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11/7/2020 – Michigan 21, Indiana 38 – 1-2 Big Ten

Some years back, Michael Weinreb had an odd sinecure. Every three months some publication would ask him to write the same article dumping on Michigan football, and he'd write it, and I'd roll my eyes and occasionally Yell On The Internet about it. We've got a tag and everything. It's only got one post in it, but I created it because I thought that six times was enough. Weinreb would write the same article about Michigan every few months until the sun baked the planet into lava. We needed a tag. Then he stopped.

These pieces were and are extremely bad. I mean:

Maybe, by essentially professionalizing the recruiting process, Harbaugh is dispensing with the pretense that college football is still an amateur sport.

In addition to making no sense, these arguments don't even dump on Michigan from the correct angle. The correct angle: Michigan does 95% of the things every other athletic department does and then sniffs its own butt about the other 5% while being dumped in a toilet by OSU. Weinreb's series of articles was so infuriating because he was the only person in the universe who could get paid to dump on Michigan for excessive rather than insufficient moral turpitude.

And yet I still remember a single ominous sentence from six years ago in his piece on the Harbaugh hire:

I would worry most of all that if Harbaugh somehow fails at Michigan, it will be the most definitive proof yet that no one can succeed in Ann Arbor anymore.

That's obviously overstated until you're staring down a 2-6, 3-5 kind of season in year six and the Black Pit Of Negative Expectations has signed a long-term lease in your head.

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I can't imagine Jim Harbaugh makes this work any more. Michigan jumped offsides against Michigan State twice. They went back to practice, watched some film, tried to self-correct, and jumped offsides five times in the first half based on nothing more than quarterback hand claps.

A fully operational recruiting setup brought Michigan this bounty of cornerbacks and defensive tackles. After a three-month-long fall camp Michigan still thought that these guys could play press man. It turns out Chris Partridge left for Ole Miss not to be DC, but to be an assistant to DJ Durkin, of all people. Michigan was down three scores in the fourth quarter and still strolling up to the line, content to blow thirty seconds on a running clock.

Michigan has disastrous recruiting at key spots, can't retain coaches, can't run tempo, can't get lined up against tempo, can't hang on to the same running approach for more than half a season. This is systemic and goes back to the head coach. We've seen most of these issues over the last few years. They were covered by a lot of talent. Now they're not. The usual flush-and-reset coordinators that buys you some more time has already happened.

The question, then: why would this get better? I mean "beat Ohio State" better, not "beat Indiana again" better. You can make a case for that based on the youth of the roster, COVID, Ambry Thomas exiting, etc. But we've seen good Michigan teams enter the Ohio State game. They were competitive when OSU was running JT Barrett out there. They have not been competitive after OSU switched from great runners and functional passers to NFL QBs throwing to a bunch of five-star WRs. They sure as shit aren't going to be competitive going forward with this group of corners.

But then you survey the situation and Michigan's specific brand of punching itself in the nuts because the hands of filthy outsiders are never to approach the hallowed scrotum…

Fwiw, source said this after I asked if Luke Fickell was at the top. I took it more to say that they wouldn’t consider a Buckeye than that a coach had to be a former Wolverine.

— Michael Spath (@MichaelSpathITH) November 9, 2020

…and you wonder what the point of replacing him would be.

I'm going to assume this is one gentleman talking out of his butt and that Warde Manuel is not going to find a Michigan Man to do Michigan Things like always lose to Ohio State. This is because there is literally no "Michigan Man" who is even 1% qualified for the job. Michigan's series of failed coaches has created literally no coaching tree. The most plausible Michigan-associated coach who isn't a million years old may literally be first-year Indiana offensive coordinator Nick Sheridan. Scot Loeffler, who is 3-10 at Bowling Green and has been in charge of some of the worst Power 5 offenses of the past decade, is the main (only?) competition unless you think John Harbaugh is achievable, which nope.

So there's where we are. The great hope is pretty much done, and if things have gone like they have over the past 15 years the program will either hire a deeply incompetent makeweight or try to go outside the family and eat the interloper at the first sign of weakness.

Anyway, hockey time! Moussa Diabate time! Why wallow?

[After the JUMP: Team Milton here]