The freshman class that Michigan signed last week is ranked 17th in the 247 composite rankings, 17th to Rivals, and 19th to On3, The class has, pending their pursuit of 5-star Nyckoles Harbor in the later signing period, zero top-100 players. This is quite clearly below the level Michigan normally recruits at.

To have a class like that after a second straight year of beating Ohio State by three scores, winning the Big Ten championship, and going to the Playoff is, without question, a disappointment. I'm one of the people who kept saying over the first half-decade of Harbaugh that beating Ohio State was the key to unlocking a higher level of recruiting. So far, it has not.

This has led to two major questions about the 2023 class, which might be seen as the optimistic and pessimistic versions of the same question:

• Pessimist: Why is a 13-0 Michigan recruiting like 8-5 Michigan?
• Optimist: Is this class like the 2018 class?

Every other question is another form of what this all signifies. Is Michigan doing something wrong? Is Michigan systemically disadvantaged in a new pay-for-play world? Was this wound self-inflicted, bad luck, overstated, or even worth discussing? Is Warde Manuel a second Fritz Crisler who's too cheap, too conservative, and too obstinately attached to outdated ideals of amateurism to keep up in a landscape rapidly reshaping to a new more capitalist order, while simultaneously too revered to be dispensed with?

I can't answer all of that. But I can tell you what happened with the 2018 class, and what that means for the very similar 2022 class.

[After THE JUMP: the 2018 recruiting tag is revived]

Who Was in the 2018 Class Again?

The last time Michigan had a class like this was in 2018, following an 8-5 season when Michigan looked miles from national contention. Here is that class. I've highlighted the guys who ended up being major contributors here.

If you remember this cycle well enough you can skip down to the next bit. If note, here's a…

Quick Refresher on the 2018 Cycle

Haskins rose from the bottom of the depth chart after three guys ahead of him fumbled. [Barron]

Quarterback: Though he wasn't great, and got hurt, for most of the 2018 cycle the assumption was Michigan had their QB for the foreseeable future in Brandon Peters (2016), with Dylan McCaffrey on deck. The appearance of a set underclassman starter turned off the 5-star types. Michigan never as interested in Tyler Shough as vice versa, but guys they targeted like JT Daniels and Dorian Thompson-Robinson were unreceptive.

Running Back & WR: A similar story: Michigan had two highly ranked WR classes on campus already, and more felt like a luxury. RB had plenty of PT to go around but M was shut out of their top targets early. Instead the staff homed in on targets like Hassan Haskins, Chris Olave, and Ronnie Bell that they loved and hardly anyone else knew about. Word got out on Olave. M got a fullback-like object in in-state ATH Ben VanSumeren.

Offensive Line: As with Olave, scouting victories got M in early with Jarrett Patterson, Nicholas Petit-Frere, and Penei Sewell, but those amounted to nothing, and Alabama was able to flip center commit Emil Ekiyor with an offer of early playing time. The two tackles Michigan did get we called "Frey Types" because 2x OL coach Greg Frey discovered (25 years after Jerry Hanlon produced NFL Hall-of-Fame candidate Mike Kenn) that super-athletic tackles are often tight ends in high school. Frey's first application of this theory at Michigan yielded the class of Taylor Lewan and Michael Schofield. His second swing 9 years later brought in Jalen Mayfield, who moved to OL as a senior, and Ryan Hayes, who started his Michigan career at tight end.

Defensive Line: The disappointment of the class was they had a big need, a good development record, and strong connections with some elites like Eyabi Anoma (now Okie), Micah Parsons, Tommy Togiai, Tyler Friday, and KJ Henry, but got strung along or left out on all of them. Part of the issue was they just got a big DT class in 2017 and nobody yet would guess that Aubrey Solomon, James Hudson, Donovan Jeter, Deron Irving-Bey and Phil Paea would produce just one decent year as a backup combined. Even their second wave of guys like Alim McNeill were unreceptive. Michigan offered 3-star Jordan Davis on his way up but then Georgia did too. Their one 4-star, who rose up the rankings really late, was a legacy, Aidan Hutchinson. They had to get creative, offering Reagan Upshaw's son Taylor, who was barely 230 pounds, and Julius Welschof out of Germany.

