Why our defense is awful

After achieving my life-long goal of getting linked to by Dr. Saturday, I did a little updating this morning of the first in the acclaimed "The Decimated Defense" posts.

This mgoboard (mysteriously  bumped to a diary) post is so loyal MGoBlog readers can get all the new goodies without re-reading the thing. The first noticeable difference: a Defensive Depth Chart, which looks like this:

SLB	MLB	WLB	OLB
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 red shirt soph who plays exactly like that

LCB	SS	FS	RCB
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 freshman who was a running back until a few weeks ago		True freshman recovering from knee surgery who can't be that great if he hasn't seen the field	Red shirt freshman with clear talent deficiency to be serviceable

( Where = Walk-on)

There's also a part at the end that uses the 2008 linebacker and DB disasters as a microcosm of the greater problem, which reads as follows:
 

The 2008 linebacker and DB hauls are a perfect microcosm of Michigan's bigger problems.

Linebacker: At a position that had zero depth left over from previous classes, we brought in four 4-star players: Marcus Witherspoon, Taylor Hill, J.B. Fitzgerald, and Kenny Demens.

Of those, Witherspoon and Hill were lost immediately to attrition. One (Fitzgerald) is on track to be a long-term contributor. One (Demens) seems to be a bust. In this case, Michigan fulfilled its recruitment needs, but was hit by double the expected attrition. Result: one serviceable player when we needed at least two.

Defensive back: At a position that had zero depth left over from pervious classes, we brought in two 4-stars (Brandon Smith and Boubacar Cissoko) and one flier (J.T. Floyd). As with Mouton, Smith was immediately deemed a linebacker, and this was a known likelihood during the recruitment period, so really we brought in just a 4-star and a flier. The 4-star looked to be a bit behind track for his rating, until he got himself kicked off the team. The flier, as was the expected result, was not useful. Result: zero serviceable players when we needed at least two or three.

Linebacker is a clear-cut case of decimation due to attrition. Defensive back is a clear-cut case of decimation due to under-recruiting. Both of these factors have ravaged each class from 2005 to 2008. Along the way, there were some serviceable players picked up, but we are still generally two serviceable players short of the Michigan norm at several linebacker positions and all four defesnive backfield positions, i.e. we are at least 12 good, useful, on-the-roster players away from a normal Michigan defense. That is HUGE!!!

I also updated the charts a bit to reflect the Purdue depth chart changes. That is all.

[Editor's note: holy hell, man. This is like a PhD thesis.]

It hits you like a thousand knives stabbing you all over your body. You can't breathe. You can't think. At least, not about anything but the pain.

I'm searching for a metaphor.

Amidst the phantom flags and the Angry Michigan Hating Bounces and the dropping of babies on 3rd down on Saturday you could not possibly have missed a notable lack of competency in the 11 guys tasked with making sure the other guys score less than we do, otherwise referred to as "Michigan's Defense."

This is Part II of the afore-bumped diary "The Decimated Defense," a look at what has happened to turn Michigan's once vaunted defense into..

I don't have a metaphor...

Something that has a lot of really shiny beautiful parts, that ostensibly looks like something grand and wonderful, but like with some major defect or hole in it, from which pours in death and destruction...

In the wake of, well, that, I'm sure that you, as I, need to understand what happened to Michigan's defense, how we got here, will it get better, and can it be avoided again?

In the first of this series, I went through Michigan's last five classes to see if we could find where and what went wrong in defensive recruiting to lead us to a day when Jordan Kovacs was all that stood between the program and the bottom of the sea. We looked at the cheap rivets, the lack of safety training, and missing life boats, while Brian UFR'ed a really big iceburg.

It was long, and mostly stuff you already knew, and at one point you had to fix yourself a sandwich, but at the end we identified two factors that were very likely contributors:

1. Small classes
2. High attrition

Today we put that in context. I compared the current rosters to the recruited rosters of Michigan, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Penn State, Michigan State and Alabama, to see how each of these teams were built, and what was lost along the way, in order to understand why should so many other luxury liners and loveable tugboats and whatnot stay dry as we face a watery grave?

(Excel spreadsheet lives here.)

Recruiting: Quantity and Quality

Rose: The fall alone would kill you.

Jack: It would hurt. I'm not saying it wouldn't. Tell you the truth, I'm a lot more concerned about that water being so cold.

Here's how Michigan stacked up in pure defensive recruiting from 2005 through 2009 (Rivals ratings used):
 

This counts every recruit that came in ready to play defense, except athletes who played their entire careers on offense. It also includes offensive recruits later moved to defense. It excludes walk-ons.

