So this is unprecedented. As of writing this Michigan has already brought in five transfers in the week since the portal opened. They are widely expected to be adding a sixth in Indiana TE AJ Barner. What is going on? Did something change? Did we become the new Portal U? Well, I thought we should talk about it.

PORTAL?

Much of what Brian went through last week is still true. Zach Shaw of 247 wrote a comprehensive assessment of Michigan's needs yesterday that isn't behind a paywall so I'll just point you to that. Updates by position, with some additional scouting thoughts:

Cornerback: There are a lot of names out there and very little to suggest Michigan is making any headway with them. They're facing elite competition for Virginia's Fentrell Cypress, who's made visits to FSU and UCLA and "doesn't talk much about Ohio State"—it may be he's looking to go somewhere warm. UNC's Tony Grimes, whom Michigan recruited hard out of high school, is another option but he seems set on Virginia Tech unless Texas A&M can divert him. Last year's #1 overall recruit Travis Hunter entered the portal but people assume that's because he intends to follow Deion Sanders to Colorado and any Michigan hope is limited to "maybe we can get Charles Woodson in his ear" fanfiction at the moment. Michigan fans have noticed a few names from recruitments of old—Syracuse's Duce Chestnut is a tire worth re-kicking—but I assume Michigan's not going to move on anybody unless they think they're likely to be better than current options. Cornerback is also a position where guys can play early—2023 recruit Jyaire Hill left Michigan out of his top five but without any insider knowledge I assume that's just a fake out.

Offensive Line: Michigan added OT Myles Hinton and C Drake Nugent from Stanford to LaDarius Henderson. Henderson is gonna start; ASU fans don't have an MGoBlog equivalent to tell them things about offensive linemen yet they're universal in acclaiming Henderson the best player on their team this year. I watched some film on the Stanford guys last night. Hinton was a 5-star recruit but I would caution against assuming he's going to take a starting job in 2023. This year was marred by injury—the kind where you play on it then shut it down when the season's hopeless—but the player he was before the injury didn't seem to me like someone who's going to displace Barnhart, Jones, or Persi. Nugent is a different story; he was the best part of Stanford's OL last year, and has a lot of starting experience. PFF's OL grading issues make comparisons difficult but Stanford ran a similar offense to Michigan's and they rated Nugent the equal of Olu.

Defensive End: Michigan added Josaiah Stewart, a true sophomore Coastal Carolina edge who generated a lot of pressures in two years of starting. Brian's scouting was pretty thorough; I'm calling Stewart a "Danna-sized Tasmanian Devil." It's no guarantee that Stewart will start since McGregor/Moore/Okie have a lot of runway and Harrell/Upshaw have a lot of coaches' trust. But I'm comfortable at minimum suggesting Stewart is probably the favorite to start, and probably a lock on the passing downs job opposite Okie.

Linebacker: Adding Ernest Hausmann is a coup, especially since it appears Michigan could get back Michael Barrett, and Nikhai Hill-Green is coming off injury. Hausmann shouldn't be viewed as an instant starter after a true freshman season at Nebraska that was both promising and very "true freshman at Nebraska." The thing to be excited about here is his upside; expect some Junior Colson comps out of Schembechler Hall this offseason. Hausmann does immediately give them the space to move Mullings to running back now. The outlook here is "no longer desperately thin," with five playable guys by the end of the season versus the two they had this year, and Hausmann and Rolder representing a very fine future.

Tight End: Michigan seems to lead for Indiana TE AJ Barner after his visit, after which it felt like an announcement could come any time. Barner also visited UCLA last week, and seems to have several more schools interested. He's also a true junior so there may be issues with Michigan's transfer admissions policies to work through. Cal Poly freshman Josh Cueves is going to Washington.

[After THE JUMP: Are we Portal U now? Should we be?]

IS MICHIGAN THE BEST AT PORTAL?

At 53.8 portal points, Michigan currently ranks #1 in portal classes to 247, and the difference between them and #3 UCLA (at 36.2) would be a top-10 portal class on its own.

