Jimmystats: The 2018 Class in Context, Part 1: Offense
It’s tough to see what they’ll become [UM Bentley Library]
So yesterday came and went the way it went. The SEC cheats, Michigan’s a tougher sell right now for reasons, yada yada—those who choose to rend garments or yell at the folks wearing tatters have plenty of threads to do so in. Let’s talk about the guys Michigan got.
As it so happens I keep a database of Michigan recruits that goes back to the 1993 class, and that gives us a chance to put all the new guys in context. Shall we?
QUARTERBACK
Shea Patterson is a transfer but let’s start with him for we can have nice things reasons. Also because he was one of the highest-rated quarterbacks out of high school to ever come here:
Shea in 2016 was the #1 Dual Threat or #1 QB to everybody, and between third and 15th overall. Quarterbacks ranked in the Top 5 overall tend to have some real talent—nobody doubts Mallett’s arm. A year of starting in the SEC should put Shea in good shape to challenge for the top job this season, provided the NCAA waives the transfer year. Yay for five-star quarterbacks!
Joe Milton comes in as a project, though one with significant upside. That kind of player usually creates a large amount of disagreement among the recruiting sites and it would appear that’s the case with Joe:
ESPN rated him the highest, which is a bit of a red flag since they tend to fire and forget. Scout had him one of their highest three-stars (before they merged with 247) and Rivals had him a solid 4-star. 247 was down relative to the others. The result is somewhere between Dylan McCaffrey (4.31 average star rating) and Alex Malzone, and closer to the latter. His late fall on 247 dropped him to 16th in the composite score. Some guys you’ve probably heard of who’ve fallen around that range in past years include Maryland’s Kasim Hill (2017), Northwestern’s Clayton Thorson, Wisconsin’s Bart Houston, ND’s Everett Golson, and Messiah deWeaver, Brian Lewerke, and Andrew Maxwell of MSU.
I also tried to find a Harbaugh comp and came up with 2009 Stanford recruit Josh Nunes. Like Milton, Nunes put up big high school stats with a low completion percentage. He wasn’t much of a runner. From my Hall of Harbaugh Quarterbacks piece from a few years ago:
Josh Nunes, the 9th pro-style QB and 139th overall player according to the 247 composite. Nunes was a prolific passer in high school (6,306 yards and 52 TDs in 34 starts) who on Harbaugh’s recommendation added running (3.1 YPA with sacks included) to his reads as a senior. Nunes was heir apparent to Andrew Luck but lost his job to Kevin Hogan while out with a foot injury in 2012, and lost his career to a freak pectoral injury in 2013.
Also the greatest QB of all time was rated around this spot in 1995, but that was 1995.
[Hit THE JUMP for the rest of the offense]
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RUNNING BACK
[Paul Sherman]
These guys are all in a relatively small grouping:
Running back heights and weights are complete B.S. by the way so ignore those, lest you confuse Michael Barrett for Thomas Rawls.
I believe a few of the guys on this list you’re not as familiar with were Carr camp commits who got bumped up some for Michigan interest. Most of them of course are Rich Rod’s various swings at a Steve Slaton type. What we’re really looking at is the murky depths of running back recruits who weren’t scouted well: scatbacks who played receiver or something in high school, bowling balls from Iowa and Flint, etc.
Projecting running backs from the pond of generic three-stars is difficult. These guys often have something in their game—lack of size, lack of top-end speed—that shows on tape. Turner you can put around Karan Higdon-level. The other guys are probably going to do as well as the system can use them. The types who turn into NFL draft picks are usually high 4 stars or 5-stars, but of course we don’t want any more of those.
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FULLBACK
[Marc-Grégor Campredon]
Rankings mean diddly here but here is Ben VanSumeren among the scholarship FBs:
Back when crootin scouts treated fullbacks as a position that everybody needs, the face-mashing types who could win a regional skills competition would shoot up the rankings. It’s hard to put that into context today.
