Would Warde Manuel even make the right hire?

What OSU runs now, and ran under Meyer basically after a year and a half of his tenure is dissimilar to what Tressel ran there, although there is a little residue left over. I’m sure Tressel would have adapted, but this OSU is not Tressel’s OSU, and this machine is much better suited for today’s CFB. 
 

But yeah. In one form or another, OSU has been a machine since Tressel. Point still stands that Michigan needs a substantial rethink, not a next guy up on the staff to maintain the status quo, and we’ve already seen with RR what happens when you strip down all the parts, so the hire has to be a careful one. 

Yeah that’s not true, friend. The Tressel era Ohio State teams wouldn’t be within 20 points of the Urban era teams. His recruiting was subpar, he mostly stayed within the Big 10 geo footprint and observed a lot of conference niceties and stayed away from other schools commits. His offenses were more modern than Michigan (doesn’t take much) because he was using mobile quarterbacks, but they were absurdly behind the cutting edge and frequently very unsound. You can probably still find the piece Chris “Smartfootball” Brown wrote about the total meltdown Ohio State had against USC late in the Tressel era. 

The problems with Tressel era Ohio State were masked by the Big 10 being shit for most of his time there. Penn State under late era Joe Paterno was still unsure whether this whole shotgun thing was here to stay and Michigan consistently built defenses that couldn’t defend a mobile QB.  Every time Ohio State played a real national elite program, they got torched. 

Urban took over and just modernized everything. The antiquated offense that tried to mash up manball and spread was dumped for a real spread offense and the recruiting took the limiter off and they started recruiting like Bama. And when football started moving to the point that elite recruits didn’t really wanna play in Meyer’s preferred run first spread he used at Utah and Florida, he brought in Ryan Day to make his offense more attractive to an elite QB recruit. 

Bill C had a post a while back that showed Ohio State from Urban on has been operating as well as it has in the history of the school, and think about what that entails. It’s a fully operational Death Star. 

I don't know but I'm starting to question Harbaugh's talent as a football mind.  Even if Fleck has only had success in a low profile spot via WMU in the MAC.  Central was playing better than them for a few years and even Toledo as well. He catapulted WMU from non-relevant to a team the whole nation of college football knew about. Perhaps his trajectory was so good that it's hard to top in comparison to what he is doing now at Minnesota.  He's definitely come down to Earth some.  Conversely, year 6 for Harbaugh and Brown has been here almost as long, and the team looks beyond lost like they were just hired during the summer of '20.

What has Harbaugh done since he’s been here that’s been so note worthy that  Fleck could not come close to achieving? I don’t care if he has the football mind if he hires the right people that do.  

Meh, you just need a hype man who works his tail off on the trail and delegates. Harbaugh does neither of those things anymore.