Many nuggets here. Let us bullet:

• Notre Dame fans who blame recruiting for some of their woes have a beef. Their classes have been highly ranked, but even smaller than paltry Michigan's!
• Bama LOL
• Michigan and Penn State recruited pretty similarly. The big difference was that PSU brought in 7 more 2-stars.
• Michigan and Ohio State both recruited 20 players of 3-star caliber, and 3 blue chips, but OSU had 9 more 4-star players during that time.
• Michigan State clearly isn't in the same recruiting league as these others. They're basically averaging one lower star per recruit
• ...but out of a respectable class size.
• Even so, Alabama had more 3-star defensive recruits over this time than Michigan State.

Michigan's closest recruiting analogue here is Penn State, with the high-end (4-5 star) recruiting separated by one more 5-star guy for us. You can call Notre Dame basically a Michigan-light. If anything, the Fighting Irish have been even pickier about talent than U-M, OSU and PSU, except they haven't been as successful at reeling in the big fish as any of the major schools profiled.

For these schools, the distribution seems weighted slightly toward the top, but their bell curves are only slightly ahead of OSU and Bama. However, when placed beside each other, it's easy to see how large amounts of recruits can generate a much more sizeable talent pool from which to draw starters.

So recruiting tells a story, but certainly not the story. Certainly, Alabama and Ohio State recruited the most 4- and 5-star players, and subsequently have great defenses.

Michigan and Penn State should, just going by recruiting, have about the same level of defense, with maybe one more NFL-bound player in Ann Arbor, and maybe a bunch of 2-star guys backing up at Penn State instead of Michigan's walk-ons. Or it would be, if attrition was constant. We will see in the next section that it isn't. But you knew the problem wasn't just recruiting, anyway, since you know that Penn State's defense is legitimately good, and Michigan went into this season steering a pre-WWI luxury liner.

First, though, while we're on pure recruiting, let's look real quick and see if it's actually the age of the recruits that matter. Since they should be theoretically the heart of a great defense, and since the distribution among all schools except Michigan State was fairly equal when it came to 4- versus 5- stars, let's just look at those two groups, and when they came in for each school (MSU left out to spare them the indignation of looking like Antarctica):
 

[At this point I would ask everyone else to pause for a moment while we give Irish, who has been waiting patiently all this time, an opportunity to assign righteous blame on Ty Willingham. HE did this, precious!]

Okay, so other than an '05-'06 "Domer LOL," did we get anything out of this?

Penn State's great defense has a lot of high-rated juniors and seniors on it -- more than any other school. Michigan was kind of even, but actually should have had more upperclassmen than Bama or Notre Dame. Ohio State has been strong all the way through. Alabama is going to be really really good in a few years.

There's nothing here to suggest Michigan should be really bad. Not yet.

Moving on.
 

The Other Shoe, of Which Its Current Gravity Situation You Were Well Aware

Rose : Don't you understand? The water is freezing and there aren't enough boats. Not enough by half. Half the people on this ship are going to die.

Cal: Not the better half.

Cal, if you make it off that ship, and if that whole heir-to-a-robber-baron thing doesn't work out for you, you might make a fine SEC recruiting coordinator.

What I'm talking about is Alabama's over-signing strategy, which has been covered many times on this blog. In short, the Crimson Tide under Saban have recruited more guys than they have scholarships for, expecting enough will find reason to get themselves expelled or booted off the team before the count becomes official. The ultimate effect is that Saban has a strong incentive not to keep troubled players, particularly less talented troubled players, in school.

I bring it up now because:
 

Bullets?

Bullets.

• Michigan has had higher attrition from 2005 to 2009 than Alabama.
• Let's rephrase: Michigan has had higher attrition than a team that has been TRYING TO SHED PLAYERS.
• If Ohio State is pulling a 'Bama, there is zero evidence for it here. They have a reasonable number of recruits, and very low attrition.
• Penn State, as I mentioned before, is a much older team, and therefore has had a lot more time to lose guys to graduation and leaving early for the NFL and whatnot. In that light, their retention rate is pretty darn good.
• Michigan State and OSU ended up with about the same number of recruits on their respective rosters, while Bama was just a bit higher.
• Notre Dame's team is much, much younger, hence the high retention rate.
• Attrition has generally been higher for the teams with coaching changes in the last few years.
• Michigan's 28 scholarship athletes on defense may work on your pre-2005 EA Sports video game (which had a 55-player limit) but is way, way below the competition.
• 58.33 percent, as it turns out, is in fact quite putrid.

[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!]