Bye week topic: What’s different about Michigan now?

There's not a huge difference IMO, Michigan got very unlucky from 2015-2019 in a few ways.

But also obviously Don Brown couldn't defend Ryan Day's offense to save his own ass (literally).  

I guess maybe the main thing that we've been spoiled with the last couple of years is an offensive line that can go toe to toe with everyone.  Another thing that we have had the last couple years is solid depth almost everywhere (with a couple of exceptions).  Feels like we've been able to roll with injuries a lot better than we were in 2015.

Culture

Biggest difference to me is that the depth is finally back up to where it needs to be. We can absorb multiple hits to key positions (QB, OL, TE) and next man up is good enough to keep winning games. 

A solid OL and steady QB play? Idk

To be honest I feel like Michigan’s in a good spot, but we need this year and maybe another solid season next year to get us to the “monster” program I think we’d all like us to be. 
 

At this point, we’re in a really good spot, but we’re also really only a couple key injuries away from falling off the page as well. JJ goes down, Turner or Sainristil, any more attrition in the OLine; any one of those things could make us pretty fragile. 

However, a solid end to the year with another title or maybe a Rose Bowl win would go a long way to cementing Michigan as a destination school for the high end recruits and coaches. THEN, I think I’ll feel like we’ve officially turned that corner. 

I think the key difference is that Harbaugh is starting to take the monkeys off his shoulder. He's regularly beating teams we weren't before, he finally beat OSU. The NFL dream has passed. He now has full attention on Michigan and strengthening the culture. 

Harbaugh is a culture builder. If the ball bounced the other way early on in his career at Michigan, we'd probably be here a lot sooner. But once the narratives began that Harbaugh couldn't beat his rivals or the ranked teams on his schedule, He seemed to have a slight identity crisis. Now that he's proven that Harbaugh ball can slay OSU, he's bought all in on it. We have a strong identity and culture, something we didn't have until last year. 

Excellent QB play, excellent OL, RBs with vision, and good DTs. We’ve rarely had all of those things. We win 2016 Iowa & OSU if you have 2021/2022 OL, 2021/2022 RB room, and Cade or JJ as they’d get 1st downs to ice the end of those games. We win 2017 MSU & OSU with Cade or JJ. 2018 ND is a win with this OL. We actually have a chance In the 2019 Wisconsin & OSU games if we have this DL instead of getting mauled to the tune of 200+ yards by Jonathan Taylor & JK Dobbins. We’ve finally gotten to an acceptable floor in the most important positions for B1G football.

It's not hard to answer:  we have significantly better Quarterbacking.  

Harbaugh has better assistant coaches for one. Several of them are former players so they understand the meaning of the culture and pass that on to the players, especially those who are out of state. Jim has matured as well. 

Between the culture and one heck of a coaching staff, the players are learning more and then going out and executing during the game. There's better locker room leadership as well and it started last year with guys like Aiden.

The team as whole look more focused when they take the field. I love their away game attitude.

Michigan is clearly a Top 3 team at this point of the season, despite the stupid AP poll. Let's see our guys really crush sparty on the 29th!

I think there are two differences. Depth and no fatal weaknesses like in recent years (CB, DT, OT). 

2021 and this year have featured elite backs in Haskins and Corum. 2015 and 2016 lacked the offensive line and a consistent back but probably had a little better (as of now) receivers in Darboh and Chesson. 

The 2018 and 2019 teams didnt have the overall offensive or defensive line play that these teams had either. Plus not leaving corners on islands all day and just sending the house all the time. And most people wont admit it but Shea Pattersons lack of arm strength and sometimes inability to handle pressure limited the passing game, not to mention Pep Hamilton sucked. 

Also there seems to be a lot less hype and fluff bs coming from the program/assistant coaches than from 2015 to 2020 so I think Harbaugh has found a very good group of assistants.

This is a good question and good topic for discussion OP - thanks for posting this.

To my eyes there are four things that are different structurally and one big thing different emotionally.

