathematically impossible. This also happens in 2006.
• Squad sizes somehow range from 85—the theoretical maximum—to 99. Early departures from mid-year graduates and transfers could bring the numbers up somewhat if the second semester has a bunch of new faces, be they freshmen or walk-ons, but those numbers seem abnormally high.
• Lloyd Carr's last year: guh. Remember that picture where Mike Hart is staring down five Buckeyes? "889" is that in numerical form.

Also, the NCAA official numbers confirm my back-of-envelope doodling: despite the flood of transfers over the last few years, Michigan is nowhere near even the "contemporaneous penalties" cutoff line. It would take a 2009 APR of 863 or worse to get into trouble. This is actually four points more buffer than this site's previous estimate.

863 is spectacularly low. Only four teams have managed that over the past three years: SJSU, UAB, Temple, and Florida State(!). Those are three mid-major schools who specialize in the marginally eligible and a school that endured a massive institutional cheating scandal. Michigan is not in either situation. We can officially stop worrying about this. Not that you would have been worrying about it without my prompting.