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| No YOU just keep bringing up Anes because his floor mates always tell the poop story when you do so. [UM Bentley] |
The Hammer Panda got ranked in this zone too but he was about 40 pounds heavier and mostly known as a plus receiver for an H-back tight end. VanSumeren isn’t Ben Mason’s size, but not Ben Mason—probably closer to what Wyatt Shallman was as a recruit, if Shallman desired to play the position he got ranked at. Anes is the closer example—if they did SPARQ scores back then Anes would have done well by accounts.
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WIDE RECEIVER
The rankings might be less instructive for projecting Bell than the career of his new coach [Eric Upchurch]
With five of the top 20 receivers Michigan’s ever recruited currently on the team, this was a year to take a flier, and Ronnie Bell is ahead of nobody but a JUCO I couldn’t figure out how to rank:
That’s really no comparison: historically sites didn’t rank far enough down to put Ronnie Bell on the scales. Neither would any of the sites stand particularly strongly behind their ratings here, since Bell chose football after they’d pretty much put the class to bed. The guy in range here is D.J. Williamson, a track star whom Rich Rod convinced to play football who turned out to be just that: a track guy who needed convincing to bother to play football. This is the worst way to get a read on Bell so let’s just move on.
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TIGHT END
He’s pretty Butt. [Bryan Fuller]
Mustapha Muhammad generated more disagreement on paper than in the final numbers. ESPN had him the #2 inline tight end, while Rivals thought he was barely a four-star, and 247/Scout came in at a Top 150ish player. Basically Jake Butt:
Historically these high four-star tight ends work out pretty well, though Mackey Award winner is a tough ask. He’s not in the range of Jerame Tuman or Devin Asiasi—the two immediate impact types Michigan’s recruited for the position (Tim Massaquoi and Mark Campbell were rated at other positions). But “between Aaron Shea and Jake Butt” is encouraging. Ignoring Jim Fisher for lack of data, every Top 200 type tight end that Michigan’s recruited has ended up a draft pick or is eventually going to.
Now we have a scroll quite a ways to get to Luke Schoonmaker and the generic three-stars:
Paskorz slipped in between them this week but Schoonmaker and McKeon are close comps as unscouted athletes whom Harbaugh snatched from Egypt. All the other guys in range were low-rated EDGE prospects so McKeon is really it.
I believe Ryan Hayes will grow into an OT—his speed limits how much of an impact player he can be at tight end—so I have him ranked there.
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OFFENSIVE TACKLE
What if he’s tight end AND he’s Schofield? /mind blown [Fuller]
No, once again Michigan was not able to reel in an instantly viable left tackle despite an open door at both tackle positions to play early. The good news is eventually guys like Jaylen Mayfield and Ryan Hayes do tend to work out:
Somehow the “FINE we’ll let you be a four-star” late riser types hits the sweet spot for Michigan offensive tackle prospects. Grant Newsome was a super smart son of an Ivy League professor and one of America’s top secret service agents whom Brady Hoke managed to keep stashed away through all the turmoil of 2014. Michael Schofield is probably the closer comp to Mayfield, despite having two inches on him, as ~200ish OT prospects praised for their lateral mobility and intelligence.
“We turned an athletic 6’8” stick into an NFL left tackle” is a VERY common (Ryan Ramczyk, Jack Conklin, Jason Spriggs, Eric Fisher, and Ryan Clady are a few who became 1st rounders) story, but the problem with that projection is it ignores a ton of similar high schoolers who wound up looking more like a power forward than an agile mountain.
Ryan Hayes is next to Juwann Bushell-Beatty despite most of a human in weight difference between them so let’s try the 247 database for a sample that’s not from an NFL draft history site.
2009: Reid Fragel, Ohio State: Became an okay OT.
2011: Giorgio Newberry, FSU, 2011: Move to DT
2014: Noah Beh, Penn State: Transferred to Delaware. Derek Allen, Rhode Island: Became a starter as a RS Junior, will finish career at R.I. Koda Martin, Texas A&M: Lost starting job 10 games in, will be TAMU’s LT this year.
