It is beyond difficult to accept how bad Michigan football is. Even in a down year, I did not set unreasonable expectations. I expected dogfights with Wisconsin, Penn State, Indiana. I expected an uncomfortable, "smells-like-I-just-stepped-in-dogshit" game against MSU. As we've all witnessed this past month, the rubber bands and paperclips holding up the University of Michigan football program have broken or snapped. We're on an outrigger in the ocean during a storm now. Tough grapple with. I'd been thinking about making some comments on some other threads, but they seemed too large to fit into so here I am, my first diary post on MGOBLOG. 

There are clearly many things that have gone wrong during the Harbaugh regime in AA that we've all highlighted and debated ad nauseam. One that we have not made time for (at least that I haven't noticed) is about the snap counts. You may think, this is a small or insignificant point that is more about keeping our guys fresh than not or about our recruiting, you would be wrong. 

The ignorance or inability to rotate bodies into games has been the death knell of this program! What I mean is this: 

In football there are 3 things you need to be good at (from a high level) to give yourself any shot at competing (Per Bill C)

1. Acquire Talent
2. Develop Talent
3. Deploy Talent

This boils down to recruiting, turning high schoolers into grown men, and putting them in a position to succeed. If you are not able to or unwilling to give you backups and underclassmen snaps, you will not be successful at the 3 aforementioned goals. 

If you need to have good players to have a good program, how can you get them to come to Michigan over Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, Oklahoma, LSU, Oregon, Penn State, Georgia, or Florida, if they won't have an opportunity to see the field until a position battle during their 3rd year on campus?

If you need to develop that talent, how are you able to get them the most valuable experience a football player can receive, in game snaps, if you are keeping your first team offense and defense on the field deep into the 4th quarter against everyone but Rutgers?

How will you deploy all of the talent you have acquired in steps 1 and 2 if they leave because they can go to another program that will play them right now and who needs what they do? 

All of this goes down to being able to work in younger players and keeping them engaged in the program. Take a look at how Wisconsin develops players? They take overlooked guys who fit the system they have spent the better part of 30 years crafting and refining. They set expectations and they make due on their commitments to these young men to get them prepared to be a successful part of a winning program. 

Clemson, the newest institutional Death Star on the block, achieves the same goal via a different approach. If you beat the dog shit out of everyone who's not near your respective Death Star level, your young guys can get to play against other Power 5 opponents! I mean for goodness sake, Dabo, Venebales, and Herbstreit all have kids running around playing for Clemson in blowouts. They have punters taking snaps at QB. 

The failure of getting backups, underclassmen, etc. on the field lead to a negative feedback loop of decreased returns in recruiting, retention, and ultimately the on field product.

If we drill down into this year specifically, how useful would Myles Sims and Benjamin St. Juste be in breaking Gemon Green or Andre Seldon in. We can go through a few examples of the guys who could have been contributors on this team one way or another and did not have obvious off the field issues. 

• Tarik Black - Ronnie Bell has performed great but Tarik Black with expanded targets could have been another great option offense for Milton. He finally got healthy and could not get targets in the offense don't blame him for departing the program. 
• Steve Spanellis - We have a true freshman starting at right guard right now. Cannot replace the experience and football IQ he would have been able to add to an offensive line with a returning started. 
• Benjamin St. Juste - All conference honorable mention, started on an 11-2 Minnesota team. He is objectively better than Gray and Green (right now).

Over the 6 years we've had Jim Harbaugh, the retention rate for each recruiting class has steadily declined. The high caliber recruiting classes have not been able to yield results comparable to other similarly positioned programs. I firmly believe, that is due to a lack of playing who you have. 

If you factor in all of the rumors that have circulated about how difficult it is to play for or work with Coach Harbaugh and you then consider the inability to get on the field, it makes sense why guys have left the program (sometimes without a clear landing spot!!!). 

Regardless of who is leading the program next year and beyond, they need to commit to playing as many guys as possible as early in their careers as possible. The schemes will be the schemes, recruiting will be recruiting, but if you can get the talent you've assembled live snaps against live competition, you will only strengthen the quality of depth and keep your current team engaged. 

Here's to hoping whoever is on the sidelines next year understands this.