Hello: TE Erick All

Enough with you and acting like you're a Michigan fan. 

I really hope you don't come to the Big House on Fall saturdays. 

You sound like a guy that will never ever accept that he might be wrong about something. You are only willing to compare Michigan to Alabama and Ohio State?  The two year-in and year-out strongest recruiting teams this decade? 

I don't know man. I hope this is your outlet for the rest of life's frustrations as the real world isn't going to be up to the standards you hold for your favorite football team.

Clemson's last 5 classes were 17,17, 21, 26, and 20, which equals...101.  Michigan's last 5 classes were  19, 30, 28,14,16 which equals...98.  So other than that two-year bumper crop to offset for the really small classes under Hoke, Michigan has effectively recruited the same number of players and retained a decent number of them even with a coaching change in the middle.  Their classes are exactly the size they need to fill their positional needs, something you'd expect from a coach who has been at a program for a decade.

Also, the ACC is pretty good at football.  They aren't the Big East conference of years past, or hell even the Big 12 of the past couple of years.  FSU and Clemson have been perennial powers for years now.  Miami and VT are solid programs with good coaches and a history of success.  To say they are a basketball conference basically means you don't want to make an actual argument so you'll throw around some trite phrase and hope nobody notices.

Also, I don't get your issue with the type of offense they play vs. Michigan's.  You keep saying "spread" like that is some singular term as opposed to a style of offense that requires different-but-equal types of players.  Michigan's offense is as much about misdirection and mismatches as any "spread" offense you'll see; it's arguably closer to Clemson or Washington as it is to Iowa or Wisconsin, even though Clemson and Washington run different flavors of a spread-style offensive system.

But whatever, keep being mad.  I tried to engage with you earlier about two recruits, you copy backed some blurbs from 247, and that was it.  So I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you still trot out the same lazy BS.

I think comparisons with Clemson are quite relevant.  Swinney and his staff do more with less year in and year out and are playing for and winning both conference and national championships.  I think every program in the country would be smart to at least take a look at what Swinney is doing.  Not necessarily about running their version of football, but what they do to get the most out of each individual player.  

It's amazing what people will tell themselves to feel better about something isn't it.

Has anyone ever done a study on a particular coach's ability to evaluate players? Comparing the futures of 3*s that Harbaugh signed vs. 3*s that all other 129 head coaches sign doesn't seem like a good comparison.

If you look at his Stanford recruits I see a lot of 3*s that went on to be All-Pac 10/12 or multi-year NFL players. Guys like:

Doug Baldwin, Owen Marecic, Coby Fleener, Jeremy Stewart, Delano Howell, Griff Whalen (0* WR out of Ohio), Johnson Bademosi, Michael Thomas, Jonathan Martin, Chase Thomas, David DeCastro, Chris Uwusu, Ryan Hewitt, Josh Mauro, Trent Murphy, Ben Gardner. +Taysom Hill

Those are in addition to the 4*s like Zach Ertz, Stepfan Taylor, Tyler Gaffeny, Levine Toilolo, Shayne Skow, and Andrew Luck.

In two full years and one month (Jan 2007 signees).  Harbaugh signed 52 players in his first 2.1 classes.  Twenty-two of them were at a minimum all-Pac 10 level players. That's over 40% of his signees were very good college players by the end of their college careers. 

TL/DR: a 3* Harbaugh recruit =/= a generic 3* recruit.

Well, if you're being truly objective, most of those studies indicate more about probabilities to make it to the NFL rather than the success of their college team. And even the correlation between high winning-percentage programs and top recruits cannot be determined as causality; do the best recruits make the top teams win, or do the top teams always get the best recruits?

One thing that is a much better indicator than "stars" is the Blue-chip ratio of the impact two-deep.

No, not objectively wrong. There are more than enough data points that disprove your (and Bluey’s) theory.

At least to the point where people like Bluey shouldn’t be throwing a hissy fit over every three star recruit. At least to the point where  you quit basing your opinion of how good a high school junior is going to be based solely on where he’s ranked. 

But nope. There will be people like you and Bluey that think the only factor that matters is where a kid is ranked. And you’ll ignore everything else that goes into it. 

5 star Trevor Lawrence up next.

Good call on Evan

Actually this is exactly how the 2016 and 2017 classes started out, it was the '18 class that got early commits from top100 players who bailed and then they whiffed on NPF & Friday, forcing them to add a bunch of "fliers" at the end.

Honestly, go back to some of those Hello posts and you see a fair number of lower-rated guys committing because the higher-rated guys tend to take more time because they are fielding more offers.  I randomly picked the Jordan Anthony post and you see guys like Nico Collins, Oliver Martin, Aubrey Solomon, and Drew Singleton still in the "waiting" stage even with the class near it's capacity.  And Anthony was pretty late in the process.  And hell, Josh Metellus was picked up pretty early as a who-dat commit and was voted Big Ten honorable mention last year as a sophomore and looks to be a solid player on this elite defense they have coming back.

Does Michigan need to get more elite recruits?  Absolutely.  But classes aren't usually full of 4.5*+ guys.  That 2017 class was an outlier even by Michigan's standards, and this class feels like it'll settle into that top-10/15 level once the dust settles.  You can absolutely win a lot of games with that level of talent, and if they can show that last year was the aberration it sort of feels like (exasperated by the injuries at QB), then you nudge that consistent ranking up a tad more and then you're in the playoff talk consistently. 

Personally, my biggest complaint with Michigan this past decade is that they seem ready to knee-cap a coach after only a couple of years, and that instability more than anything else hurts recruiting.  When a kid doesn't know if his coach will be there in 2-3 years, why would he stick around?  That's why even if Harbaugh struggles, I'd rather give him time to figure it out than rush off with the "unacceptable" bullshit and move on to the next guy.  People forget that John Beilein would have been run out of town numerous times by the same people here now clamoring for Harbaugh to be on the hot seat (in particular a color-based username, who almost always responded to posts after losses and rarely after wins).  Harbaugh didn't forget how to coach or recruit, and the reality here isn't "he can no longer convince good players to play at Michigan".  I honestly don't know if certain assistants are better or worse than others in recent memory in terms of getting guys into the program, but I also doubt anyone here knows either, and so instead of just saying that we get the wild-ass speculation.