1. Much better OL.  As others have stated already, having a mauler OLine makes a HUGE difference in the game's outcome.

2. Much better QB play.  With the exception of Ruddock our QBs were sketchy at best.  Spreight was "OK" before he was hurt and much less than that afterwards.  Then a murders row of suspect signal callers kept the offense from truly rolling until Cade last year and with JJ we've taken another huge step forward.

3. John Harbaugh loves his brother and has established a nice defensive coaches feeder program for us.  The defensive schemes the past two years are vastly superior, IMO, to the Don Brown regime and it shows on the field.

4. Depth.  We can take an injury, even at a key position, and keep rolling.  Injuries before last year were literally crippling.

The emotional change IMO is that these teams truly BELIEVE they are better than anyone they play and it shows on the field.  Saturday they could've folded having dominated PSU but trailing due to a couple of flukey, lucky plays but they didnt.  I cant help but think that in the past that game might've been lost.

Bringing Michigan back to prominence was always going to take somebody with incredible resolve.  What has been amazing about Harbaugh has been his unwillingness to engage in the 10,000 foot view of the program and to approach it moment by moment, game by game.  It began right when he took the job, when he literally would not even admit that he was aware of the struggles the program had been experiencing.  It continued, amazingly, through the MSU punt fiasco when he simply broke down the play and what happened, and refused to engage it as part of a "narrative" of MSU having Michigan's number. 

With Harbaugh, things happen and then they are over.  For the longest time, bad things had the feeling of "piling on," through Rich Rod and Brady Hoke.  With Harbaugh, every moment and every game is "fresh," it does not involve what happened before or what will happen after.  That approach is the only way Michigan was going to get back to where they are now and it is the culture he has instilled, step by step.  The pick 6 on Sunday is the perfect example.  In previous eras, and even early in Harbaugh's era, Michigan would have crumbled after that because "oh my god another really bad thing happened."  With Harbaugh, it happens and then it is over and there is no reason to think about it again.  It took A LONG TIME for the program to get this mentality, but they have it now.

It seems clear there are a lot of internal program changes that we get hints of but are hard to parse if you're not inside the battleship. Culture changes, conditioning changes, that kind of thing. That all seems to be going very well. About as well as it's going for literally any college program right now, given that Bama has lost some of their peak 2010s aura of simply doing everything better than everyone else.

As far as what's visible on the field, I'd point out a few key things:

-- Recruiting and development have lately been perfectly attuned to what the program wants to do. They're identifying so many guys in the 3.5 to low 4-star range (and sometimes lower than that) and building them into the absolute best version of themselves. I don't think anyone is doing better recruiting ranking arbitrage and development than Michigan right now.

-- The program finally got serious about having a modern, innovative defense that can adapt to opponents and throw in trickery in the middle of games, as we saw with that very strange front in the PSU game [three guys down, one standup rusher on the opposite side, leaving a huge gap at the line of scrimmage]. We've seen so many offenses simply not know what they're looking at until it's too late and pressure is arriving. MacDonald and Minter have been as successful as any defensive coaches in CFB over the last few years, once you adjust for the fact that they don't have NFL talent at every single spot on the field.

-- The sport has swung so far towards favoring the pass that Harbaugh's affection for an old-fashioned-yet-varied run game can now arbitrage some inefficiencies in how opposing defenses are built. I get annoyed at the conservatism at times, and I still think Jim is often wrong about predictable short yardage/goal-line calls (as we saw this week), but I'm forced to admit that being able to get 5-6 yards a carry consistently makes you nearly impossible to beat at any level of football. You'll possess the ball a lot and you'll wear down and demoralize the opposing defense quite fast, especially when they're using 5 DBs and lighter LBs in their base defense. You can also ONLY get away with being a run-first team if you have one of the 2-3 top offensive lines in at least your own conference. Luckily, Michigan has had one of the best offensive lines in the country over the past two seasons.

All in all, I'd say there's no one in CFB right now who could run this particular ship better than Harbaugh. Some guys (tho not many--it's Saban the GOAT and a couple others who have won titles, none of whom are named Ryan Day) could be called better coaches in some sense, but as far as a guy who can run a program at this level and deal with the specific cultural complexities of the fanbase and institution? It's Jim Harbaugh. He's managed to combine his longstanding strengths of identifying talent and running the football with defensive creativity and, now, a QB who could become elite. It's very exciting and gratifying.