2015: Cole Chewins, MSU: Lots of starts but still undersized. Brady Aiello, Oregon: Projected to claim LT job this year.
2016: Nathan Smith, USC, Marcus Tatum, Tennessee, and Alex Akingbulu, UCLA are probably too young to tell us anything yet. Smith tore his ACL last year. Tatum made a few starts but was bad. Akingbulu hasn’t played.
February 8th, 2018 at 5:51 PM ^
February 8th, 2018 at 6:14 PM ^
February 8th, 2018 at 6:32 PM ^
February 8th, 2018 at 7:13 PM ^
February 9th, 2018 at 12:04 AM ^
February 8th, 2018 at 7:21 PM ^
The problem with grabbing a boatload of 3.5* guys they can get is football players want to play, not be somebody's backup plan in case they get an Isaiah Wilson or Alex Leatherwood or Nicholas Petit-Frere. So you can get a few of them to commit but the more you pursue other guys the more they'll pursue other opportunities. Michigan lost Kai-Leon Herbert because it was looking like he'd be the #4 guy in a 7-man OL class. Michigan would have taken them all for sure, but if Miami's going to make you their #1 guy, that's a good option.
I think they lost Mekhi Becton the same way: Chuck Filiaga decided on Michigan, and Louisville and V-Tech called Becton to say "Look, Michigan got their play-immediately guy, but we still have a giant hole at left tackle and you're competing with ____."
February 9th, 2018 at 10:35 AM ^
how do State and Wisci do it?
February 9th, 2018 at 12:21 PM ^
Wisconsin pulls guys out of territority that isn't well scouted. In most of the country--and Michigan is now included in that list--high school talent gets concentrated in a few schools and leagues. If you're good enough you get recruited to the Catholic schools or the big programs, and if you're awesome you can go to IMG or something. There are also tons of camps kids can go to and get noticed. Michigan was out in front of that with SMSB but today there are 7-on-7s almost every weekend in the South. It's very rare that these concentrations miss a talented player.
Wisconsin and the rest of that region isn't developed like that, and prefer it that way. So it's really hard for, say, Michigan to build a pipeline there by developing a strong relationship with a couple of coaches of their power programs. Barry Alvarez knows every high school coach in the state, and in Minnesota, and into the Dakotas. They tell him when they've got a guy and Wisconsin gets a year or two before anyone's ever heard of him to evaluate and build that relationship.
Michigan State's deal is different. They don't recruit a ton of OL, or a ton of guys at all. Their whole thing is they zoom in on their favorite targets--usually guys who were passed over for some reason (that reason is often behavorial or academics--Saban even passes Dantonio info on some Southern kids he can't get into Bama). They've also got a set defensive system that Dantonio developed and knows how to pick players for and teach better than anyone, and that system happens to be perfect for the Big Ten right now because the QBs in this league can't bomb their way out of it. The other thing MSU does, normally, is redshirt everybody and hang onto them. They have extremely low attrition compared to other schools, and considering how many bad seeds they take (hi Chris Frey) that is doubly surprising. The program will do EVERYTHING to hang onto players, so they always will have another redshirt sophore or redshirt junior to step in when a player graduates. A good example is how Michigan dismissed Logan Tuley-Tillman immediately when he videotaped consensual sex without the woman's permission. Michigan still has a left tackle problem, and that's a thing that MSU wouldn't have cared one iota about.
Neither of these are repeatable at Michigan. We're not on the edge of the last remanining recruiting backwater, and I would hope we'd never turn into the most shameful athletic department in the country.
I keep saying it and saying it: Michigan should be better at being Michigan.
February 9th, 2018 at 12:56 PM ^
Good insight.
I'm all about Michigan being better at being Michigan.... it just doesn't seem to be selling this year.
In the podcast Sam spoke about us revamping our recruiting staff?! I hadn't heard that. Mama Gwen is still listed on staff, but they said she was gone?
I wonder what our niche is? Smart 4 stars who want to play ball but also have a great school?
