How To Have A Football Team Without Tackles
[Bryan Fuller]
Site note: due to an extensive and very frustrating search to replace the media file conversion program step in the UFR process things are going to be delayed a day. Finding a non-scammy FFMPEG wrapper is the hardest thing to do in the world, except recruit tackles, I guess.
You may ask yourself "how does a bonafide P5 team of some repute enter a season with no functional tackles?" Well, here's how. Bolded players are recruits who are not on the roster whether via decommit or other reason.
2014
Michigan enters the season with—surprise—an insufficient number of tackles due to poor recruiting. The late RichRod era's recruiting collapse saw literally zero junior or senior tackles make it to the 2014 roster. Erik Magnuson, an early Hoke pickup, flips out from guard to start a fairly good three-year career at right tackle. None of the other recruits are ready; most will never be ready.
The most ready of the unready: Mason Cole, a true freshman. He starts at left tackle. He is a very good freshman offensive lineman, which means he's barely surviving. Michigan has to play him; a stable program with guys in the pipeline gets a redshirt on him, and likely makes him available this year.
The dissolution of the Hoke era is in full swing at this juncture; Michigan only picks up one other OL in this recruiting class. That's Juwann Bushell-Beatty, who gave up seven pressures on Saturday.
[After THE JUMP: more of this post]
2015
The Hoke era implodes spectacularly, taking Michigan's recruiting with it. Hoke does manage to leave Harbaugh one parting gift: Grant Newsome. Newsome looks to be on his way towards a productive career when a Wisconsin defensive back submarines him on an edge run, leading to a 40-day hospital stay and eventually Newsome's medical retirement.
The only other OL in the class are Jon Runyan Jr, who just gave up eight pressures on Saturday, and Nolan Ulizio, who had a brief and rather disastrous starting tenure at the beginning of last year. Runyan is a legacy recruit Hoke acquired. Ulizio is the first OL recruit of the Harbaugh era, a wild swing in the dark at a Kentucky commit. Michigan does pick up Ty Wheatley Jr, a tight end who Michigan wants to move to tackle for basically his whole career because he keeps showing up near 300 pounds. He refuses and eventually transfers.
2016
Harbaugh's first full class has no tackles in it. Michigan does pick up Ben Bredeson, who's listed as an OT by recruiting sites but after an offseason battle with Newsome for the LT job as a true freshman gets moved to guard and is apparently never again a consideration to play outside.
Hamilton (right) is the most painful decommit in a minute
Devery Hamilton decommits late in the cycle, which blindsides Michigan despite the fact that Hamilton's high school coach has a kid on the team. Hamilton sees significant LT snaps for Stanford as a redshirt freshman and is now starting at guard for them. Erik Swenson is booted from the class in December when Michigan had to know many months before that they didn't want him. Michigan replaces him with Stephen Spanellis, who looks like he'll be a good player but who has also gotten no consideration at tackle.
2017
Michigan airballs on a ton of guys who they seemed in play for at one point: Aaron Banks, Alex Leatherwood, Isaiah Wilson, Jedrick Wills, Kai-Leon Herbert (a decommit), and Mekhi Becton all head elsewhere. A number of those are the sort of guy who can play immediately. Some do not because they're at Alabama or Georgia or Notre Dame; Becton immediately walks into Louisville's starting lineup.
Michigan takes Chuck Filiaga,—another guy who is permanently a guard—Andrew Stueber, and Joel Honigford. They move James Hudson over from defense in fall camp. All redshirt, so hooray for that. None were able to push through the starting tackles. So boo to that.
2018
These are true freshmen who should not be expected to play. Michigan may have gotten lucky on Jalen Mayfield, a man growing by the day, and could end up inserting him so he can be Mason Cole. Ryan Hayes is about 30 pounds too light to play.
So...
There is a world where Michigan has Newsome and Cole at tackle, but we are clearly not on the good timeline. Even so, the number of bolded names here is too low to point the finger at the general bloody-mindedness of the universe, and three of those are bad decisions or recruiting by the Michigan coaching staff: trusting the commitment of a kid who visited Stanford, not pulling the trigger on Swenson fast enough to find a real replacement, and taking and then losing Herbert.
The rest of it is a litany of recruiting misses by Drevno. Some of those are understandable and a natural cost of going and getting a sitting NFL coach. When Harbaugh and Drevno hit the ground in 2015 they'd been out of the recruiting game for four years and had three weeks to do anything. Missing there is understandable.
The bomb that just went off is most traceable back to the 2016 class, which should have had four tackles in it and had zero. Michigan swung and missed at a lot of top-end guys in 2017, a class that did almost have four tackles in it. It's a much harder ask to go up against Alabama and Georgia's cash than it is to find a solid prospect who will be ready by year three; once Drevno failed in his second year the goose was more or less cooked. Greg Frey's recruiting style is excellent in the long term but does not usually produce year-one starters.