Four of Michigan's five portal commitments this week are rated as four-stars, including #2 overall transfer Ernest Hausmann. The fifth is center Drake Nugent, a 2022 preseason Rimington candidate with the clearest path to the field among the newcomers.

Michigan does seem to be getting a high number of their targets to make their decisions quickly. But the commonality between those decisions is they were all, to varying degrees, some form of "duh." Michigan's got a pretty rare combination of playing time, winning, development record, hardware, and prestige to sell right now, AND they were lucky that multiple players who fit what they wanted suddenly lost their coaches.

Two of their guys are from Stanford, where Shaw just retired, and it just so happens that the guy who built Shaw's program is at Michigan with a monopoly on the nation's offensive line awards. Drake Nugent plays the position the Outland/Rimington guy was playing, and was so obviously of interest to Michigan that I mentioned him on the podcast earlier this year. Myles Hinton, the other Cardinal, had a brother come through Michigan's program. Michigan also needed help in pass rush all year, and there's a dude they had a previous relationship with who's tearing it up at Coastal Carolina—again, not hard. AJ Barner played at a division rival, where he overlapped for a year with Mike Hart. Ernest Hausmann is another Big Ten player Michigan saw this year at a position of need. LaDarius Henderson was a top OL who knew Sherrone Moore well and who'd already come up to visit. These are all no-brainers or minimal-brainers.

What Michigan hasn't added is a cornerback, despite the evident need for one even if they like some of the young options on the roster. That's not from a lack of trying, but a lack of duh. They'd love a Travis Hunter, Fentrell Cypress or Tony Grimes. Well, get in line! It's not that the guys they got weren't huge victories; it's that Michigan's allure represented such a preponderance of force to other suitors that they didn't want to waste the resources. Cool! But these are quick annexations, not a blitzkrieg. The portal's big recruiting battles are just getting started.

That brings me to the second point: it's very early in Portal Season. Currently the #6 team in the portal rankings is Iowa, whose portal class is composed entirely of Cade McNamara and Erick All. Last year's #6 team was Alabama, whose class was headlined by RB Jahmyr Gibbs, projected to be the 2nd RB in the draft, LSU 5-star CB Eli Ricks, and All-SEC LT Tyler Steen, plus a pair of draftable WRs. That's a closer analogue to Michigan's success than last year's top portal team USC, which added 20 players, including this year's Heisman winner. If Michigan adds Barner and holds there they'd end up at around 67 points, which would have placed them 4th last year, when the market wasn't as large as this one's shaping out to be.

Michigan is doing well in the portal, not unprecedentedly well, except for them.

SANTA?

He exists. [Marc-Grégor Campredon]

Michigan has historically been held back from using transfers as much as other schools because of their academic requirements, which I've argued are a) well beyond those of their competitors, and b) well beyond reason. I do not believe Ono has changed anything about this, but to make this case we need to get into the nitty-gritty of Michigan's Byzantine transfer policies.

What's different at Michigan versus most of the schools they compete with is Michigan has all sorts of rules pertaining to how many credits you have to take at Michigan itself to get a Michigan degree, and just as importantly, how your credits transfer. To have credits count towards a major, you need to find cognates between your classes and those taught at Michigan, which is increasingly difficult the further along in your studies you get because 300+ courses are less likely to be "Survey of Medieval Europe" and more like "History of Consumption Patterns and Practices 1750-1950."

Michigan's various schools also have requirements, such as prerequisites that can't be waived to access higher-level classes, plus things like LSA's foreign language, math , and first-year writing requirements. This all gets weirder because certain schools transfer better than others—Ivies and other Michigan peers usually go smoothly, sophomores at other AAU schools don't have much difficulty, and various feeders like Oakland University and UM Flint/Dearborn are streamlined in ways that your average FBS school is not.