Linebacker: As usual they trusted Don Brown to look for doom squirrels and that looked prescient when commit Cam McGrone shot up late. Viper prospect Otis Reese, the only top-100 player in the class, flipped to Georgia on Signing Day.

Secondary: This was the long-and-tall class. Needing bodies badly, still chafing from being burned by slot fades vs their Cov 1/Rush 5 system, and unable to get in on any of the Jourdan Lewis types in a down year for the position, Michigan decided to go all in on guys who looked Channing Stribling and Jeremy Clark. The one with any recruiting pedigree was Myles Sims, but he was 173 pounds. We thought they might have something in Gemon Green, though they had to take his twin (Texas wouldn't), and nobody else but Texas was that enthused. Sammy Faustin was a recent immigrant, and also long and lean. They flipped Vincent Gray late from a Missouri commitment, but he got a few late offers (Oregon, Notre Dame) that suggested he wasn't as much of a flier.

Specialists: We didn't even know they recruited Jake Moody as a scholarship player until after the class was signed and a donor pointed it out on the message board, that's how quiet that was kept.

Transfers: The portal wasn't a thing yet, but Michigan addressed the quarterback problem creatively, battling Ole Miss and the NCAA to pry former 5-star/Mississippi starter Shea Patterson out of Oxford. They also tried to buttress the secondary depth with a grad transfer cornerback looking to expand his rolodex.

Harbaugh's Moneyball Tactics

A high school QB and a TE [Patrick Barron] 

Going through that list you can a lot of creativity at work. This was noticed at the time. Here's an incomplete list of the (often overlapping) ideas that Harbaugh's program used to Moneyball recruiting:

1. Find athletes to develop. Multi-sport guys, guys playing QB for small schools, big-/fleet-footed tight ends to grow into OTs, mogul-skiing Germans with crazy 80s workout videos.
2. Recruit sons of pro linemen (model: Mo Hurst, examples: Hinton, Upshaw, Jenkins) to grow into DTs, since they're monetarily not as affected by the bag and have a better idea of the demands.
3. Hire the guys who built the best high school programs. In 2016 Harbaugh hired Devin Bush Sr. and Chris Partridge, who built Flanagan (Bush Jr, Devin Gil, Josh Metellus, Wisconsin's Faion Hicks) and Paramus (Peppers, Gary, JBB, Singleton) into regional powers. Harbaugh also twice hired Biff Poggi, who's the guy behind St. Francis, and more recently Ron Bellamy, who made West Bloomfield metro-Detroit's new Farmington Hills Harrison. This didn't help them much in 2018, when the NCAA passed the Partridge Rule, except Poggi kept them in it for Eyabi Okie until Bama bagged him at the end.
4. Focus on yards after contact? Their secret sauce for RBs is still mostly secret, and it's not like Blake Corum, Donovan Edwards, or Zach Charbonnet were big secrets, but one commonality in Michigan's underrated RBs, from Karan Higdon to Ben Hall, is they had a lot of YAC in high school.
5. Recruit off the beaten path. Michigan has a very strong relationship with the program that sends Europeans to American football. They got Haskins and Bell out of Missouri. Recruiting has mostly moved on from the old school system of having a network of alumni and friends of the program keeping you apprised of players, but Michigan is one of thew few northern schools that still very much
6. Recruit ceiling, backfill with floor. They zeroed in on Joe Milton for their QB of the class, probably because DTR wasn't feeling it. They also offered Cade McNamara, one of the most prolific slingers in Nevada history, for the 2019 class at the same time.
7. Attack the South. This was the downslope of one of Harbaugh's original exploits upon arriving at Michigan: going into the South to find guys that get passed over by Bama/Georgia only to end up very good players for Auburn or Mississippi State. Harbaugh's infamous satellite camp spree in the summer of 2016—and the NCAA's ban on the practice—was one piece of this. By 2017 the SEC was in full defense mode, and successful at it. Georgia bought Isaiah Wilson out of the 2017 class at the end, and did the same again by yoinking Michigan's top-rated commit, viper Otis Reese, the only top-100 player in the class, on Signing Day. It was, by accounts, a lot more than UGA would usually pay for a Reese, and meant, and received, as a message: Leave SEC talent to the SEC! But Harbaugh's Southern Strategy still made off with a couple of flier RB candidates in Christian Turner and converted QB Michael Barrett, plus 4-star Myles Sims from Georgia, the Greens and 4* TE Mustapha Muhammad from Texas, and three overlooked Floridians in Joe Milton, Sammy Faustin, and Taylor Upshaw.