To me, and I'm obviously biased, Michigan seems to have a nearly unbeatable brand. Come here, play football, get a great degree without incurring debt, and with the huge amount of players successful in real life, and the largest alumni base around, have an amazing network with which to get a job. If you go to the league, great. If you don't, you're covered there too.
With that I'd think we could get some mid to upper tier kids who are smart and disciplined. But the fact that we couldn't even get kids to visit in January is dismaying.
February 8th, 2018 at 7:53 PM ^
So what's the John Anes poop story that's being referenced in that caption?
December 19th, 2018 at 8:31 PM ^
I have no idea what that reference is referring to! I know John personally and I'd like to know as well!
February 8th, 2018 at 8:27 PM ^
Michigan had a running back in 2005 named Mister Simpson? I've been a fan since the 80s, so how have I never heard his (remarkable) name?
February 8th, 2018 at 9:08 PM ^
http://www.fox19.com/story/13837937/former-colerain-football-star-arres…
Sorry that didn't embed but will tell you why you heard so little of this man.
February 9th, 2018 at 12:07 AM ^
February 8th, 2018 at 11:22 PM ^
2 of my favorite running backs who never did anything. They just looked impressive in a uniform
February 10th, 2018 at 1:23 PM ^
February 8th, 2018 at 8:28 PM ^
February 9th, 2018 at 12:06 AM ^
February 9th, 2018 at 8:03 AM ^
We'll have an HTTV article either this year or next year with Bo's top recruiting assistant, Fritz Seyferth, also known as the guy who brought back the Pretzel Bell, and the guy who made the key block to spring Touchdown Billy Taylor for Touchdown Billy Taylor's touchdown (and converted a 4th and 1 by diving over the OSU front the play before that).
The short version is recruiting was quite different back then, but Bo's classes, if ranked and rated as precisely as they are now, would probably have blown any modern class away. Scholarship limits shrank slowly over the course of his career, but by his retirement I think they were just about go down to 89 (I have to look but IIRC it was 1993 when it went to 85).
Bo was very regional, however, National recruiting was hard to do in those days, and only a very few schools even attempted it--until the mid-'80s high school players rarely thought of playing outside of their region, and if they did they went to the SWC because they were paying players.
What you'd see in this era was one or two schools would dominate television in a regional market, and therefore dominate on the football field. Alabama had the Southeast to itself. Oklahoma and Nebraska fought over the riches in Texas. USC owned the West Coast. Penn State was alone with the Atlantic. And in the Midwest if you turned on the television on Saturday, you saw Michigan or Ohio State. Occasionally there would be upstarts, and they were considered interlopers and (often correctly) dirty: Pitt, FSU, Miami and whatnot. The only national program was Notre Dame, but this would come back to bite them.
What changed in the mid-'80s was the big1984 Supreme Court case, which forced the NCAA to stop only showing a few games on TV per week (they were certain this would dilute profits!) Before that case only a few schools could even offer the chance to regularly be on television, and Michigan and Ohio State were the only two that could do so consistently through that entire period (Notre Dame, which recruited nationally, was hit the hardest by the simultaneous growth of rampant cheating and the breaking of the TV oligarchy).
After '84 Michigan and Ohio State had to face scholarship limits and a Michigan State or Purdue or Wisconsin who could actually get on TV regularly. But that's only the last few years of Bo's career, and before that he and Woody/Earl cleaned up in the Midwest, took a spattering of kids from further afield, and beat the crap out of everyone else but each other. That whole "Big 2, Little 8" dynamic began on the recruiting trail.
Again it's hard to tell, but Michigan's classes in the Bo era would probably have fallen in the Top 5 most years, averaging 4.5 five-stars per class and maybe 20 four-stars. Except they'd always fail to get a kicker.
February 8th, 2018 at 8:56 PM ^
I love how Jon Jansen was 299 pounds and classified as a TE.
February 8th, 2018 at 9:36 PM ^
For some reason they have collegiate weights in the grid. IIRC Jansen was in the 240-250 range as a HS senior. He was a basketball player and required some projection.
