Defensive Recruiting

[Editor's note: I was working on a post similar to this today that examined the past five years of defensive recruiting with a particular focus on the secondary. This is broader but I may as well not reinvent such a well-put-together wheel. I will take this opportunity at the top of the post to rephrase something I stuck in a mailbag. Here are the members of the secondary in the recruiting classes that comprise this year's team:

2005: None. (Harrison, Sears, Richards all gone.)
2006: None. (Mouton, Brown moved to LB.)
2007: Warren, Woolfolk, Williams, Rogers. (Chambers gone.)
2008: JT Floyd (Smith moved to LB, Cissoko is gone.)

Excluding true freshmen, Michigan has five scholarship players for four starting spots, none of whom are seniors and one of whom is a positional vagabond who was a huge reach even at WR. Attrition has something to do with it, but poor recruiting—the 2006 class didn't have a single corner, and the 2007 class had two reaches and one Notre Dame defection—had much more. With Woolfolk's move Michigan has one scholarship safety on the roster outside of true freshmen. Not to go all ND-fan-talking-about-Ty here, but lord I don't know if anyone could dig themselves out from that.]

[OP note: Part II lives here].




How did it ever come to this?

DE NT DT
NFL All-World Guy Young Beast Solid Guy
True Freshman Blue Chip or Serviceable backup guy Old-guy bust who's kind of serviceable now

SLB MLB1 MLB2 WLB
Former Infinite Safety Disaster, now above-average tweener guy Young guy who's progressing but prone to massive young-guy mistakes True freshman wunderkind who is still a true freshman
Long-time judgment-impaired starter who projected to possible Butkus Watch List but instead regressed and lost job to a walk-on Nuclear missile equally likely to strike his own territory as his enemy's Kind of this 3-star redshirt soph who plays exactly like that

CB1 S1 S2 CB2
NFL-ready junior guy Current Infinite Safety Disaster, who is worse than the walk-on Legacy who is halfway decent and was our FS until a few weeks ago
Dust mite true freshmah who was a running back until a few weeks ago True freshman recovering from knee surgury who can't be that great if he hasn't seen the field Redshirt freshman with clear talent deficiency to be serviceable


(Where = Walk-on)

With Boubacar Cissoko's dismissal from the team, we now have a number that every Michigan fan might need to commit to memory:

4053762448_57b1c3dcf6_o Everybody got that?

Now, numbers without context are hard to understand. If it's a completion percentage, well, that's not horrible but it's not bad, right? If that's how many questions you got right on your Anthro-Bio mid-term, well, not so great.

The question we will try to answer in this Diary, is what does that number mean when it's the percentage of defensive recruits over the last five classes who are still on your team?

Really? 58.33 percent? How?

Defensive Recruits No Longer With the Team: 2005-2009

Name Class Pos Stars RR What happened?
Eugene Germany 2005 DE **** 6.0 Left team
James McKinney 2005 DT **** 5.9 Left team
Terrance Taylor 2005 DT **** 5.9 Graduated
Brandon Harrison 2005 CB **** 5.8 Graduated
Johnny Sears 2005 CB *** 5.6 Left team
Brandon Logan 2005 LB *** 5.6 Graduated
Chris Richards 2005 ATH *** 5.5 Left team
Carson Butler 2005 DE *** 5.5 Moved to TE, left for NFL
Chris McLaurin 2005 DE *** 5.5 Left team (health)
Jason Kates 2006 DT **** 5.8 Left team
Cobrani Mixon 2006 LB **** 5.8 Left team
Quintin Patilla 2006 LB *** 5.7 Left team
Quintin Woods 2006 DE *** 5.6 Left team
Austin Panter 2007 LB **** 5.8 Graduated
Artis Chambers 2007 S *** 5.6 Left team
Marell Evans 2007 LB ** 5.2 Left team
Boubacar Cissoko 2008 CB **** 6.0 Left team
Marcus Witherspoon 2008 LB **** 5.8 Did not qualify
Taylor Hill 2008 LB **** 5.8 Left team
Adrian Witty 2009 CB ** 5.3 Did not qualify (may return)

That seems really bad. Like really really bad.

Is it bad?

It's obviously no surprise that Michigan has faced a lot of attrition since RR came on board. Each case is it's own particular. But all told, it seems to me that we are seeing something here that is way out of whack. And I'm not sure it's RR's doing. And though that seems like a lot of attrition, I'm not sure that's the whole story.

I'm going to break down this list by class. Perhaps in the micro we can see what happened to the macro...

(or perhaps you are already poised to scroll to comments and write "tl;dr" -- if so, get a sandwich and meet the rest of us down at the very long sub-header)
 

Class of 2005

terrence_taylor_michigan_lb_feature
 

Name Class Pos Stars RR What happened? Here?
Eugene Germany 2005 DE **** 6.0 Left team no
James McKinney 2005 DT **** 5.9 Left team no
Terrance Taylor 2005 DT **** 5.9 Graduated no
Brandon Harrison 2005 CB **** 5.8 Graduated no
Johnny Sears 2005 CB *** 5.6 Left team no
Brandon Logan 2005 LB *** 5.6 Graduated no
Chris Richards 2005 ATH *** 5.5 Left team no
Carson Butler 2005 DE *** 5.5 Moved to TE, left for NFL no
Chris McLaurin 2005 DE *** 5.5 Left team (health) no

Nothing left. This isn't just age -- you'd expect at least a couple of 5th year seniors to stick around. This class was decimated early and often, leaving Terrible Taylor as the only major defensive contributor. Harrison, who would be very nice to have around today, burned his redshirt during Safety Armageddon. Logan was the only other graduate. For Sir Carson Butler's career at Michigan, consult the minstrels.

Moral of this story: losing the top two recruits on defensive line made things dicey. In the first attempt at refilling the cornerback cabinet, Carr picked up Harrison and a couple of fliers (Sears, Richards) who didn't work. [More after the jump!]