September 5th, 2018 at 2:36 PM ^
Re: the cash Georgia and Alabama pay recruits. Not saying it doesn't happen because it obviously does in modern big-time college athletics. But if fans can come to this conclusion (and love to pound the topic) then it should be obvious to coaches as well. Which leads to the real problem as far as Michigan is concerned: either Harbaugh and his staff think they can somehow get playersthat other schools are offering money to or they themselves also offer money and they are still losing. I lean toward the former, because I don't believe that Harbaugh and his staff are ignorant enough to not know about it and because I've seen no evidence that Michigan pays players (though Michigan boosters are likely as talented as other boosters). But it's a huge failure by Harbaugh and staff to chase these players when they have such a small chance of landing them. Stanford can win some of these battles because they are Stanford. Michigan can not. And Harbaugh has failed to know the difference.
September 5th, 2018 at 3:05 PM ^
Can't underscore how damaging the attrition from the 2016 class was as well. All the guys that burned out of that class limited our ability to pack more tackles into that class: Crawford, Walker, Mcdoom, Mbem-Bosse, Nate Johnson, Kingston Davis, Dyt Johnson, Asiasi. I'd say it factored into 2017 too since the class count was showing those guys on the roster, but we missed on so many in that class anyway, it didn't matter probably.
September 5th, 2018 at 3:38 PM ^
We look at Wisconsin as the Oline factory and we are impressed how they are able to produce annually NFL level O Linemen.
So I went back and took a look at Wisconsin's recruiting history, here is what I found (current starters in BOLD (Which is suppose to be one of the best lines in CFB this year).....
My take observations from this chart:
1) Wisconsin has their system set up, Linemen are recruited and put into their workshop for a minimum of 3 years before they see the field...
2) Consistent recruiting of linemen each year, no gaps, no fallout, no crazy injuries, just consistent pipeline of ~18 OL spread out over 5 years
3) No star gazing here (with the noted exception of Logan Brown..... :(. They go out (mainly in the Midwest) pick out their ~6'6" athletes, feed them, train them, and are patient with them to develop into linemen. The starting Center for Wisconsin was recruited at a DT, Edwards was a non de-script TE converted.
How does this tie into Michigan....
1) 2019 - 5 OL
2018 - 2 OL
2017 - 5 OL
2016 - 3 OL
This tells me that at minimum, 2020 AND 2021 need 3-4 OL. This just fills the pipeline with able bodies, now onto the development....
2) No bad injuries or Bonehead decisions, ie no fallout...
3) 3 of the Linemen are from the pipeline noted above (Bredeson, Onwenu, and Ruiz) - Which BTW, are considered the strength of our OLine
4) As for the OT in particular, 5 are on campus (3 - '17 and 2 - '18) with 2 more coming in for '19 so far. If this was Wisconsin none of these guys would be sniffing the field until at least 2020, more likely 2021.
So to me, there is your answer....2021 to have an OLine that rivals our memories of the 70's and 80's. Of course there are just under 3 full seasons left to be played so things have to be done to mitigate it. Ideally, 2020 "could be" solid, but that would require 2 young tackles to beat the development curve.... Maybe as 'higher' recruits, they can accelerate the process but I would not 'expect' them to do it, just be thrilled if they could.
Until then.....
September 5th, 2018 at 11:48 PM ^
The thing is, most of those guys were Tackles... Bo used to do that then kick them inside...
Instead, we are bringing in guard after guard. Now have Rumler and Carpenter, with T. Jones... that's 2 guards, one tackle (and odds are with this staff's recruiting, Jones will end up inside).
So, we are still left with no tackles.
Mayfield is one, maybe Hayes, and Hudson.... nobody else... Barnhart is 6'4.
And isn't it interesting how many tackles Wisconsin stole from our state ? Right below our noses.
September 5th, 2018 at 4:40 PM ^
Where’s the link for Georgia’s cash? Maybe just good school, great town, great girls, way better talent and football program?
September 5th, 2018 at 4:53 PM ^
Not fair to mention UGA in the same breath as Alabama in terms of bagmen. UGA does it pretty clean.
September 5th, 2018 at 11:35 PM ^
After every OL commitment and I'd scramble only to find out, it was yet another guard..... many here have watched and questioned this trainwreck. And I do vaguely recall Brian openly asking "where are the tackles?"
September 6th, 2018 at 4:55 AM ^
This might sound crazy, but bear with me on this. What if our offensive line just lines up without any tackles? Just four guards and a center. Or better yet. Three centers and two guards.
September 6th, 2018 at 5:33 AM ^
I know it’s been mentioned in passing by one or two bloggers or commenters here past, but the string of tackle disaster was first started by none other than the vaunted Lloyd Carr who decimated the roster by actively promoting and helping anyone and everyone to leave the team with him via transfer (see, Three and Out, by Bacon - including Carr’s refusal to respond to the facts exposed therein). Yes 2008 was long ago but one can draw a straight line through this problem right to Lloyd. Rich Rod was trying to install an entirely new system and starting virtually at zero with an upward trajectory obvious as Brandon fired him, only to bring in Fred Flintstone who as pointed out above struggled himself as he tried to then swap the system back to a pro style using RichRod’s creation set us up again for more heart ache in the rebuild. Is it all Carr’s fault of course not but I’ll be damned if I ignore what Carr openly and successfully did as RR arrived and the ripple effect it had that we’re still feeling.
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