There were also a couple of Don Brown-specific strategies:

1. Own the Northeast. Those relationships have continued post-Brown, though Massachusetts is no longer Michichusetts.
2. Recruit system LBs instead of making it hard. McGrone was another Bush-alike, perfect for a one-high system that often blitzed its MLBs or asked them to play to spill. Can he diagnose plays, play chicken in gaps, take on blockers? Who cares: the way we play he won't need to!
3. Go long in the secondary. Who needs speed at DB when you have length? No more slot fades!

This isn't a comprehensive list of the tricks Harbaugh's employed to find value in recruiting or get in with players Michigan might normally not have connections with.

The long CBs idea—though they've since gone that direction again because Clinkscale likes length—was kind of a disaster. I say "kind of" because Green and Gray turned out to be fine and fine enough players, Sims was his own issue, and Faustin was dealing with stuff that would have derailed any football career. St-Juste in the previous class was also a successful Big Ten cornerback. The moral of the story here was you don't have to fly, but you do have to be fast enough.

How Was This Class Successful?

Do you count transfers? [Barron]

While there were some notable whiffs, what set the 2018 class apart turned out to be their player evaluations.

1. Michigan found some dudes that didn't take a ton of recruiting effort. Hassan Haskins, Ronnie Bell, Aidan Hutchinson and Jake Moody went on to be some of the best at what they do in school history. Hutchinson was a legacy; the rest were scouts they managed to keep secret until late in the cycle, even to the point of drawing out the recruitments of Haskins and Bell so other schools wouldn't get wise to how much Michigan's coaches coveted the two Missouri prospects. They snuck Moody in the class with so much cloak and dagger that we thought he was a walk-on until a reporter discovered he wasn't.

Also Adam Schnepp came back from scouting Aidan Hutchinson swearing that this was a steal, but for most of the cycle he was seen as just a legacy who probably didn't have the athleticism to stick outside. As soon as Notre Dame realized it, Michigan turned up the heat and got him to commit, admitting to Steve Lorenz later that they hoped the industry would stick to its tradition of not reevaluating recruits who don't gin up much recruiting drama.

2. Michigan could afford to be patient. Michigan stayed away from multi-school battles over players who could help a team immediately, and brought in a lot of projects. You had multi-sport high school QBs like Luke Schoonmaker and Michael Barrett, a German athlete in Julius Welschof, a TE/FB/LB/DE/?? in Ben VanSumeren, two OT prospects who'd recently been tight ends, an insane-armed QB who completed >50% of his passes in high school, and host of mostly (the Greens) or completely (Faustin) raw DBs who could be corners or safeties. Taylor Upshaw "didn't have a butt." Even the battles they won, like McGrone (over ND), Mustapha Muhammad (Texas) were ranked highly for their upside, not immediate playability, and the SEC powers backed off Myles Sims because he clearly needed to put on weight to make it on the next level.

