Det News Article "With 'Relentless Recruiting', AL, GA Build All-Star Teams"

You know that has been happening for a long time, right? 

The solution is a G-League for football.  Let that be the development league and CFB can be a more parity driven league.  Many Michigan fans won't like it because the lack of parity permits Michigan to be better positioned to attract talent than, say, MSU.

Naive.......is no way to go through life.

Mark Emmert says ‘HI!’.  He’s the man for the job…

Agree with much of this but do you really think Mel Tucker is an elite recruiter?

The dynamics have changed with NIL..denying that is the equivalent of head covered in sand. I mean, the No. 1 recruit in the country flipped from Florida State to a Jackson State...That should have sent shockwaves through CFB bec there is NO way that happens pre-NIL. And now Charlie Batch (who? to most in the world of CFB) is trying to buy top tiered talent for Eastern Michigan...and after Travis Hunter...you can't even think he's completely crazy. 

Michigan has never been on probation or even meaningfully investigated for recruiting violations in football.  Some schools, mostly southern schools, but some others, have incurred probation multiple times over decades.  I don't believe that the refrain "it's always been this way" applies to some schools, and it's used as a smoke-screen by moral bottom feeders. Some programs have historically played by the rules, and when Jimbo Fisher uses that excuse, it's just to excuse his choice to pursue an illegitimate path in the past. To me, what's happened is an increasing lack of enforcement by the NCAA, which has led to an unprecedented level of recruiting brazenness from a handful of schools, to their great successes on the field.  

I knew the NCAA was utterly dead as an enforcement body when Tressel essentially got away with lying in document filings. Both the NCAA and OSU seemed poised to do almost nothing, and Gordon Gee's famous "(aw shucks) I just hope the coach doesn't fire me", was one of the most vacuous moments of leadership I've ever seen, and was a seminal moment in my view of the NCAA's degeneration. A head coach filed documents that knowingly lied to his regulatory body.  That is something that lands people in other industries in jail.

You don't just step in to the GA football program, not really a historical elite, and suddenly pick any player you want like you're in a candy shop, without something untoward going on.  But not a peep of interest from the NCAA. Now the college football landscape looks something like a corrupt banana republic, with all the wealth concentrated in a few corrupt hands, morsels for everyone else, and a disinterest and apathy from the public. They've essentially ruined a very unique product with no real salvation in sight, and not even any talk of a need to resurrect it.  At this point, I'd be happy to see an NFL minor league emerge for the many, many kids who aren't interested in playing student.  

Educated guess on why Michigan is not in the cutting edge of NIL programs...

1.  Just as a matter of culture, the University and Athletic Dept. have been behind the curve for a long time, slow to react to a series of changes in CFB since 2000, and really is reactive and not proactive to every change that develops in the CFB landscape.  And the NIL is a huge change.  For those who thought, 'yeah, NIL!  Michigan has a money canon!'  ya gotta remember that having a money canon and using it in every way theoretically imaginable are different things.  

2.  There, are in fact, issues with doing it in a legal way.  NCAA standards prohibit turning NIL into 'pay for play.' 

The way this thing is supposed to work is that college athletes are freed from the former rules that barred them from profiting from name and likeness.  The way it is/will really work at the 'win at all costs' places is just as an amped-up and open bagman system.  Boosters will provide $$$, the football team will tell them which top 100 players to go after, and those recruits/players will be offered contracts and dollars that wildly overpay for the true market value of their image and likeness. 

This is pay-to-play, full stop.  Many will say 'so what? players should get a slice of the billion dollar pie.'  Perhaps.  But running it that way is, in fact, a clear violation of NCAA standards on NILs.  And Michigan (University and AD) is not going to be among the very first to jump in the pool on such obvious NCAA rule violations.

TL;DR--The places that long ago decided that they really embrace a 'win at all costs' approach are obviously going to be the more aggressive first movers in NILs, to the point of blatantly and obviously violationing NCAA standards (which the NCAA does not have the will or capacity to enforce).  As CFB evolved post-2000, Michigan really has consistently had a 'win at many/most, but not all, costs' culture.  So no way Michigan was going to be among the first to adopt the Texas A&M model... 

Yup. 
 

This is what people mean when they say “Michigan Arrogance”. Michigan admin and the old heads would rather stick to some antiquated view of how college sports should be, rather than what it has become. 
 

Even if Michigan admin will not change transfer rules, it would be ridiculous for them not to agree to NIL support. 

The question I have is whether Warde Manuel is a good enough administrator and big enough personality to bring Michigan athletics into this new world.  Especially if the school administration fights against it.  I mean, he Jim MF'in Harbaugh isn't enough pull to backstop Manuel in this effort, no coach will ever be able to bring Michigan into modern times.  If Manuel, backed by Harbaugh and Juwan F'in Howard, can't do this, competitive football and basketball in Ann Arbor has just reached its apex and will never get there again.

And honestly, I don't know that Manuel is up to the task.  I hope I'm wrong.

I said to my wife during the Georgia game, "This sucks..." no, what I stated was that if in the next 2-3 years Michigan does not fully embrace the NIL rules (and probably sooner) then this is it, this is as good as it gets. The talent difference on the field was so huge that perhaps if Michigan had come up with some better schemes (newer stuff) they might have kept it closer, but I doubt it.

So, you don't think just being HC at the University of Michigan is big enough a job? It took damn near everything he had ('win or die trying') to get a Conference Championship and Beat OSU...Don't think adding GM to his responsibilities is going to work. 

It’s about as close to insurmountable as it gets, to say it’s not insurmountable is a lazy take. You cannot compare playoff games to mid-season conference games…when you give a roster with that much talent (Bama, UGA) 1 month to prepare when national champ stakes are on the line (meaning no one sits out or doesn’t play inspired), your chances of winning as a top 15 talented team against a top 3 talented team go way down. You aren’t going to catch those teams sleeping or uninspired like Bama may have been caught a few times this year (I question if they basically sandbagged much of the season to prep for Georgia? Sure did seem like by the way they comparatively played in those games, much like our situation against OSU in 2018) 

You can’t compare Alabama’s near losses to the way they play and prepare in the playoffs, you just can’t. Would you compare our 7 point victory over Rutgers to our focus the last 3 B1G games of the year on our B1G champ run? 
 

The thing is, if Michigan does make the playoffs again, their only hope to get to the championship game is to play a team like Cincy or Notre Dame, and just hope when they get to the champ game that Alabama/Georgia wasted all their extra practice time prepping for their semi-final game and had to scramble to prep for Michigan in the final game. 
 

The UGA game showed we need to get with the program in recruiting/NIL or we are destined to be second tier. That means we also won’t ever be able to hire the competitors as coaches (like Harbaugh), because all those best and most motivated guys will want to coach at the schools that actually try to win it all on a yearly basis, or they will go to the NFL where the playing field is even and rules are enforced to keep it that way. 

Recruiting has always been about probability.

you can have all the talent in the world and still get upset, but how often does that actually happen?

All one has to do is look at playoff appearance and which schools have dominated that. Sure a few schools have broken through and made appearances over the years, and they have been smoked in the semi finals, just like Michigan

The closest margin of victory for the interlopers was 17 points by Washington.

Talent matters. OSU has the talent to get into the playoffs every season. Whether Day can beat the other coaches is another question.

Let's assume they came up with a pay scale for players.  For the sake of argument, let's say it was $3K a month.  Don't you think the Alabamas and Georgias would then start offering -- under the table -- sweeteners to that $3K to get the top talent to come to them?  It would be the old process reborn, just with the veneer of a "pay the players."

I truly don't like being this cynical.  But that's the reality of things.