recruiting is legit yo

The problem with Michigan's defense against Ohio State the last two years was pretty simple: they didn't have the dynamic defensive tackles they had in 2016 and 2017 and had to weaken other parts of the defense to compensate for it. In 2018 they couldn't generate pressure versus single-man blocking with Kemp and Mone, giving Dwayne Haskins time to sit in the pocket and OSU's receivers and backs time to shake defenders who weren't designed to last that long against elite speed. In 2019 they couldn't hold up physically with Kemp and true freshman Chris Hinton, and got pasted with Inside Zone and Duo until the linebackers stopped acting responsibly. It also forced Michigan to leave Josh Uche, one of their best players, on the bench for standard downs because they needed their DEs to play interior gaps. As we've said before, that was a "we need DTs" problem not a "why aren't you playing him?" problem.

Take those two games out of the equation and everyone feels just fine about the Harbaugh era. But that's not how we measure things here. I think most people see that if everything else can hold where it's at, getting the DTs back to 2016-'17 level gives this Michigan a shot to beat what's quickly becoming the strongest program since Point-a-Minute. Then we see Michigan not even a factor for any elite DTs in two straight classes (2020 and 2021) and the despair creeps in.

Can Michigan build a competitive defensive tackles depth chart with what they have now? Sure. They also could have had one in 2019—they just got really unlucky on a relatively standard roll. Can they have one in the future? It's harder to say.

Recruiting Elites: A Question of Can, not Will

Will Carr almost cost Eddie George his Heisman. [Jed Jacobsohn via Burnt Orange Nation]

Just as some of you were giving up the diaries section for dead, AC1997 wrote a treatise on elite (top-105) defensive tackle recruiting at Michigan and the various playoff competitors.

Wait a minute….I can math.  You said 18 for 6 schools, which means an average of 3 per school over a three year period.  That’s not as much as I thought.  What gives?

Good catch.  We know that just about every power-five team rotates three DTs regularly and that the success rate of even the top DT recruits is not perfect, so it is a position you would expect to over-recruit to ensure there is depth and insurance on your roster.  I would have expected that over a three-year period these elite schools would be stocking up on this talent, even if there were only 39 prospects to go around.  In reality, only one school (Alabama, duh) over-recruited from this list with a whopping SIX signees.

All of the other elite schools had just two or three:

• Clemson = 3
• Ohio State = 3
• Washington = 3
• Georgia = 2
• LSU = 2
• Oklahoma = 2
• Michigan = 2

The short version is Michigan and Ohio State have the same disadvantage: recruits tend to stay closer to home and the Midwest doesn't produce that many 300-pound monsters. Ohio State overcomes that by being the #1 destination for the kind of recruit who doesn't care about region because he just wants to make the playoffs. Michigan isn't recruiting better than any program in football history and so can't keep up with OSU in that regard. If you want more details I recommend you read the diary.

Growing Dudes: How to Find a Renes

Recruiting services don't tend to send scouts to your nightmares. [Patrick Barron]

In the comments AC asked me what Michigan's hit rate is on grow-your-own DTs. The answer is it depends a lot on the profile of the recruit.

• Dudes (since 1996): Mo Hurst, Ryan Glasgow, Willie Henry, Rob Renes
• Guys: Eric Wilson, Grant Bowman, Ben Huff, Shawn Lazarus, Matt Godin
• Playable but missing a key component: Carlo Kemp, Jibreel Black, Michael Dwumfour, Gannon Dudlar, Jess Speight, Alex Ofili, Kerwin Waldroup, Larry Harrison
• Whiffs: Phil Paea, Richard Ash, Jason Kates, Ray Edmonds, Brion Smith, Donovan Jeter, Deron Irving-Bey, Brady Pallante, Renaldo Sagesse, Terry Talbott, Vince Helmuth, Marques Walton, Paul Sarantos, Dave Spytek

If you bring in a pair of lightning feet attached to an excellent brain and just need to add 40 pounds to get to 300, your chances are pretty good. If you need to add 70 pounds, or he lacks the athleticism, or he needs to drop 40 pounds of one type of weight and put on another, or he doesn't have that one in a million brain that can process how a team wants to block him from minute details while in a trench battle, your chances are not great. Once you're moving guys over who were never expected to grow past defensive end you're hitting a ceiling.