So: If you transfer as a sophomore, your advisor will make sure you get your requirements done early, your introductory courses mostly come over, and if you're a few credits behind or have a few classes that morph into generic credits, you have plenty of time to build a graduation plan. If you transfer as a graduate student none of this matters because these are undergraduate transfer admissions policies. Ergo, Michigan has three main categories of transfer athletes they even bother to target:

1. Grad students (most of our transfers)
2. Freshmen, or sophomores right after their 3rd semester (Gentry, Ty Isaac, Threet, Charles Matthews)
3. Ivy League/Stanford etc. (Austin Panter, Grant Mason)

As I understand it, Ono can't do much about this—Admissions has their own, not necessarily friendly relationship with athletics, and by strong custom they operate independently from parts of the school that have to keep donors happy, e.g. the president's office. All of this is why Michigan football only took seven transfers total from 1990 to 2014. Harbaugh took more but the overwhelming majority (O'Korn, Rudock, Lyons, O'Neill, Casey Hughes the Utah Transfer, Danna, Bowman, Daylen Baldwin, Willie Allen, Whittley, Goode, and Olu) enrolled in Master's programs.

Yes, many other peer schools have similar transfer policies; they also have relationships between athletics and admissions that can make hurdles disappear quickly. An example of how this bites us is when Juwan Howard was pursuing Terrence Shannon of Texas Tech last year. Shannon seemed ready to pull the trigger, but Michigan needed to get him through summer classes in Lubbock—with TTU apparently not too interested in facilitating this—to get him graduated early. Applying his Texas Tech career towards a bachelor's from Michigan was out of the question. For Illinois, this was not a problem.

Of this year's guys, Nugent, Hinton, and Henderson are reportedly grad transfers. Hausmann was only at Nebraska for one semester. Stewart was at Coastal Carolina for three semesters, which probably sets him back some, but not enough to be a dealbreaker. I don't know Barner's situation; he was not an early enrollee.

So I don't think a change in leadership signals a change in undergraduate admissions' attitudes towards standards for high-profile athletes. It may be an opportunity for admissions to realign itself with the "an uncommon education for the common man" values that made Michigan what it is. Ono can ask. He can outline which principles are stressed. But he's a president, not a dictator, and large institution like Michigan doesn't just change course.

I don't think this should be controversial. Athletes at Michigan, especially those on the football team, have access to a ton of structural academic support, and are inundated with a disproportionate amount school spirit over a collegiate experience that is vastly different from most of their classmates. It's entirely reasonable to look at the ideology behind certain transfer policies, e.g. how much time at Michigan do you need to spend at Michigan to have "gone to Michigan," and ask whether they apply to athletes. It's reasonable to treat time spent practicing football, learning football, shaping one's body to be better at football, or traveling with the football team, as not only value provided to the school, but part of an uncommon education. It's entirely within Michigan's value system to identify elite athletes who got that way through a singular competitive focus as stronger candidates for a Michigan degree than the difficulty setting on their previous classes may indicate. It's entirely correct to assume a football player, because they're an elite football player, will make for a better student and a better alumnus.

And I'm not saying go full Hugh Freeze here; I'm only asking for undergraduate transfers to be held to the same academic standards as freshmen and grad students.

ARE WE MICHIGAN STATE NOW?

With three missed tackles and one misdemeanor charge against Michigan, Windmon fit right in. [Patrick Barron]

I would argue that nothing's changed. Harbaugh's actively hunted transfers since he came here, within the limitations that Michigan has. What's changed:

• A lot of transfers were announced in the same week.
• There's a WAY bigger transfer market than there used to be, ergo a larger pool of Michigan candidates.

A lot of this is mere perception; people see five transfers announce in a week and can only think of like five others in Harbaugh's 7 years. The missing piece here is the list of transfers only the obsessives remember, because quite a few of them didn't end up making much of a difference. For every Mike Danna, Jake Rudock, Shea Patterson, or Olu Oluwatimi there's been a Cam Goode, Willie Allen, Jordan Whittley, Wayne Lyons, or Casey Hughes the Utah transfer. Even now you're probably like "Oh yeah, Casey Hughes, the Utah transfer! He transferred from Utah!" Yeah, he did.

Also, we're talking about five transfers, maybe going as high as seven or eight in the class. Michigan State signed 14 transfers in 2021. Out of those one should have won the Heisman, but arguably the next most useful was a mediocre OT who up-transferred from Arkansas State, pending the future development of WR-turned-TE Maliq Carr. Typically those guys were cast-offs from SEC schools (Ronald Williams, Quavaris Crouch, Chester Kimbrough, Harold Joiner) who turned out to be castoffs for good reasons.

