The Athletic re-ranks the 2019 recruiting classes. #1:UGA / #2:OSU / #3:UM
Interesting article each season that retrospectively ranks the recruiting classes from 4 years ago. Article is paywalled, so I'll just include this blurb:
https://theathletic.com/4626268/2023/06/21/college-football-recruiting-class-2019-rerank/
3. Michigan
Adjusted average: 2.85
Class rank in 2019: 8th
Four-year record: 36-11
Attrition: 44%
Top signees: DB Daxton Hill, DL Mazi Smith, LB David Ojabo, DB DJ Turner, DL Mike Morris
Jim Harbaugh and his coaches found 13 starters and eight All-Big Ten players in this class, hitting on a remarkable number of NFL-caliber defenders who helped lead the run to back-to-back Big Ten championships and College Football Playoff appearances. Smith joined Hill in becoming a first-round draft pick this spring, while Ojabo and Turner were both second-round selections. Morris and defensive lineman Mike Danna also got drafted, and D-lineman Christopher Hinton is playing in the league as well.
The Wolverines’ offensive haul in 2019 included quarterback Cade McNamara, offensive linemen Trevor Keegan and Karsen Barnhart, wide receiver Cornelius Johnson and running back Zach Charbonnet, who became the best back in the Pac-12 after transferring to UCLA.
What that really does is demonstrate the effect playing on a winning team with good coaches has on your overall ranking ... which is why we shouldn't pay too much attention to high school rankings, which are going to be similarly weighted.
Hoping our coaches are able to see past the "rankings" to the actual talent and performance of high school athletes — even those playing on less successful teams, with less skilled coaches.
And the fact that predicting the future success of an athlete is really, really hard.
Michigan’s staff does a nice job of finding kids with potential that are good character kids. Combine that with the fact that if they identify an underrated kid early and go after them hard they have a high hit rate.
And being Michigan doesn’t hurt their cause. They seem to have a successful repeatable process.
The class was ranked 8th out of high school. They weren’t working with scrubs
I think they have vs the first couple years
I would say it shows solid scouting and development when your 4 year rank outperforms your original rank.
There is no denying this shows the impact on evaluating recruits, developing players and coaching them to fit the scheme and culture. This staff has done an incredible job in these areas. The ID'ing of players they know they can get and mold is Harbaughs biggest strength IMO. It has caused some angst here over the last few years. I have actually went from a huge star gazer to someone that only tries to become familiar with the players name so I know who is who while following recruiting. This staff knows what they want, goes after those kids and hits a high % into developing them greater then their high school rankings. Love to see it and if I am a 5* kid and see what they do with lesser rated guys I want some of that with the tools I have in the bag.
Yeah the biggest hurdle I see with the Michigan recruiting brand is that it takes a long-term developmental view to see the value in choosing Michigan (wise, IMO) but high school grads don't have life experience or fully developed frontal lobes (the discerning/decision making part) that would be required to make a smart long-term recruiting decision. It's kind of like how a lot of young people would probably take $20,000 today instead of $5,000 with a 40% return over five years.
So we have this excellent development track record. Great successes under our belt. So where do we win with recruits? If they're fresh out of high school, it's the academic/hard work focused kids who likely have wise parents guiding their decision-making. This means we lose the Chiles of the world, likely due to the recruit prioritizing short-term benefits because the long-term benefits feel spongier and less tangible in the immediate. This is counteracted when you have a wise guardian sharing their life experience and the recruit's trust in that experience overrides the "bag."
The other type of recruits we do really well with? Grad transfers. They know the game - both on the field and off. They have the requisite experience to know that an immediate payday doesn't always mean kept promises. They have seen NIL scenarios play out. They're prepping for the NFL and already have a degree to fall back on - there's a reason our portal-in ranking was so high this year.
It's very much a long-term strategy and it's very very sound. I love this approach because it's going to be the difference between Sunbelt Billy winning 6 games with blue-chip recruits Texas A&M style and building a winning legacy. The only thing I'm concerned about is a succession plan so if/when Harbaugh makes his exit, we already have a plan in place that the administration, boards, department heads, and boosters have already built consensus around - avoiding the Lloyd Carr/Rich Rod situation completely.
Very much agree... We are not likely to hit the football operational acumen of Harbaugh in the next head coaching hire. I'm not talking X's and O's all coaches in the NCAA landscape can coach those. I'm talking about staff structure and the hiring of great assistants, I'm talking roster construction: ID'ing recruits with lesser ratings you can coach up and turn into NFL talents. The football operations side of this for Harbaugh is maybe as good or better than his coaching. This dude turns over assistants on the regular and you are like we are boned only to find nope Coach found us another coaching gem! McDonald to Minter perfect example. I love Harbaugh's football operational management style more than I like his coaching, more than I like his scheme and more than I like the way he deals with press etc. Its top notch level stuff and if you find those really good coaches they have a way they do things that just matters. That is James Joseph to a T....
Don't forget about Mikey Sainristil - been a key cog on both offense and defense since joining the team.
He is also a BIG part of the culture revamp which precipitated the back to back B1G championship runs.
Ironic that he might be our most valuable and was left off the list. I wonder sometimes if he didn't play last year, how close the Game may have been and yet he didn't even garner all Big Ten mention for next season.