3. Michigan trusted their exploits. Developing athletic tight ends into tackles paid off in Mayfield, who left for the NFL too early but was ready to play as a redshirt freshman, and Ryan Hayes, who took longer but is leaving this year as a bona fide pro prospect. Their strategy of turning athletes into tight ends found another in Schoonmaker. Their strategy of taking multi-sport athletes and finding a spot for them yielded Michael Barrett. Their "discovery" that length could make up for speed in the secondary looked really bad in short-term hindsight, but Gray and Gemon Green won back some legitimacy, and other programs (Minnesota, Kentucky) have had a lot of success with that idea.

How Was This Class Not Successful?

And then he silly walked away. [Barron]

We can't just point to a higher-than-normal diamond rate of the rocks they found found in the rough and say "Yay, win!" A recruiting class has to address holes in the roster. It's generally too much to ask them to fill immediate needs, but a good recruiting staff should be able to shore up weak positions in a couple of years and put enough in the pipeline to not have other holes forming down the road. So let's assess the 2018 class's needs and see how they were filled:

No DTs. This was the big thing at the time. Michigan graduated Mo Hurst and went into 2018 with just Mone/Kemp/Dwumfour and carrying a five-man 2017 class that washed out (Jeter became useful late in his career, but only as a second-stringer). Until the 2019 class of Mazi Smith and Chris Hinton were juniors, DT was a weakness that had to be papered over.

Speed in secondary. The long-and-tall experiment was a disaster in the short term, and in the long term only yielded two starters—Gemon Green and Vincent Gray—at cornerback, neither of whom ever got to Stribling-level. Safety was a complete washout, leading to a year when Michigan was playing walk-on Hunter Reynolds, putting too much on 2019 5-star Dax Hill, and running stuff Dax might be able to do with Brad Hawkins. They needed at least one 4.5* on a Lewis/Hill/Long/Thomas level and someone able to play safety. Out of the guys they got only German Green projected there when we scouted them, and that was more of a "because he can't play corner" thing. German ended up at cornerback anyways.

No QB ready for 2020. Recruiting Shea, who had junior eligibility in 2018, and subsequently losing Peters/McCaffrey to the portal sped up the timetable for the next guy, and Joe Milton was emphatically *NOT* the guy who could be ready by 2020. They tried anyways, and wound up with a major hole at QB that season. A high-floor QB in addition to the high-ceiling project would have been great.

No edge rusher to pair with Hutchinson. Josh Uche was a 2016; Chase Winovich was graduating. Hutchinson looked like an ideal anchor, but Upshaw and Welschof were grow-an-anchors too. Neither one of them popping into an edge threat was foreseeable, and the need for one of those guys was evident by 2018 as 2017s Luiji Vilain and Corey Malone-Hatcher were already losing most or all of their careers to injury. Michigan was lucky to have Ojabo, a 2019, pop last year, and unlucky that he popped into a 3-and-out. But even going into 2020 there was a huge drop-off at DE when Paye or Hutch (or both) went out, and Michigan has been having to hit the portal in 2022 and 2023 to find help.

Needed more than one LB. McGrone shouldn't have left early, and a small class after taking Drew Singleton, Josh Ross, and Jordan Anthony in 2017 was understandable. Turns out all of those guys but Ross were gone by 2021, and Michigan had to start freshmen last year and wait for Michael Barrett to transition from Viper over the course of 2022.

No Interior OL. Maybe they didn't know yet that Cesar Ruiz was a three-and-done but this was the time to get a center prospect. They didn't, and got lucky that walk-on Andrew Vastardis could do it. Likewise, burned redshirts for Bredeson and Onwenu meant they would need successors ready for 2020 at guard. They ended up having to kick Stueber inside and play Zinter as a true freshman.