Michigan is probably bringing in at most half of what MSU did when they were the proof of concept of rebuilding through the portal, or what Nebraska brought in last year. They're also recruiting these guys to positions where they could have survived without them. A major question you have to ask when evaluating any personnel addition is how desperate are they, because that's how low the floor can go. MSU was destitute at cornerback and linebacker, took anything that looked like a cornerback or linebacker, and wound up with crappy cornerbacks and linebackers.

That's a world of difference from Michigan adding three offensive linemen to mix it up with younger offensive linemen who've already seen the field on the best OL in the country. Also those guys were the Pac 12's two best sophomore linemen in 2021 and a former 5-star offensive tackle who are leaving their schools after coaching changes. The rest of the transfer are a linebacker who started as a true freshman, a DE who's getting draft hype at Coast Carolina, and (pending) a two-year starter and captain at Indiana. Every one of Michigan's transfers were going to start had they stayed at their old programs.

Even so, it's likely not all of them will work out. That scenario means playing Trente Jones, Jeffrey Persi, Gio El-Hadi, Greg Crippen, or Raheem Anderson, finding some pass rush out of another year of Jaylen Harrell, Eyabi Okie, Derrick Moore, and Braiden McGregor, and going back to the TE depth chart when Schoonmaker was hurt this year, except instead of true freshman/redshirt freshman/redshirt sophomore they're all a year older. Okay!

Contrast this with a team that *is* focused on using portal recruitment to restock its roster. Kenny Dillingham just took over Arizona State, which is staring down an NCAA investigation and into Year 2 of a mass player exodus. With the mid-term future of the program in serious doubt, it's hard to get freshmen to sign on. So Dillingham is looking at the portal to offer near-term playing time to upperclassman backups. Notre Dame QB Drew Pyne is the headliner, but most of their 15-man transfer class is made of dudes who were passed by younger players at Cal or WSU, or 4-stars who never broke through at USC or Texas (or both). Dillingham is going to end up with an unprecedented transfer class—their insiders think it can get up to 25—to fill ~15 major holes in his two-deep. The guys he gets are coming there to play; mostly likely a good many of them won't play very well.

I would define Mel Tuckering as what Dillingham is doing, not what Michigan is doing. It's better than recruiting true freshmen for those positions. It's better for the sport and for the players for these guys to be filling gaping holes somewhere else than handling a couple of drives during garbage time. But it's still just a form of recruiting, with a similarly wide range of outcomes.

Most recruiting however is additive, and that's how I would describe Michigan's portal strategy. If you add to an already strong depth chart, when it works you've got an Olu and can get a redshirt on Crippen. When it doesn't, you can start your Trente Jones or Karsen Barnhart and everyone but the program and its attendant Seths forget Willie Allen was ever here.

WHY ARE WE SUDDENLY MUCH BETTER AT PORTAL?

Michigan has several things going for them in addition to the standard things like the degree and winningest and wings etc.:

1. Winning. First time in program history they're going to back-to-back Playoffs. First time getting this deep into the season undefeated since 1997. First time they beat Ohio State twice in a row since 1999-'00. First time they're 13-0.
2. They have playing time available at certain positions.
3. OL U.

You could not design a more perfect case study than Olu Oluwatimi of OL-U: Come to Michigan where we will let you mash face, win all your games, make you a team leader, get you some hardware, and send you off an even better draft prospect. Oh yeah, and the degree.

Beating up on your rival, and proving the first time was no fluke, are also pretty big deals. Last year Michigan wanted Chip Trayanum to come play running back. Clearly we could have used him more than Ohio State, who put him at linebacker then didn't play him. But even after 42-27, Ohio State was able to sell that as a blip. Now, not a blip.

I highly recommend beating Ohio State every year into eternity.

AREN'T YOU THE GUY WHO SAID "THE PORTAL'S OVERRATED" THIS YEAR?

