Harbaugh is too nice of a guy

Submitted by Nemesis on November 17th, 2020 at 6:34 PM

The title says it all.

 

Harbaugh put up with Pep Hamilton for years.  He let Pep look for a job while he was doing a poor job of coaching.  

 

The same is true of Tim Drevno.  His offenses were bad after Jed Fisch left and he insisted on coaching the O Line where he did a poor job.

 

How many good offensive coordinators did we lose out on because of Hamilton / Drevno?

 

And how Ben McDaniels (QB coach) is still on staff is a mystery.  We have consistently underperformed in developing QBs.  McDaniel came with Harbaugh originally I think.

 

Now Don Brown is getting beaten by teams with less talent than he has.  A far cry from when Brown was at BC and coached up lessor talent to scrap with much deeper programs.

 

Harbaugh has to make some tough personnel calls and he will not make them. 

 

If you disagree with me, fine.  But ask yourself.....has Harbaugh fired anyone?

 

Magnus

November 17th, 2020 at 7:06 PM ^

If you're talking about quarterbacks, the guy has landed 4-star after 4-star after 4-star, with some 5-star prospects mixed in. If these guys (Peters, McCaffrey, Patterson, Milton, McCaffrey, etc.) are true misses, then other big-time programs are missing on their evaluations, too.

It's not like he's taking fringe athletes who happen to also be good at jai-alai. I get that maybe his evaluations/development might be off, but let's not pretend that these QBs he's recruiting aren't great athletes.

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Lakeyale13

November 17th, 2020 at 8:15 PM ^

Magnus, I’m referencing, if I remember correctly, that when Harbaugh was running camps he would do weird stuff like see if kids could catch pop flies.   Furthermore, I remember him talking about how important he thought Playing other sports were for the kids he recruited. 

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Mongo

November 17th, 2020 at 8:43 PM ^

Harbaugh went for the QB transfers which negatively impacted both recruiting and team chemistry.  It was his greatest mistake imo.  Needed to find franchise guys and go all in with recruits building a team program.  It seemed he got the B team QB recruits given propensity to take transfers.  That impacted overall program unity.  

JJ seems like a real find but hard to tell for sure.  He is not very big and could flame out in a B1G pocket.  

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MGoStrength

November 17th, 2020 at 9:28 PM ^

I've found under JH that many of our "elite" top 100 type guys tend to be projects, raw, position changes, etc.  They are not the traditional elite guys.  We've had a few like Gary, Ruiz, Bredeson, Dax, & Long that were universally accepted as elite recruits.  But, Crawford was overrated.  Same with Walker as he got passed on by OSU.  Peters didn't pan out and many program wouldn't sign him despite his ranking.  Vilain had an injury history.  Solomon flamed out and his recruitment was odd with his "eff UM".  Singleton & Anthony flamed out.  Filiaga was a project that isn't working out too well.  Muhammad had issues to be nice.  Hinton started out as a SDE before changing to DT.  Mazi Smith is apparently a bit of a project too.  That's a good chunk of our top recruits that were a bit odd with either position changes, being really raw, or way overrated.  Maybe that's why we got them.

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MgoWood

November 17th, 2020 at 9:45 PM ^

Is Harbaugh actually missing on recruits, or missing on everything else he brings to the table? These QB's in my opinion could be good/avg/maybe better. However Harbaugh has not realy proven to be a "whisperer" during his time here. He brought in Shea, in front of his other recruits to start, even though that guy was out on the golf course instead of building some camaraderie with his team. Actions(coaching/stats/scheme/game planning/etc.) always speak louder than than anything we could say. Our team will not be able to flourish with Jim at the head. I do hate to say that, because when he was brought in, I thought like everyone else thought this was it. And it is not the end of the world if he cannot bring us the forefront. Other coaches clearly can do it. We need to keep our options open and unbias reguarding having ties to the school. 

 

Edit: Shea's 2nd year here is when he did that. 

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Damn straight

November 17th, 2020 at 6:50 PM ^

Not many great coordinators want to run the I formation with a fullback and double tight ends in 2020.

It is possible that Harbaugh is the problem and forcing this scheme on coordinators and impeding their progress, thus preventing other potential offensive minds from wanting to come to Michigan as well.  He almost looks upset that he had to give in and take Gattis.

Harbaugh has not bought into the spread and it will be the downfall of Michigan football.

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Damn straight

November 17th, 2020 at 7:07 PM ^

It took Harbaugh three years to even start to abandon that offense.  

Remember all of Pep Hamilton's 'Body Blows'?  Let's be honest, we were still running A gap dives down 29 to Ohio State.

Harbaugh has not bought into the spread.  It is that simple.  He doesn't like it, he doesn't trust it, he doesn't understand it, and it all shows.

 

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jdib

November 17th, 2020 at 7:26 PM ^

Yeah, and that's fine if Harbaugh doesn't want to run that  but then hiring Gattis is the worst thing you can do.  We have a frankensteined offense with a 1st year QB.  Yet people scream and point the finger at Gattis like he wanted a FB and heavy TE set with power runs up the middle.  Really screams "speed in space"..