2018 Lessons for 2023 Stargazers

In all, the 2018 class was able to produce a lot of valuable players who contributed to Michigan's success in 2021 and 2022, which was Years 4 and 5 of their Michigan careers. This was also a class that failed to cover for some evident miscues in the 2017 class, however. By the time the 2018 class were juniors the major contributors were Aidan Hutchinson, Hassan Haskins, Ronnie Bell, Jalen Mayfield, Ryan Hayes, Cam McGrone, and Michael Barrett. Not coincidentally that includes the only two players ranked in composite top-150. Also not coincidentally the season went off a cliff when three of them got injured.

This weakness of the class was evident at the time, and the downside of their strategy of recruiting long-term payoffs: they're not as useful in the short term. Even if 2020 had not been blown up by COVID and Nico Collins and Ambry Thomas were available, that season probably ends up 7-5 or worse. To not have that happen, the 2018 class probably needed earlier hits from Joe Milton, Taylor Upshaw, Julius Welschof, and Gemon Green as well.

This brings me to Lesson 1:

Whiffs in 2017 were a problem for 2018. When going over the list of things that went wrong, I kept finding a glut of players in the class ahead that understandably made recruiting those positions in 2018 more difficult. That was most apparent at DT; Michigan had a five-man 2017 class, and by the time they had an inkling that most of them were lost causes it was far too late to make up for it. Linebacker was a similar story. The 2017 class's defections were another issue. Of that 30-man class, only 11 players made it to their 4th year. Even if Michigan wasn't recruiting off an 8-5 season, they had to be reassessing their recruiting strategy at that point. Which leads to Lesson 2:

The 2018 class stuck around. The program has said they focused on guys who wanted to be at Michigan, which we took for the same kind of explanation that Michigan State used when they brought in classes full of guys outside the top-1,000. But those MSU classes also produced winning teams by retaining players a long time, and Michigan's four-year attrition dropped from 63% to 40% between the 2017 and 2018 classes.

Also nine members of that 2018 class were still on the team for a 5th season (this one). To date, the 2018 class is Harbaugh's only class to have a retention rate higher than one of Lloyd Carr's, which is pretty extraordinary considering this class went through two cycles of the portal era.

It can both be true that developmental 3-stars stick around longer than NFL-minded 4-stars, and that the program would have taken more of the latter if they could have. Somewhere in there however I do think Michigan began to put more faith in their scouting. It's telling that they came out of 2018 recruiting better, but also recruiting against Brian Kelly's Notre Dame, the scouting gold standard of college football, until dramatically different approaches to NIL pushed us apart this cycle. This matters because, Lesson 3 is:

Higher recruiting rankings are generally better. You know who was the most awesome member of the 2018 class? Aidan Hutchinson, the highest-ranked member. On the other end of the scale, German Green came with little fanfare to recommend him and spent five years as a depth DB.

The 2018 cycle was something of a nadir for the recruiting industry. Scout had just been wiped out, ESPN stopped paying attention to recruits who didn't look likely to have a televised signing ceremony, 247 was young and still pumping out a gazillion articles about visit reactions with scant scouting in between, Rivals had pulled out of every camp but their own and otherwise only evaluated guys when they committed.

So there were more blind spots that year, and this came out when we were evaluating them as recruits. Luke Schoonmaker, Ryan Hayes, Michael Barrett, and Ronnie Bell came out significantly higher to us than the recruiting industry. That said, Brian gave a "Very High" to Hutchinson, McGrone, and Sims on the General Excitement Level metric, and was least enthusiastic about German Green, Vincent Gray, Julius Welschof, Sammy Faustin, Taylor Upshaw, and Hassan Haskins. The last was wrong. Sims was wrong. YMMV on McGrone/Gray, but you see the pattern.

Our lesson here is there are often very good reasons the scouts rate guys how they do. As we delve further we learn more. Our site is going to take a much more comprehensive look at the 20-30 guys Michigan recruits than the national sites who are looking at 50 times as many. There were good reasons to think Ronnie Bell and Luke Schoonmaker would be way better than their rankings. Look for those reasons, and also look for reasons why other schools made it easy on Michigan. Sometimes (Haskins) those reasons are so hidden only the program knows. Sometimes (German Green) it's pretty obvious.

