Throwback post (to further show how far the program has come)

Post the guys name and have him come back and write something.

Gold pants have ostensibly gone out of style anyways. 

To be fair, there was several posters in the last month that said the season was over. I recall Ed Shuttlesworth as the biggest naysayer.

I remember when we were clamoring for Matt Campbell 

I remember those days all too well.  Things got so dark on the board I'd stay away from it for several days at at time to keep from going down that hole.

Jim Harbaugh refreshed his staff, created a new plan and implemented that plan which has us all in a much better place today.  Still wish we could get a few more Top 100 recruits like JJ, though.

While I’ll gladly take a few more 5 star players (who wouldn’t) I think this coaching staff has been able to recruit the right players for the kind of football Harbaugh wants to play. These guys will run through a brick wall if asked. 

Check out some of the Fire Harbaugh threads from that season. They're full of emotional hot takes. There were posters that wanted Harbaugh fired the last two off-seasons for interviewing with NFL teams too.  Overreactions will crater a program. Emotional Buckeyes are all in thier feelings pushing for the same shit right now.

OSU today is where we were in 2020.

People arguing that you can't keep a coach who always loses to your rivals, and others arguing that it's insane to fire a coach with an incredible record outside of their rivals.

They're both right.

Hats off to Harbaugh. It really seems like he looked at what he was doing, and who he surrounded himself with, and changed a lot. That may not have been easy for someone who was as successful as he'd been. 

I was a downer.

My feelings, at the time, were that Harbaugh is CAPABLE of coaching brilliance, but we saw that brilliance less and less as the seasons went on, and it wasn't clear why. I was also pretty peeved at the mis-management of the Shea Patterson/Joe Milton/Dylan McCaffrey situation. 

I won't say that I was wrong; I don't think I was. I WILL say that the 2021 team, and especially the 2021 coaching staff, pulled this program together in a HUGE way. Absolute clinic in leadership from both the coaches and the players.

If there's one thing you can say about Harbaugh, it's that he's *intellectually honest* with himself. 

I mean, 3 years ago I was thinking the same thing.  At that time I felt Michigan needed to be at home and have a miracle game with a last minute score to beat osu.  I never thought they were close to dominating them in a game, never mind 3 years in a row.

IMO 3 things that have turned it around-

1) Harbaugh getting the right coaches in place.  Once he realized it wasnt going to take the hype of a recruiting classes he got the coaches that could develop players that weren't chasing money bags and full of their own hype.  They recruited players that fit their system.  

2) Recruiting players that wanted to play for Michigan.  Choosing hard working and respectable young men that give it their all for the team and coaches.  2021 and 2022 teams got that ball rolling and the current players are the ones running the team with their leadership.  They know what has to be done and they are molding the next men up.

3) Ryan Day is not as good of a coach as people were thinking.  He replaced Meyer and went to the NC in 2020 and they thought osu was better than Urban.  After 3-4 years of loading up on talent and out recruiting Michigan heavily, people have started to realize you can't coach toughness, you can't beat Michigan and win B10 titles out-recruiting Michigan anymore.  Day was handed keys to the kingdom by Urban and has shit the bed after losing Urbans players. He truly was born on 3rd base.

I had many debates with friends between the 2020 and 2021 seasons re: Harbaugh.

They will all tell you I never gave up my belief that he was the right coach for the team.  Between 2015 and 2019, he had the team back to its historic level of success (70%-ish winning percentage- 9-3, 10-2, etc.)...and had the team in contention for a Big Ten championship (and a spot in the Playoff) at least a few times.  

Where I was wrong was my contention that Michigan would never be able to compete on a regular basis with OSU.  I felt that a 10-2 or 11-1 record with a nice bowl game was the team's ceiling.  I thought that if Michigan could beat OSU 1/3-1/4 of the time, that would should be considered a success.

Happy to have been wrong about my latter assertions!  

There is a stark difference in the program from 2019 to now, you see it on the field and you see it off the field. It didnt seem like a "team culture". Guys were leaving early back then just to be a late round pick. Wisconsin absolutely throttled Michigan that year, people forget how bad of a loss that really was.

Whenever a mistake would happen it seemed to snowball and things just got worse. The 2019 version of The Game was full of those, from a missed extra point to a bunch of penalties to dropping wide open passes. 

Michigan teams now don't hardly make mistakes anymore, and when they do they don't let it bother them. And they make the little plays in between the big plays that they never used to make. Probably the biggest one I can think of was Mike Sainristill knocking the ball out of Stover's hands last year in the end zone. 

Harbaugh deserves a lot of credit for basically starting over after 2020, he absolutely got it right. 

I was a big Harbaugh guy - he was QB at Michigan when I was there, I was at the 1986 "Harbaugh Guarantee Game" in Columbus, he wrote me a nice letter for my birthday once - but even I had my doubts by 2020.

But the one thing I honestly did believe, and commented on here, is that I thought the Covid year and canceling the Ohio State game would be the "Great Reboot" for Michigan.  It was a pause we really needed, and I thought we would come out of it a different program. 

Once Harbaugh signed up for the incentives-based contract, it was a different program.  The pause "reboot" and the incentive contract lit a competitive fire.