Does Mike shake the "converted wide receiver "(not just a shooter) label this year? By the time of the game I think it should have been ditched.
My hope is a combo of this type of development with top notch recruiting year in and year out. Beating Bama, Georgia, and OSU for high end recruits is never going to be a bad thing. Plenty of room for diamond in the rough players in every recruiting cycle. I think we are seeing that now and I cant wait to see what they do with top classes.
This is how we go from Top Tier Big Ten team to top national team IMO. Still develop those diamond in roughs and surrond them with key high end recruits every cycle. 2024 is shaping up just like that! Exciting times!
Yup, my view is that the best recruiting classes have a handful of top-notch blue chippers alongside a complement of high-floor glue guys and high upside lottery tickets.
That is the model Ohio State used to build the program into a top 4 team. They have started to get away over the last 5-6 years chasing every 5 star skill position player and letting go of cohesion and development.
Definitely plenty of room for both with Michigan using NIL to expand beyond 85 “scholarship” players.
There's a mix of guys there, some of whom were indeed underrated as recruits (DJ Turner in particular). However, by far the biggest factor is that Michigan has provided a stable and positive environment that has allowed players to more fully reach their potential than their peers at other schools.
I don't think DJ was an underrated recruit. His ranking matched his profile for a CB at his height, size, and skills at the time. However, after being in the system and allowing the Herbertization to occur, his speed improved, his tackling got a bit better, and his coverage definitely improved.
I disagree. Turner and those around him have said he's always been fast, he was just injured when he went to camps. His 247 profile has him at a 4.6 in high school. Going from that to 4.28 can't be solely attributed to development.
He also had an impressive offer sheet IIRC but the 3* mafia said they were all fake offers.
I'd re-rank OSU below Michigan, but that's me.
I was wondering about the attrition rate number. From the article:
The attrition rate listed counts all signees who left school due to transfer, grad transfer, dismissal, ineligibility or injury. Players are graded by their contribution to the program regardless of whether they transferred. The impact of the portal era is clearly creeping into these rankings: Among this year’s top 25, the average class attrition rate was 49 percent.
UGA: 46%, OSU: 40%, (us: 44%), Alabama (#4): 61%.
Two straight years Michigan has finished #3 in this re-rank. This is our blurb from last year and the 2018 class re-rank:
3. Michigan
Adjusted average: 3.07
Class rank in 2018: 22nd
Four-year record: 33-13
Attrition: 27%Top signees: DE Aidan Hutchinson, OL Jalen Mayfield, RB Hassan Haskins, OL Ryan Hayes, K Jake Moody, WR Ronnie Bell, QB Shea Patterson, LB Cameron McGrone, CB Vincent Gray, TE Luke Schoonmaker
This was not a very celebrated class four years ago.
The Wolverines had recruited a top-five class in 2017 after another 10-win season. You might remember all the headlines Jim Harbaugh generated during that cycle or the party his program threw on signing day. There were no festivities for this one, not after missing on top-100 recruits Otis Reese, Nicholas Petit-Frere and Tyler Friday and finishing outside the top 20 nationally.
Matt Dudek, Michigan’s former director of recruiting, can laugh about that now. He understood why top-10 classes are the expectation as well as the perception that you can’t catch up to Ohio State with anything less. But he’s proud of what he, Sean Magee and Cooper Petagna achieved as a recruiting staff by staying focused on fit and “evaluating our butts off.”
“You want the best players you can get,” said Dudek, who’s now Mississippi State’s senior executive director of recruiting. “You don’t necessarily have to out-evaluate. You can out-recruit some people as well. But there’s plenty of great players outside of that top 100 that you can build a Playoff team.”
And they did just that, developing 10 signees into all-conference players and eight into starters on their 2021 squad that toppled the Buckeyes, won the Big Ten and was the No. 2 seed in the CFP. Hutchinson was the highest-rated signee, having moved up more than 100 spots in the composite rankings to No. 112 following his senior season and U.S. Army All-American Bowl performance. The No.2 overall pick did it all in 2021 as a Heisman runner-up, unanimous All-American and Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year. As an in-state take, he was not a tough evaluation.
But lots of members of this unheralded class, such as Haskins and Bell, came in as three-stars with something to prove, and they stayed and got better. Only six 2018 signees have left the program, and two were grad transfers.
“It was a close-knit group that came to campus together,” Dudek said. “They recruited each other. I think that’s a big thing. They loved ball and wanted to be great. I think that’s what made the big difference.”
Isn't Dudek the guy that royally fucked up our recruiting? Kind of kills the vibe for me...
Hmm. Maybe Harbaugh's doing something right.
How do they factor in transfers, in particular Charbonnet in this case? On one hand Michigan recruited him so it should count, but I'm really more interested in how the recruits contributed to Michigan's success.
I would say that this has everything to do with player development and coaching and nothing to do with rankings. Because it sounds like Michigan out performed their perceived rankings. It is a testament to the staff and them trusting their gut as opposed to the shiny stars by someone's name.
(puts up soapbox)
Don’t care - according to most of the folks that hang out on this site recruiting rankings don’t matter.
Unless Michigan gets a highly ranked player. Then all of a sudden it a big deal. 😀