Applying This to 2023

Saying this class will match 2018's at this juncture is silly. What we can do is look at this as-of-now 23-man class (plus 7 transfers as of now) against the lessons of 2018. That class:

Quarterback: They needed one, and like 2018, they got a Bell brother who's ranked in the way deep 3-star range. I don't get the sense that Orji or Denegal is going to be The Guy after McCarthy, who may go pro after next year, so not having more than Bell in this class is rough. Perhaps they're certain to keep JJ through his senior year, pick up Jadyn Davis in 2024, and go into 2025 with a true sophomore Davis? Or perhaps Davis Warren is Playoff-caliber guy. But this was a miss.

Running Back & Receiver: We didn't believe this staff on Haskins so maybe they have a real dude in Benjamin Hall to go with Cole Cabana, who's a far better prospect as your lightning than Christian Turner. Then again, Haskins was tearing it up in nowheresville, Missouri, not getting passed by younger backs at a Georgia power. There was no receiver haul in 2018 to compare to the three guys they got in 2023, which is a good sign for the position in the future. This staff hasn't missed much on tight ends so two more in the Schoonmaker mold is great.

Offensive Line: They got a high-ceiling in Efobi but didn't go Frey-types. Herring to me seems like a guard; the staff loves Evan Link. Their success in the portal makes this a very different situation than 2018's. Note that Nugent, Henderson, and Hinton all have two years left to play, and Hinton could even redshirt to draw that out to three. This is quite a new exploit they've found if they can keep the OL-U thing going.

Defensive Line: They got DTs, and the depth chart is already on far better footing now than in 2018. It's so nice not to have that problem anymore. Enow Etta is ranked higher than Hutchinson was but you can't expect THAT out of him. Koumba is a fair comp to Welschof, a boom or bust to unwrap in years. Breeon Ishmail is your Taylor Upshaw but with a lot more upside as an edge rusher. Josaiah Stewart is that rush specialist they couldn't get before.

Linebacker: The McGrone here is Ernest Hausmann, who should be ready to fill a starting role in 2024. Michigan also managed to add numbers here instead of getting blocked by a previous class. Hayden Moore is very much what this staff wants, and Semaj Bridgeman is very much a body they didn't get in 2018. Jason Hewlett is a direct comp to Barrett, though we don't have the Viper position for him anymore.

Secondary: If you zoom out the three-man DB class kind of looks like the 2018 guys. Calhoun would fit right in with them. But D'Juan Waller is more of a superb athlete they hope to develop, and Jyaire Hill is a playmaker they had to fight much harder for than the higher-ranked Myles Sims. I do wonder if safety this year had a bit of a shadow effect because of last year's safety class. Those guys couldn't crack the rotation, or even pass Quinten Johnson this year, which gives me pause.

Prediction: How 2018 is this class?

I think it will be a lot deeper, but the peaks won't be as high. Top recruits like Etta, English, and Samaha can be very good players without being Hutchinson, Bell, and Moody. I think Jyaire Hill is going to be better than Gemon Green, that Waller has a higher ceiling than any 2018 DB save perhaps Sims, and that Calhoun gives you a nice Vincent Grey to fall back on. Unlike 2018, this class also addressed upcoming holes everywhere but quarterback. They also found in the portal important pieces that they didn't have access to in 2018 to shore up near term issues that a class of mostly long-term projects can't fill. A 60% four-year retention rate is a lot to ask in the portal era, but in the portal era you can also take bigger swings knowing you get more shots at a higher floor.

So while it's not fair to say this is like the 2018 class, you can look at the 2023 signees as a continuation of lessons and strategies they had to learn with Hutchinson's class: Good scouting, good pipelines, high ceilings, and a plan for any holes you will inevitably develop from this inexact science.

But would it have killed them to go after just one Frey type this cycle?