the clans

Last Friday I asked for football questions and got a lot. Roughly these fell into two categories: What’s going on with the college football landscape, and what does Michigan look like next year. So I’ll break those into two posts. If your question didn’t get answered, it’s because the person who asked something similar is better looking.

Why can’t we get a transfer?

Mercury Hayes asked:

It is clear that Mel Tucker and MSU is going to target the transfer portal heavily to shore up their roster each year. With a team as strong as Michigan, why aren't we seeing more of this?

Michigan is notoriously hard to transfer into. In deep history this wasn’t a case, since smaller colleges used to do the talent collection work that big high school programs do today. But today, Michigan treats transfers athletes no differently than other transfer students, and like many elite academic institutions, are stingy with the credits.

Why isn’t this a problem with freshmen? While there are a lot of kids Michigan won’t even offer once they see their transcripts, given enough headway, the football program can get most of the freshmen they recruit into Michigan the normal way, and they get a hard number of quasi-waivers for the rest. With a transfer, our academic experts have to work with what they’ve got, and in most cases it won’t be enough. Even if they can get them in, they can’t get enough of their classes to match up with classes that Michigan offers, so the guy has to be good with essentially starting his career over again.

Thus Michigan has been limited to grad transfers, guys who don’t mind virtually starting from scratch, and Stanford’s roster. Here’s the breakdown of Michigan’s 20 transfers since 1990:

• Grads (11): Jake Rudock, Wayne Lyons, Blake O’Neill, John O’Korn, Casey Hughes, Mike Danna, Willie Allen, Jordan Whittley, Daylen Baldwin, Alan Bowman, and Victor Oluwatimi
• Freshmen (5): Jonathan Goodwin, Spencer Brinton, Steven Threet, Ty Isaac, Andrew Gentry
• Mid-Career (2): Grant Mason, Shea Patterson
• Jucos (2): Russell Shaw and Austin Panter

Grant Mason came from Stanford. That leaves just a mid-1990s Juco, another Juco who played 8-on-8 football in high school and became a doctor, and Shea Patterson who broke the mold. Did Shea graduate?

I assume, but don’t know, that other football schools have much cozier relationships with admissions. That part is never going to change, but Michigan’s undergraduate admissions could ease off quite a bit and still be elite. Northwestern took six transfers last year. It’s really just us and Stanford who can’t seem to cut a deal between the jocks and the admissions pencilnecks.

On the flipside, Michigan is a top-15 recruiting school that has to go well outside of its footprint to keep up that pace, and regularly leaves 4-stars on the bench, so they're bound to give up more transfers than most. The first year that players could free transfer (because of COVID) was alarming, dwarfing even the Great Rich Rod Flight.

Dismissed players not included. Click here if you want to see this chart as an interactive viz.)

The thick yellow bars above were the glory days when grad transfers were free, which was ideal for Michigan’s particular needs and valuable graduate degrees. It also helped in recruiting; part of the pitch in those years was “commit to us and worst-case scenario you’ve got that degree with 2 years to play somewhere.”

The chart above isn’t that alarming, however, because few of Michigan’s recent out-transfers have left us wondering what could have been. Most of the guys who’ve left the program under the free transfer rules were looking for playing time, IE they weren’t playing here. If anything, it’s made it easier, and less skeezy, to oversign and trim the roster.

It’s going to lead to faster roster turnover for everybody. For Michigan, it means they can recruit larger freshman classes, refreshing mostly scholarship positions from guys who weren’t going to play into more guys who might someday. That’s also true for schools like Ohio State, Alabama, and Georgia, which have an easier time recruiting, and have greater access to mid-career up-transfers, but that’s not a big change. What’s different is they’ll be replacing their 3rd year guys who aren’t playing with someone else’s 3rd year guys, while Michigan’s rosters will get even more freshman-heavy.

Realistically, where the transfer market changes football the most is it raises the quality of the mid and lower-mid range programs who can fill major roster holes before it gets to true freshman Ray Vinopal. The schools it helps most are the mid-tier programs like Indiana, Illinois, or Michigan State that can protect their stars from getting poached, but often develop big roster holes. Being able to fill those with Michigan and Florida leftovers raises the floor for those teams; Kenneth Walker III-type impact players are probably going to be super-rare.

My biggest concern is the opportunity for tampering, because it’s not like the NCAA is going to regulate that better than they (don’t) do anything else. Any time an NCAA rule is getting widely flouted, it’s going to disadvantage Michigan, because Michigan’s self-image is wrapped up in that being the case. The alarming thing about Xavier Worthy going to Texas wasn’t just losing a star freshman before he played, but how blatantly Sarkisian was communicating with him, and they just got away with it. Apparently that’s been happening a lot, which isn’t surprising, since the transfer rules came about in the first place because that was happening with great frequency back in the day.

What’s the answer? I’ve heard of some labor markets using a document signed by both parties that stipulates enforceable conditions for an exchange of services, but I don’t think the NCAA wants to go there.

[After THE JUMP: NIL, another big chart, and the return of The Clans]

The Clans. This is an awesome post that you must rush to read right now drop everything. Look:

You want to know where you fit. Everyone does. Everyone thinks they're a fierce pragmatist. Seriously, check the comments.