If you look at the Dudes they came from all over the 3-star spectrum. Hurst came out a 4.01 on my 5-star scale, Renes a 3.83 (what we generally call a "3.5-star"), Henry a 3.48 (really low) and Glasgow was a walk-on. But they also fit a certain body type. Hurst was 6'2/282 as a true freshman, Renes 6'1/275, Henry 6'2/270, and Glasgow 6'4/294. The Guys showed up smaller: Wilson was 6'4/255, Bowman 6'3/258, Lazarus 6'3/245, Godin 6'6/277, and Huff a 6'4/234 linebacker.

The whiffs group has a lot of guys we would call reaches. Of those who came in with some sense among the fanbase that they were better than a shot in the dark, Ash, Kates, and Sagesse were tear-down/rebuilds, Brion Smith (medical), Ray Edmonds (dismissed) and Irving-Bey (transferred/dismissed) failed to materialize for non-scouting reasons. Dave Spytek was 6'7".

[After THE JUMP: a trip through Michigan DT memory lane to see how classes translated into lines]

We did the offense already. Before we get into the defensive side of contextualizing the 2019 recruits against every Michigan guy since Bo, I want to give a shout-out to some other Tableizers. Jacedeuce gave me several suggestions I incorporated into the money graph, and Bo McReady (son of Bennie, godson of Oosterbaan) created this magnificent visual that you can spend the rest of vacation clicking over. For example if you select all the New England states you can see this view…

…that shows just seven players from the region from 1990-2013, and nine players in four classes since Don Brown arrived. Mouse over the 2016 and 2017 towers and you'll find Sean McKeon, Tarik Black, Andrew Stueber, Kwity Paye, and Ben Mason from the first two classes, all of whom are working out better than their rankings suggested they would. On the other hand recruiting rankings do strongly correlate with the likelihood of playing in the NFL. I've recreated his NFL chart so you can mouse over the individuals:

Our fun had, let's dive into the defense:

[Player-by-player discussion, after The Jump]

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Here comes my latest attempt to make my spreadsheets into cool interactive charts. If you haven't checked it before, I keep these Google Sheets of Michigan's recruiting and roster data going back to 1990, and those are back to being updated. I've also experimented before with Tableau and other interactive chart software.

The 2019 Class in Context:

/tap tap does it work?

If you see the "Viz" horray. The big yellow bubbles are the current 2019 commits, the blue are former players with available recruiting data in my database, and the maize bubbles are Michigan's current players. You can click on those groups below the chart to see them with more clarity (some players, e.g. Donovan Peoples-Jones, might be covered up otherwise). I've also included some filters so you can pop out certain eras, specific classes, or who had NFL careers.

Also you should be able to mouseover the chart to pull up each player, some career data, and the components that went into his ranking.

Things made apparent:

• Thanks to those 2016 and 2017 classes some of Michigan's highest-rated recruits at several positions are still on the team.
• Notably the current players are bit lower than the post-Bo standard distribution at DT, RB, and both safety spots. DT and RB are addressed in the 2019 class but not safety, unless Daxton Hill makes his way back into the class.
• The NFL draft picks, especially first-day picks, are bunched towards the top of the recruiting rankings. B.J. Askew was the only low 3-star to get drafted as high as the third round, and Frank Clark is the only recent first-day pick who was less than a 4-star. If they NFL wasn't dumb Maurice Hurst would be in there.

Recruiting stars matter, even if the distribution is wide. That said, how does the 2019 class stack up so far?

[Hit THE JUMP if you want more mouseovers]