general bloody-mindedness of the universe

As if we didn't have enough to cry about right now:

http://www.michigandaily.com/content/u-says-tate-forcier-not-enrolled-cl...

He's got until January 25 to enroll but has not done so yet. Does this mean he's on his way out, or is he slacking on picking his classes, or what?

It's the first round of Big Ten Elimination as we've reached the final two weeks of regular season Big Ten baseball. Michigan faces one of the three other teams tied for the Big Ten lead in the Northwestern Wildcats, a team with a solid pitching staff and a surprisingly decent offense that came together just in time for conference play. This is also a series for revenge as Northwestern was the team to knock Michigan out of the Big Ten Tournament in 2009. Vengeance must be had.

Quick look at the midweek game against Michigan State, as well as a preview of Northwestern after the jump:

Why was I so feared, and you so loved? What was it? I was no less honorable. I wanted to do good. What betrayed me? My mind? My heart? Why do I condemn myself so? I swear, on the lives of my children: Give me a chance to redeem myself, and I will sin, no more.

If you have followed this series, you are now familiar with the message: light but focused recruiting plus really bad attrition equaled a defense with some really great players and some suicidal kittens.

Here's a question: based on recruiting and retention from 2006 to the present, how good will Michigan's defense be this year?

This diary will look at the talent on Michigan's roster in 2010 versus that of 2009, plus that of two rivals in that time, to try to get an idea of what kind of team we will be looking at this coming season.

In the first, we met the family.

In the second, we saw that family destroyed.

Today, I bring you Part III.

You know, the one that's chronologically incompatible with the other two, with the substantially lower production values, that rehashes old characters and plotlines from the previous flicks in order to squeeze more cachet out of the franchise.

In the third (and final?) installment of the Decimated Defense Trilogy, I will look to the future, comparing Michigan's 2010 defensive roster and attrition numbers against those of last year, and also against 2009 and 2010 for two relevant rivals: Ohio State and Michigan State.

Still interested? [ED: YES YOU ARE.]

[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:

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

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

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!]