Mike Hart is the master. If Mike Hart is serious about going into coaching after his NFL career is done and eventually returning to Michigan, he's already got the bit about expertly defusing tricky questions down pat. Via a recent radio appearance:

"I think that any Michigan man that would've came in would be hard to be mad at because I think people have been complaining so bad these last three years that – 'Hey, we want a Michigan guy here. We need a Michigan guy. Rich-Rod doesn't respect the traditions.' (For) guys that have been saying those things, Coach Hoke was the perfect hire because he brings back that Michigan legacy."

I eagerly await the day he's cut. No offense, Mr. Hart, it's just… you know.

and the hoke-footed balloonMan whistles far and wee

Needs moar tremendous.

Not much of substance, but I'm not a big fan of the Vick comparison. When Vick got to the NFL he was shepherded in a run-heavy, simple system that wasn't very good. It takes time, and while Denard will progress I think it'll take more than a year. There will be a larger post on this later.

Calling Brandon a liar. Is what LSU's doing:

"He was offered more than 4 million to become the Michigan coach," LSU Board of Supervisors member Stanley Jacobs said Friday. "When he said no, they came back and offered him more. And he said no again."

Miles is apparently set to sign an extension that does not raise his salary. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the buyout. Miles has made a lot of money already but seemed to be lacking in job security early this year when LSU was surviving by the skin of its teeth. He may not have leveraged the Michigan job into more money, but he may have leveraged it into making it very difficult to get rid of him if LSU fails to live up to expectations next year, which is totally going to happen because LSU fans are expecting a national title.

I can see Miles doing this because he's 57—a primary reason he should never have been considered for the job in the first place—and knows this is his last head coaching job at a premiere school. He's probably eyeing retirement in the not too distant future and would like to make sure he chooses the "when."

As for the Michigan side of things, I'm not sure what to believe. It would be stupid for Brandon to waste time playing footsie with Miles when he had no intention of tabling a serious offer, but it would be stupid to table a serious offer. So I guess it doesn't matter. The LSU guys think this game of semantics is silly:

"Well, if Hoke was his first choice, he could've signed him up prior to ever talking to Les or Harbaugh," LSU chancellor Mike Martin said. "Don't you think?"

One way or the other, they're right.

You are heartfelt but uninformed, LSU chancellor. Brandon, meanwhile, set to compounding his arrogant father-knows-best press conference by putting this out later in the day:

"I got inundated with advice," he admits on WDFN-AM 1130. "A lot of people with very good hearts, and who care a lot, and with a lot of passion, came at me with their point of view. And I respect that, and I certainly tried to show them a courteous reply whenever I could because those passionate people are what make Michigan football special.

"However, most of them are very uninformed, and in most cases, they were recommending people they had never met. Or been in the same room with. Or ever had a conversation with. And interviewing a candidate for an important job like this is about sitting down and talking about specific issues, and getting to know them at a completely different level than blogs and statistics and images that, in many cases, are shaped by PR more than reality. [ed: the noise you heard was my irony meter exploding.]

"So, I didn't pay a lot of attention to those recommendations – even though they came from people with good hearts, they just weren't all that helpful."

This falls in line with Brandon's comments during the press conference that "all that glitters is not gold" when it comes to some coaches and that "the hype or the PR doesn't match the real person." To me, that came off really, really poorly. I was pretty sure everyone was in the same boat—I especially liked the bit at the end that signaled the program's return to barely tolerating its fans—but apparently not. The Wolverine Blog says to give credit to Brandon for "putting himself on the line," which he's certainly done by making his decision on explicitly faith-based grounds. I'm not so much with the crediting bit.

One, attempting to paint the internet's problem with Brady Hoke as a matter of "statistics" is… well, the main statistics people have problems with are "record: 47-50" and "age: 52," neither of which is a particularly advanced metric. 

Two: does this relate in any way to Brandon's passive-aggressive comments about Jim Harbaugh when Rodriguez was fired? It doesn't seem very leader-y to take shots at the people you interviewed and didn't hire. It implies everyone other than Brady Hoke is not fit to coach Michigan, and attempts to dismiss an awful lot of evidence that suggests Hoke is kind of a desperate hire by saying "you have not sat across the room from this man."

It's not reassuring to envision Brandon's interview process. Braves and Birds blows up this line of reasoning from Brandon real good; suffice it to say that Brady Hoke would have to be vastly worse than expected to sink to the level of Brandon's performance over the last two months. It looks like we'll have tangible evidence of that in two weeks.

EXPLICIT SECTION: Here's the tedious section in which I explain this is not a criticism of Brady Hoke but the athletic director that hired him at a terrible time for not particularly good reasons and told anyone who said words to that effect that they were "uninformed."

I expect Hoke will have enough success at Michigan to stick around a while; when he retires whether he was a good idea is likely to be a matter of heated and interminable debate. I hope I am wrong and am willing to give Hoke the proverbial "chance." I hope that Dave Brandon sets the world record for smug pats on the back when Hoke retires. For the record.

BONUS: Expect to read this disclaimer dozens of times!

Etc.: Brabbs gets good news re: cancer. Indiana: ugh. Rodriguez stuff goes for ridiculous sums.