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chunkums

November 17th, 2020 at 6:51 PM ^

Regarding McDaniels, he's a recent hire. There were actually two other QB coaches before McDaniels. Rudock and Speight both made huge strides when Fisch was the QB coach. It's hard to judge the QB coach for 2017 since the QBs were all getting murdered every play, but Shea generally improved over the course of 2018 under Pep. We hired McDaniels before the 2019 season. QB development has not been good.

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Nemesis

November 17th, 2020 at 6:58 PM ^

Thank you for clarifying McDaniel's tenure.

 

Yes...Fisch was great.  I remember lots of plays where we had receivers running free uncovered.  That happened a lot less frequently after Fisch left.

 

I am still not a Pep fan.  Shea improved very little during his Michigan tenure.  Many feel that he was better at Ole Miss where he was running for his life behind a porous offensive line.

 

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Teeba

November 17th, 2020 at 7:20 PM ^

I didn't see him play at Mississippi, but the numbers don't really back you up.

His first season at UofM was statistically about the same as his last at Ole Miss.

https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/shea-patterson-1.html

And if you dig in a little, you'll see his QBRs were great against South Alabama, Tennessee-Martin, and Vandy (220.7, 203.7, and 184.8.) But they sucked rocks against Bama and LSU (82.3 and 59.8.)

https://www.sports-reference.com/cfb/players/shea-patterson-1/gamelog/2017/

His low QBR game his first year at Michigan was 114.2 against Florida (tough SEC team) in the bowl game. Every other game was between 122.1 and 232.3. His first year at Michigan was good, dare I say very good. His last year at Michigan was not that.

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Nemesis

November 17th, 2020 at 7:28 PM ^

I am not sure how you could make this argument.

 

A freshman QB should not have comparable numbers as a junior or senior.  Shea showed a flat line trend YOY.  You act as though that is the expected course for a college QB.  It is not.

 

And Shea had a better supporting cast (particularly the O Line and a defense that put him in better places on the field) at Michigan than he did at Ole Miss.

 

It is really that simple.

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Teeba

November 18th, 2020 at 11:35 AM ^

I am comparing his sophomore and junior years. I think he improved from year 2 to year 3 (the numbers back that up,) but there's no debate he regressed his senior year. That's one of the biggest strikes against the "Harbaugh as QB whisperer" narrative. Speight regression is another. Peters and  McCaffery transferring and Milton looking like a true freshman as a junior are others.

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chunkums

November 17th, 2020 at 7:21 PM ^

I thought Shea was good at what we asked him to do in 2018, which was hand the ball to Higdon and occasionally hit a deep shot to a wide-open receiver after opposing defenses started keying in on Higdon. His god-awful pocket presence didn't have many opportunities to show itself in 2018, but it was there. It was a very simple offense for him to execute. He clearly struggled at least early in 2019 when he was asked to make reads on RPOs.

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The Fugitive

November 17th, 2020 at 7:36 PM ^

I'm not ready to shit on any offensive coordinator anymore. Pep said the offense was Jim's and it was all a "collaborative process" in calling plays...It was a disaster when he was at UM but I dont think it was his fault because Jim wanted 3 guys making decisions. I don't remember who they were but I recall someone called runs, someone called passes, and Jim had final say. WHO ELSE DOES THAT? I highly doubt that's what Pep preferred. 

https://www.mlive.com/wolverines/2018/04/pep_hamiltons_offense_michigan_1.html

Here's an article of Pep talking about the offense. It's Jim's. Always has been, always will be.  Gattis will be successful the minute he gets away from Harbaugh. 

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chunkums

November 17th, 2020 at 7:48 PM ^

We can decide whether we believe it, but that was allegedly the big change in 2019. Harbaugh explicitly announced that he would no longer be involved in the in-game playcalling like he had been every other year. Now maybe that's a lie. As someone pointed out earlier, I don't think calling a shotgun QB run at the one yard line was a Jim Harbaugh decision. 

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Hail to the Vi…

November 17th, 2020 at 10:58 PM ^

what's weird to me is, why do we keep seeing the same stubborn play calling regardless of the coaching staff at Michigan. We literally said the same thing about the OSU game in 2013 when Michigan was going for the win. Michigan lines up their offensive set, OSU (13) and Wisc (20) call time out and adjust the defense. Michigan comes out and runs the exact same play the opponent called a timeout to be sure to stop.

I have a hard time believing it, but seems like who ever coaches Michigan gets coierced over time to revert back to the same stale, uncreative play calling that we've run for 30 years. It's crazy to me why every coach is so risk averse they'll run into a brick wall before they would consider running something outside the box and unpredictable.

I am not sure how you win in 2020 if you think you're playing against players and not scheme. The game has advanced beyond the point of my Jimmy's will beat your Joe's even if you know what's coming. You simply don't win like that anymore unless you have Bama/OSU/Clemson talent. This year has been completely devoid of any schematic advantage. Hence the record.

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