Go Blue. Beat Ohio.

Continuity. The coaching changes and style changes from Carr to Rich Rod to Hoke really set the program back in recruiting, depth, and system-building. Rich Rod was obviously a completely different philosophy. Hoke had no QBs and left Harbaugh with no QBs. And then early on in Harbaugh's tenure he had no luck with QBs either. Now he's got 4th, 5th, and 6th year guys who are "program guys", quarterback talent, and depth on both lines. Honestly, the recruiting could be better (come on NIL/Santa!), but having the continuing will give the team a very solid floor. The issue is whether or not our level of recruiting can all our program to hit the ceiling of actually competing with an Alabama/Georgia. However, the QB is the equalizer in college football, and that is why I always say that JJ is the key to everything (unless we start recruiting like the big boys). 

I'd say it's having a QB with that high-ceiling that JJ does. Elite QB play has been the hallmark of just about every CFB team going back years and it finally feels like Michigan has one. Pair that with one, if not the best OLs in college, and some NFL talent at RB and that's a team that can beat anybody.

I'm not quite ready to anoint them the equal of the 2001 Hurricanes because the Big Ten looks like hot garbage outside of M and OSU, but this sure feels like a team that can go toe to toe with any of the recent playoff participants.

This offense is on a totally different level. We've had some very good offenses in Coach Harbaughs tenure but this one has the chance to take us to a National Championship. The one thing we haven't seen is the long ball.

The differences are real but many of them are incremental.

There are also some important things that are the same, some of which are more positive than others.

Others have mentioned this, but: One big difference between this time period and the 15-17 time period is that the OL is solid. Took years to build out that pipeline, but it's there. When Harbaugh came to Michigan he inherited Brady Hoke's OL and while it took longer than I thought it should, it absolutely was a challenge to rebuild it. Even in 2016 it was significantly flawed.

Another difference is that it feels like player development has genuinely improved over earlier in Harbaugh's tenure. I'm a bit of a stars guy; you need athletes to compete, ultimately, and I still think that keeps us a step behind the Bamas and Georgias in the larger landscape. But Michigan has had a series of hits in player development in the last two years that can no longer be considered flukey. Getting elite performances out of guys like Hassan Haskins and DJ Turner, turning guys like David Ojabo into first-rounders. Michigan is getting enormous mileage out of guys that aren't blowing away the recruiting scouts. 

One thing that's not exactly different but is something Harbaugh has begun to lean into more: The synergy with the Baltimore Ravens organization. Since Harbaugh's brother is tenured, Super Bowl-winning HC there, Harbaugh has a unique opportunity to compare notes, swap staff members, and benefit from the relationship. The number of situations where the connections have an effect is so long that I actually deleted a paragraph that tried to summarize all of them. But in short: Michigan has a direct connection to a successful NFL coaching staff that no other college program has. 

One thing that's the same that is to Harbaugh's credit: He is never afraid to change stuff if it isn't working. The contrast with previous coaching regimes stretching back to the Carr era is stark: he has changed DCs, DC styles, OCs, OC structure, line coaches, everything. He has fired friends of his. He has identified problems and hired coaches to remedy those problems.

It doesn't always work. I'm still ansy about how organized Michigan is at recruiting. Some of the hires wind up not yielding anything, and Michigan hired at least two coaches that basically got put in a closet for large parts of seasons. 

Another of the things that is the same that I'm less a fan of but that he has proven he can succeed with: Harbaugh has a particular way he wants his offense to play. He emphasizes the run and limiting game possessions in a way that many other elite teams do not. The way Michigan gets there has varied; different blocking schemes, increasing use of zone reads and RPOs, that sort of thing. But the target has remained the same. I think a key here is that Michigan appears to have the right combination of personnel and scheme now in a way that they lacked before 2021. The running game is enormously diverse, and both Haskins before and Corum now are elite vision players that find the holes that the OL is opening and exploit them. And, finally, we have a QB that can threaten with his legs consistently enough that defenses get punished if they do not respect it.