February 8th, 2018 at 9:36 PM ^
February 9th, 2018 at 5:27 AM ^
February 9th, 2018 at 7:02 AM ^
One could argue that the only reason the previous 2 classes were top 10 was their size. We are coming up short on elite talent every year, disturbingly so on the OL. I know I'm not an expert like the homers here, but as far as I know, elite OL play is still required to win championships.
How do you win without great players? How do you recruit great players without winning? The bowl game was a disaster for this class, rightfully so or not, it made the coaching staff look incompetent.
February 9th, 2018 at 10:46 AM ^
February 9th, 2018 at 10:09 AM ^
For what it's worth regarding Harbaugh, this class, and recruiting under Harbaugh in general: Things I've heard which I consider to be very reliable given the source.
--He LOVES this class and noted how not one guy ever behaved or indicated they were doing a Michigan football a favor by committing. I guess in the recruiting world it's fairly common to have at least a guy or two (or more) in any class who do project the opposite and even bring it to campus after signing. So it's reminicent of the type of players he stocked his program with at Stanford.
--He is uncompromising in his promise to the player and the parents that their child will get a great education and the expectations in that area will be high. He sells that prominently and is looking for that kind of kid who wants the same. The rigor of Michigan academics and the freedom for a player to choose his discipline track is something he sells actively. He also sells the academic support to help guarantee success.
--The robotic type guy we think we see in press conferences or on the sideline since they changed the behavior rules, is 180 out from the guy recruiting. His enthusiasm and passion for Michigan and the program being constructed leaves no doubt to recruits this is where his heart is.
Offenses and schemes can be improved. More effective recruiters can be hired. Relationships with high schools can grow and deepen. But the type of foundation for something unique, successful, and lasting has been solidly laid.
I don't want the thing blowing sideways again when Jim does leave, even say a decade or two down the road. Don't want it to lose it's way.
We may have to accept the reality that certain recruits we'll never be in on no matter how much we win. And also know that in many cases, that's by design.
February 9th, 2018 at 10:33 AM ^
"We may have to accept the reality that certain recruits we'll never be in on no matter how much we win. And also know that in many cases, that's by design. "
The academics thing cuts both ways. You will get kids who really want to get a good or decent degree from a school with a great rep. But You will also get kids who want to see if they can get into the league, and who think a heavy academic workload might get in the way of that.
There is a difference between the B1G and the SEC. My niece (not an athlete) scored a 36 on the ACT and had a 4.0 and a ton of extracurriculars. Apparently 'Bama put a ton of money on the table in terms of scholarships. The B1G schools had her competing to get in. (in fairness, they did offere performance scholarships, but nothing like down south).
So if that is a valid example, I could see a guy who wants to get into the league saying 'Yeah, go to Michigan and take hard courses and not have as much football success, or go to 'Bama and spend all my energy competing on the field, with a fair shot at the league and big money if I'm a success...'
Of course, the lack of signature wins and our inexplicable issues with O lines don't help. But even if we do return to the great O lines of yore we might still have trouble attracting guys who don't want to overhead of an academic load.
February 9th, 2018 at 10:25 AM ^
"anSumeren isn’t Ben Mason’s size, but not Ben Mason—probably closer to what Wyatt Shallman was as a recruit"
I sincerely hope this means we can expect more Wallaby's in the future.
February 9th, 2018 at 10:40 AM ^
If they acutally use him as a receiver I think Ben V. could be a very valuable piece. But that would mean the coaches would have to be inventive and do something that makes sense. But they struggle to throw to a weapon like Chris Evans, who would be a killer in-space type of guy. So who knows.
February 9th, 2018 at 11:54 AM ^
February 10th, 2018 at 9:23 AM ^
The takes about Frey, Jedd, and Warriner sure seem reasonable... if true, this is scary- could JH have an Achilles heel? A bit too loyal to NFL offensive schemes and his friends?
Not sure what that whole poop story about me, John Anes was all about... I'd be happy to address it and talk to the person accusing my life to be a "poop story"!
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