100 MGoPoints if you can name this player (no cheating). [Patrick Barron]

Yes, I said this in reference to the narrative that Mel Tucker built Michigan State into an 11-win team by hitting the portal, arguing that you're more likely to end up with 2021 MSU's secondary than Kenneth Walker III. As with recruiting in general, fans tend to get overly hyped about the new guys, mistaking projections (what a player could be if he works out) for actualities. The fact is not all of these guys work out. The expectation should be that half of them do.

Usually with transfers you're dealing with guys who left because they weren't going to play. Let's take a quick survey of players who've left Michigan under Harbaugh:

• QBs: Joe Milton is a backup at Tennessee, Brandon Peters was a mediocre starter at Illinois. Dylan McCaffrey, Wilton Speight, Alex Malzone, Dan Villari, Shane Morris, Russell Bellomy, and David Cone…missing anyone on that list?
• RBs: Zach Charbonnet tore it up at UCLA, would have been behind Haskins and Corum and probably Edwards here. The rest of the list: Christian Turner, Gaige Garcia, Tru Wilson, O'Maury Samuels, Kurt Taylor, Kareem Walker, Kingston Davis, Derrick Green.
• WRs: Kekoa Crawford is the headliner since he stuck at Cal, though wasn't a major impact guy. Giles Jackson has a diminished role at UW, Oliver Martin emerged as a weak #2 WR for Nebraska after transferring from Iowa. Eddie McDoom and Tarik Black washed out. Less came of inherited Brady Hoke-era leapers like Drake Harris, Mo Ways and Da'Mario Jones, let alone Freddy Canteen.
• TEs: Devin Asiasi had a disappointing career at UCLA, Ian Bunting had 18 catches for 195 yards for Cal. Mustapha Muhammad, and Tyrone Wheatley Jr. were never heard from again.
• OL: Kyle Bosch got sober and had a good career at WVU. Hudson was good for Cincy after precipitating Harbaugh's one-time free transfer suggestion that became the portal. Chuck Filiaga got to spend his final year plowing at Minnesota. Zach Carpenter has been fighting to play at Indiana. Jack Stewart couldn't even start at UConn. Willie Allen, Nolan Ulizio, Ja'Raymond Hall, Nolan Rumler, Stephen Spanellis (didn't like Warinner), David Dawson, Blake Bars, and Dan Samuelson haven't done much else.
• DL: Mike Dwumfour was used correctly at Rutgers. Luiji Vilain was a rotation edge for Wake. Phil Paea is playing for Utah State. Ondre Pipkins and Aubrey Solomon are famous 5-star washouts, Deron Irving-Bey's CMU career was derailed by academic issues. Gabe Newburg, Ron Johnson, Tom Strobel, and Reuben Jones didn't make it back on the field.
• LB: Drew Singleton caught on as a backup at Rutgers for a few years. Ben VanSumeren played for MSU…that wasn't a good thing. COVID ended Devin Gil's USF career. Never heard from Anthony Solomon, Osman Savage, Cornell Wheeler, Jordan Anthony, Charles Thomas, or Michael Ferns again. Tennessee regrets taking William Mohan.
• DB: Benjamin St-Juste could have helped if M's docs had cleared him. Keith Washington was fine at WVU, and probably could have played in 2016 but baby David Long and LaVert Hill were cutting into his PT. Blake Countess became a safety(!) at Auburn his last year. Hunter Reynolds started, but did not make all-conference for Utah State. As for the rest: J'Marick Woods, Jordan Morant, Darion Green-Warren, Jaylen Kelly-Powell, Andre Seldon, Myles Sims, George Johnson…stop me if I get to someone we needed.
• ST: Andrew David ended up at Northwestern via TCU. Will Hart punted a year at SJ State as Michigan chose to Robbins.

Those are all Michigan guys, most of them rather highly ranked out of high school, who had the benefit of Michigan's coaching and Michigan's strength & conditioning, and Michigan's resources during their development. They're the very kinds of players who cause excitement among fans when they show up in the portal. That's what most of the portal is made out of: guys who couldn't see the field at their current schools. Very occasionally (Charbonnet, Filiaga) that's because the school he's leaving has great players at his position coming out of their ears and you pick up a useful player. A Hunter Reynolds who played his way onto the field at Michigan before a higher-ceilinged younger player overtook him is often the sign of a good down-transfer.

