Opposite approach-- the player who most out-performed his hype was probably David Harris. Anonymous unranked 3-star who became the best linebacker of the post-Bo era. You know, we never really had too many of those guys, did we? Most of the stars at Michigan were star recruits.
The bigger discrepancy is how many elite players are produced, compared to population. Texas has 2.5 the population of Michigan. So based on strict numbers you'd think it would produce 2.5 times the blue-chip football players.
But Texas, on average, produces about 5x the number of four-star recruits as Michigan, on every recruiting site. I agree that a huge part of this is the football culture in Texas, but in general I think recruiting gurus have just sort of made up their minds that players are better in Texas, Florida and California. ESPN in particular is really skewed towards those states and the southeast.
Urghh. Noah Spence. Consensus Top 10 Player to the Buckeyes. Apparently had zero interest in Bucknuts until this week. What the hell is Urban Meyer selling these kids?
ND's class certainly has a lot of star power at the top, but Rivals has them ranked behind where Scout does, and ESPN probably has them lower than that (because ESPN basically thinks any kid who plays Midwestern football is inferior to someone from Texas or Florida, so all Big 10 schools and ND suffer in their rankings).
Generally, they don't have the depth of a really top-notch class. I'll be afraid of ND when they start translating recruiting success to fearsome defenses and explosive weapons on offense--hasn't happened yet.
Instead of focusing on the raw metrics, which has the Michigan O fifth-best or second-best or whatever in the country, I'm just gonna say that from what I've seen the 2010 offense has not been a great one. We were not competitive against any good Big 10 team this year, with only the possible exception of Illinois. Against Iowa, MSU, Wisconsin, Penn State we were down by three scores in the fourth quarter--that's not a competitive game. The defense gets the lion's share of the blame, obviously, but if the offense really was that tremendous we would've at least been in a couple of those games.
The offense's primary weapon this year was Denard's legs. All of those ridiculously open deep routes happened because of that. But we struggled running from the RB spot, struggled with the WR screen game which is so important to a running spread, and had really, really shaky passing in passing situations. Turnover problems continued. For Michigan to have a successful season (9 wins) next year, the offense is going to have to improve, in more than just an extra-year-of-experience kind of way. The team is sloppy on both sides of the ball.
I suspect, even if Michigan were to be this bad for another decade, resentful jerks like Bielema would still be saying stuff like this. We have so much tradition it doesn't matter how low we get, people will still take joy in kicking us in the ribs! It's almost a consolation.
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So is it a bad thing Wisconsin lost tonight?
man illinois' passing is atrocious
Opposite approach-- the player who most out-performed his hype was probably David Harris. Anonymous unranked 3-star who became the best linebacker of the post-Bo era. You know, we never really had too many of those guys, did we? Most of the stars at Michigan were star recruits.
The bigger discrepancy is how many elite players are produced, compared to population. Texas has 2.5 the population of Michigan. So based on strict numbers you'd think it would produce 2.5 times the blue-chip football players.
But Texas, on average, produces about 5x the number of four-star recruits as Michigan, on every recruiting site. I agree that a huge part of this is the football culture in Texas, but in general I think recruiting gurus have just sort of made up their minds that players are better in Texas, Florida and California. ESPN in particular is really skewed towards those states and the southeast.
Urghh. Noah Spence. Consensus Top 10 Player to the Buckeyes. Apparently had zero interest in Bucknuts until this week. What the hell is Urban Meyer selling these kids?
RVB would be a good DE in a 3-4 scheme--those guys don't rack up stats, but they need size and technique and the ability to make the occasional play.
ND's class certainly has a lot of star power at the top, but Rivals has them ranked behind where Scout does, and ESPN probably has them lower than that (because ESPN basically thinks any kid who plays Midwestern football is inferior to someone from Texas or Florida, so all Big 10 schools and ND suffer in their rankings).
Generally, they don't have the depth of a really top-notch class. I'll be afraid of ND when they start translating recruiting success to fearsome defenses and explosive weapons on offense--hasn't happened yet.
Does anyone have information on the financial terms of the agreement? I know Brandon said paying ACs real money was gonna be a priority .
Instead of focusing on the raw metrics, which has the Michigan O fifth-best or second-best or whatever in the country, I'm just gonna say that from what I've seen the 2010 offense has not been a great one. We were not competitive against any good Big 10 team this year, with only the possible exception of Illinois. Against Iowa, MSU, Wisconsin, Penn State we were down by three scores in the fourth quarter--that's not a competitive game. The defense gets the lion's share of the blame, obviously, but if the offense really was that tremendous we would've at least been in a couple of those games.
The offense's primary weapon this year was Denard's legs. All of those ridiculously open deep routes happened because of that. But we struggled running from the RB spot, struggled with the WR screen game which is so important to a running spread, and had really, really shaky passing in passing situations. Turnover problems continued. For Michigan to have a successful season (9 wins) next year, the offense is going to have to improve, in more than just an extra-year-of-experience kind of way. The team is sloppy on both sides of the ball.
I suspect, even if Michigan were to be this bad for another decade, resentful jerks like Bielema would still be saying stuff like this. We have so much tradition it doesn't matter how low we get, people will still take joy in kicking us in the ribs! It's almost a consolation.