transfers in tag hasn't had this much work hoo boy since roosevelt

Don Brown no longer works at Michigan but is still giving us a hand, or more specifically, his best cornerback. UMass transfer CB Josh Wallace announced this morning that he's committing to Michigan.

The grad transfer is on his (last) COVID season of eligibility. He has decent size but up-and-down grades on PFF over four seasons of starting at Amherst, the first three of those in the milquetoast Quarters/Cov2 system of Charlie Strong acolyte Tommy Restivo before Brown installed a more aggressive Cover 1 scheme. He was also a two-time captain. Wallace's other main consideration was a guarantee to play immediately at Virginia Tech; the other serious offers were from Oklahoma and Iowa.

In my limited scouting Wallace looks like a functional player but not a star, more long than tall, and excellent at press coverage versus UMass-caliber competition. Speed looks average for the Big Ten. His experience shows in run support; he's not a great individual tackler but a very sound team defender, responsible and strong enough to press an edge closed against the receivers he's played against. Those include Pitt's Jordan Addison in 2021, but UMass's coverages were so soft pre-Brown I couldn't take much away from that film. Alex Drain will have a more complete writeup later on today.

Projection:

Since Will Johnson had knee surgery after spring ball and "might" return in time for the opener, Wallace has a shot to start the season #1 on the depth chart. Amorion Walker was #2 in spring but is transitioning from wide receiver, and got the worst of a spring game battle with walk-on Peyton O'Leary. Ja'den McBurrows looked like their best non-Johnson CB in spring but has dealt with injuries his first two years on campus and hasn't been on the field. Touted Jyaire Hill is a true freshman. His classmate Cameron Calhoun and Johnson classmate Myles Pollard have thus far been behind veteran walk-on Keshaun Harris, if not 6th year special teamer German Green as well. Mike Sainristil is much more valuable to them at nickel, and his RS freshman understudy Kody Jones is supposed to be getting reps there to prepare for life after Sainristil.

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Given recent adventures in 300+ DT recruitments, the March optimism that Michigan had caught the eye of one of the better transfer portal options seemed too goode to be true. One week after Good Friday it's Goode Friday!

BEEN HIM
STILL HIM#COMMITTED pic.twitter.com/YQsqO5gps5

— Cam Goode ™ (@CamBamBiggalo) April 23, 2022

Aside from nearly being old enough to appreciate the punning of local preschool dads, Goode is a big get. He's one of the more solid and experienced nose tackles available in the portal, and that position is in high demand.

Listed at 6'2"/315, Goode has been a regular rotational nose tackle for UCF since transferring there in 2019 from Virginia Tech. He's built low to the ground and heavy, is praised for his quick feet, and has shown a strong rip move in pass rushing, though he's more of a block-eater than a destructo by trade. PFF had him ranked 65th among FBS D-linemen (i.e. marginally draftable) after 2020, and 88th in a bigger pool for 2021. Goode started (with a sack on the first play!) in UCF's 29-17 bowl victory over Florida, and looked like a plausible replacement for Jeter, though not a gamebreaker. It's the only game of his I've seen so far.

Having redshirted at VT in 2018, and thanks to the COVID year, Goode should enter with two seasons of eligibility remaining.

Michigan returns a solid starter in Mazi Smith, and this spring learned they have some up-and-comers in Kris Jenkins, Rayshaun Benny, George Rooks, and Mason Graham. But Michigan lost seven guys from last year's depth chart, including co-starter Christopher Hinton and their top backup, Donovan Jeter. With Julius Welschof's move outside, the Wolverines were looking at five guys for three positions that require a lot of rotation.

Goode should shore up a backup role, probably behind Smith so the freshmen can show off their skills at the two less double-intensive off-tackle positions. He could also factor in as a run-focused nose between Smith and Jenkins if they wanted to give Mazi more opportunities to maul guards. If last year's rotations are any indication, Michigan will do all of it, and Goode should see between 30 and 40 snaps per game.

By my count Michigan is back up to 88 scholarships for 2022, which is slightly under where they usually are with four months and change left in the offseason. We'll get a fuller Hello post out sometime in there. There's no content after the jump.

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]