But just from going over Michigan's own portal contributions you can see that if there's going to be a part in there that a Power 5 contender could use right away, he's probably leaving for a unique reason. Even then, you're taking a risk—it's hard to tell from a distance sometimes when a guy says he's leaving because he hates the coach if the problem really is the coach (it would appear Spanellis was right about Warinner) or something else.

What you should look for in the portal are reasons. Olu's head coach left and he was the best run blocker in the country at a school that was passing 80% of the time. Danna and Baldwin were pro-caliber players at schools whose competition was too low for draft evaluators. Rudock was splitting time with a guy with another year of eligibility left. Shea Patterson was trying to get off the Ole Miss boat before the NCAA sank it.

IS THERE A DANGER OF RECRUITING OVER YOUR TEAM?

I mean yeah, if you knew Frankie was going to leave and that Jaelin Llewellin would lose the season to a knee injury, you should absolutely be in the stock market. [Zoey Holmstrom]

Yes. While portal additions should be seen as guys who *might* play, the perception that they *will* play certainly extends to those most affected by such additions. Greg Crippen and went to IMG to become the most college-ready center in America. He burned his redshirt in 2021 because he was next in line to start in 2022. Then Michigan had an opportunity to add the best lineman in the country, and Crippen took that redshirt. Now Michigan's found another transfer center, except this one wasn't even a Rimington finalist. Well, shit.

The worst-case scenario is exactly what happened to the basketball team. Howard recruited Jaelin Llewellin out of Princeton to join Kobe Bufkin, Frankie Collins, and true freshman Dug McDaniel. Collins took offense and left to be a 27% usage guy for Bobby Hurley at Arizona State. Then Llewellin hurt his knee and Michigan was left with just two guards on the team. This led lots of fans to say they never should have recruited Llewellin if it was going to cost them Frankie, except Frankie leaving in that scenario was also insane. If it was Frankie's knee that got blown up, they'd be in the exact same position. Punch yourself in the face or someone else might do so: it's the same logic. "There should be nobody but me who can play my position" is not a fair request for any player to make. From what insiders say about the Frankie situation, it was pretty unique.

The way to avoid irrationality by your players is to be honest with them. I think Michigan has been mostly careful about how they recruit in the portal with regard to their other players. Usually you can point to a specific guy who left with eligibility remaining and a portal replacement with the same or similar eligibility. Lose Erick All and Luke Hansen, offer AJ Barner and Josh Cuevas. Hayes and Zinter(?) going to the NFL early, okay, that leaves room for a couple of upperclassman OL. What do you tell Crippen? Well, hopefully you told him years ago that you're always going to be trying to get better (insider bit: they did), and you're always going to play the best. You tell Drake Nugent the same thing: if you come here you have to beat Greg Crippen, who went to IMG, got on the field as a true freshman, redshirted behind friggin' Olu Oluwatimi, and knows the whole playbook we can't hand you until you sign. Oh, and Raheem Anderson started four years at Cass Tech and has looked pretty good for us. We might even convince Zinter to stay and shift over. These are the terms.

Your players are also not stupid. Shifting our gaze to DE, they know that natural pass rush has been a sore spot since Michigan lost Hutchinson and Ojabo. Harrell, Upshaw, Okie, McGregor, and Derrick Moore are all too aware that none of them secured the role opposite Mike Morris, and that Morris couldn't be spared as a passing downs DT this year, and that when Morris went out they had to shift their whole defensive strategy around the assumption they weren't getting to the quarterback with regularity. They are the most aware.

As annoying as it might be to get recruited over, there are lot of ways recruited over at Michigan can be a better deal than throwing your hat in a foreign position battle. They're bound to lose some guys—burning a year of eligibility not playing SUCKS—along the way, but Frankie situations are uncommon, and a much bigger deal in basketball with its accelerated timetable and rosters with fewer people than Harbaugh has tight ends. The cost-benefit of gathering your Olus as ye may leans strongly towards gathering.