name and image rights

Things Discussed:

• Lost Herbert: Recruiting against Jim is tough.
• DC: Zach Orr has a couple of NFL opportunities now so figuring that out will be the most important thing.
• Concerned that this administration is going to Bennie Oosterbaan Sherrone Moore's program. Needs to not just support but lead the transition to a new version of the college football landscape.
• Beefing up recruiting department: can criticize Jim Harbaugh here because he spent recruiting jobs on hires like Stalions and Shemy.
• Sherrone going hard for ND's Chad Bowden. Fended off Harbaugh for Grant Newsome, fighting for Elston.
• Warde: His "transformational not transactional" interview was the end for us; he's not the guy for the future. Transactional means fair; when you say you don't want that you're saying you don't want the players getting a fair deal.
• Michigan's culture doesn't have to be these 1930s ideas. Hunter Dickinson would be here if we had this working right.
• There's more in the tank: Michigan's Athletics department doesn't need to be taking money for naming buildings.
• NCAA dysfunction has to be part of this. We should be leading the way towards fixing the system, not pretending the old system still works. Players don't benefit from everyone being a free agent because it makes them all replaceable. That system sucks for everybody because there's no investment in the players, there's less time to get to know your system, and nobody's getting an education.
• Right now we're hanging onto a system that's already dead, falling into a terrible oligarchic system. System should be one that forces the universities to be stuck with the players they get, because it makes them responsible for the player's education and development. Right now the NCAA is antithetical to the higher ideal the NCAA was set up.
• Seth: communist economies—that's what the NCAA model is—require a black market. The cheating is part of the system.
• What we're seeing is the fall of that system, and what Michigan should be doing is leading the way to a new system.
• How? Pay our players to be in a Super Bowl commercial advocating for a player's union, which we start here.
• Seth & Brian argue whether the history of Oosterbaan/1950s is relevant today.

[Hit the JUMP for the player, and video and stuff]

The Sponsors

We want to thank Underground Printing for starting this and making it possible—stop by and pick up some gear, check them out at ugpmichiganapparel.com, or check out our selection of shirts on the MGoBlogStore.com. And let’s not forget our associate sponsors: Peak Wealth Management, Matt Demorest - Realtor and Lender, Human Element, Ann Arbor Elder Law, Michigan Law Grad, The Phil Klein Insurance Group, Venue by 4M, Winewood Organics, SignalWire where we recorded this and INTRODUCING TO THE PODCAST: Sharon's Heating.

Special Guest: Professor Greg Dooley, whose podcast is The Professor & the Pundit.
Featured Musician: Kyle Mack

The Video:

[After THE JUMP: Dooley arrives so we get off-topic.]

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]