...IF Michigan is in the market for a new DC, who would you like to see?

IIRC, Gerg ran his own defense the first year (2009) and when that went badly, RichRod made him run the 3-3-5 the next year.

Gerg had had some decent defenses in the past but in his head coaching job just before (Syracuse) his defenses were terrible.  Also, he plagiarized Wikipedia in a press conference.

VaBlue, yeah Gerg deserved a lot of crap.  But the fact that he had to convince RR to allow him to add 10lbs to each dlineman was telling.  RR after getting his arse handed to him again told Gerg we have to get bigger again...  Ya think.. 

I digress, I don't think any DC could have had a competent BigTen defense with RR as the head coach.

The NFL periodically tweaks its rules to allow quarterbacks to not get killed, but that's not really what's happened in college football.  Offenses have simply evolved to take advantage of the rules.  The rules committee may possibly need to tweak the rules to help defenses out.

Changing our recruiting focus from MI, OH, and PA to New England was a bad move then and a really bad move now.

Very much this. I sometimes wonder if he thinks he can just get away with lesser athletes because he could at BC.

That's exactly how I see things. I would add that he has been very, very slow to adjust as well. 

Thanks for being the one of few around here capable of talking some damn sense.

Don Brown's scheme is still a good (great) defense with the right pieces, as we saw during the first few years of DB's tenure, but the much bigger issue is the drop off in recruiting on the defensive side of the football.

DB looked like an absolute genius when handed Hoke/Mattison recruited players (for all his failures as a head coach, Hoke could recruit defensive players like crazy). But we failed to reload on defense since then and with the loss of Mattison and then Partridge - our two best recruiters on defense - it has lead to a huge, huge decline in talent on the defensive side of the ball. 

While we were losing our best defensive recruiters, OSU upgraded their defensive staff by poaching both Mattison and Larry Johnson. Now, combined with Kerry Combs, they have three of the best defensive recruiters in the conference. OSU's defense is not the sexy schematically, but the way college football is going, defense is basically just having the bodies to control/disrupt the line of scrimmage and enough speed to rally to the football. 

Changing DCs won't fix this defense unless/until you fix recruiting. 

Thank you.

Reading this board, you would think that Harbaugh, Brown, and others have forgotten how to coach football. Of course, most of these posts have been written by people who have never played high level competitive football or coached same. In fairness, myself included.

The current struggles are a result of recruiting misses, and that is something that is ultimately the responsibility of the coaching staff.

Don Brown's defense would look a helluva lot better with a dominant defensive line and lockdown corners supplemented with consistent play at the safety positions. Harbaugh's offense or Gattis' offense would look a lot better with a dominant offensive line and consistent high productivity at the QB position.

It's not just recruiting, although recruiting is a big part of the failure. It's more that Don Brown's defense is designed to short circuit run heavy read option offenses. He'd chew Rich Rod's ass up, it was designed to stop that or Chip Kelly or Urban Meyer's Florida teams. 

You put your corners on islands and bet the other team's athletic QB isn't really good enough arm wise to beat you deep anyway, especially under pressure. You blitz from every odd angle so that whenever he's trying to read a guy there's another guy coming behind that end man or on the front side to make the read pointless and both decisions wrong. It works.

All that goes out the window when you're dealing with a passing QB who is dissecting you with short air raid passes that chew man coverage up and RPO's that gut you for trying to blitz. He has no answer for it, because the answer to RPO is "play zone and try to stop the run with just four DL." And stopping the run consistently with just four guys means you gotta recruit, which he sucks at.

I know he wasn't the DC, but Brian Flores' last 8 years on the Patriots staff was exclusively on the defensive side of the ball, and he's about to take the Dolphins to the playoffs.