mike macdonald

NOTE: This is being reposted from Friday, but now you can see the plays I was talking about.

Matt Demorest, Realtor and Lender and I have brought back our (sometimes-)weekly video short. The purpose of these is to show you something on film that you as a fan will be able to pick up on when you see it in the future. Or to just show you what people are talking about.

We put this together this afternoon because there's been some questions about what's different between Win Martindale (who's blitzier) and his former assistants Mike Macdonald and Jesse Minter, who were using more simulated pressures than actual ones with their respective defenses last year. If you're in the housing market, Matt's the guy.

There is nothing after the jump because it's video content.

Previously: Podcast 14.0A, 14.0B, 14.0C. The Story. Quarterback. Running Back. Wide Receiver. Tight End. Offensive Tackle. Interior OL. Defensive Interior. Edge. Linebacker. Cornerback. Safety. Special Teams. 5Q5A Offense.

1. Does losing Mike Macdonald matter?

Probably. Unlike Gattis, Macdonald did not make a lateral move, and his trajectory from nobody to position coach to college DC to NFL DC speaks volumes about what the Ravens organization thinks about him. It's no disrespect to Jesse Minter to say that Michigan would have been better off if Macdonald had set up shop in Ann Arbor for several years. (Schematically, anyway. Macdonald reportedly loathed recruiting with the fury of a thousand suns.)

HOWEVA, that does not necessarily mean this year's team is going to be hindered by the transition. Going from Don Brown's all-man all-the-time approach to the Raven's diverse collection of fronts and zones is jarring. A few different players had issues with the change—or in the case of the freshmen linebackers, with trying to absorb it fresh. Gemon Green was iffy in zones, and when I was going over DL clips I think I found several instances where one guy was running a stunt and the other guy wasn't. Brown used stunts, of course, but whenever you change your playbook and your terminology you lose all that familiarity and increase the chances you bust.

Losing a DC after one year re-imposes all those costs… unless it doesn't.

Jesse Minter is a branch of the Ravens coaching tree and he has seven years as a college DC under his belt. Sam Webb on the transition, or lack thereof:

The commonality in scheme with former defensive coordinator Mike Macdonald has been obvious and has allowed for exactly the kind of seamless transition Harbaugh hoped for when he made the hire. The familiarity for the players has made the install of new elements very smooth, especially when it comes to pressure.

The defensive nomenclature certainly hasn't changed from last year, with Harbaugh announcing a 3-4 style defensive depth chart just like last year's. Minter brings the best of both worlds: continuity from the Ravens and college experience.

What he does not bring is much of a track record. His single year at an abominable Vanderbilt program (2-10 last year, 122nd in SP+, 115th on D) is no data at all. He did do an encouraging job with Georgia State, which transitioned to D-1 in 2013, his first year with the program. After two years stuck near the bottom of FEI (119th and 128th, the latter dead last) on teams that went 1-23, GSU popped up to somewhat respectable (81st and 76th) in 2015 and 2016. Building a fresh-to-FBS program into a defense in the vicinity of 2016 MSU, Kentucky, Maryland, and Arizona State is something. And he moved up over time with the Ravens.

I'd rather have kept Macdonald, even with a recruiting gap, but Minter is a young up-and-comer who came through a good organization and has one build job in his past that looks encouraging. It'll probably be fine.

About a month ago, I updated the 2023 recruiting board. It's a useful resource, but it is rather short on hard information about specific key recruitments, as well answers to some of the questions that readers ask in the comments. That's where football recruiting bits comes into play. Today we're going to scan the recruiting landscape for Michigan's 2023 class as we enter the most crucial portion of the cycle: the summer. Victors Weekend is less than a month away (weekend of June 17) and the Big House BBQ will be later in the summer. Many recruitments will enter their make it or break it stages and by the time the summer months are over, the class and the hunt for recruits will look very different than the present. 

Addressing the elephant in the room

When I updated the recruiting board, most of the comments were something like "WHY WE NO GET RECRUITS?????", which seems to be the mood of the Michigan Football fanbase right now. I get it. When Michigan defeated Ohio State in November and then clobbered Iowa a week later to qualify for the CFP, most believed that the Wolverines would quickly be rewarded with a top five recruiting class. Getting that 800 lb. Silverback Gorilla off Michigan's back was definitely important for the narrative, but it hasn't yet produced the sort of recruiting surge that many thought it would. Michigan currently has just six commits, not all of whom are totally locked in, and rank 22nd in the country. Meanwhile, Michigan State is making decent early progress on the class, Ohio State continues to recruit like Ohio State, and Notre Dame holds 12 commits and the #1 class in America (!!!). All of these truths has led many to mash the panic button like they're playing a video game. 

So what's going on here? First off, recruiting does not have a linear relationship with winning. They are correlated to some degree, but not exactly. For example, Mark Dantonio was never able to recruit at a high level at MSU despite ripping off 10-11 win seasons for a half-decade. On the flip side, Mel Tucker might be cobbling a better class than Dantonio ever had off a record at MSU of 13-7. Recruiting is about a lot more than winning. In many ways, it's about ~vibes~ more than anything else, which can be summed up as a combination of winning, the coaches/individual recruiters, $$$$, program history/brand, and more. You could go 12-0 every season and may not get the top class in the country if you don't have charismatic recruiters, aren't willing to play NIL, etc. 

In short, the reason Michigan has had a bumpy last five months on the recruiting trail despite the glories of 2021 is that the developments of the first six weeks of the year badly damaged the ~vibes~. Recruiting has a lot to do with individual relationships between positional coaches (who are the primary recruiters) and the players themselves (as well as the head coach), and when many of the positional coaches, coordinators, and coach all leave or threaten to leave, that does a lot of damage. It shouldn't be considered a surprise that one of the few positions that didn't see the coach switch jobs, running back, is also the only one where the class already has multiple commits. 

[Patrick Barron]

Michigan's WR, TE, DL, and S coaches all either switched positions or left the staff, in addition to both coordinators. And even guys who stayed like Matt Weiss at QB and Sherrone Moore at OL both have had to take on new responsibilities in the coordinating game with Josh Gattis gone. All this shuffling fractured relationships with recruits, as recruits had to get familiar with new positional coaches and essentially start the relationship-building stage all over again. For example, Michigan was in a great spot with 5* WR Jaylen Brown from the Miami area in early January, but since have fallen behind the pack after Josh Gattis, who was the primary recruiter, left the staff. Ron Bellamy, moving from S to WR, has been working from behind other suitors in rebuilding Brown's trust in Michigan. 

And of course, this doesn't even get into the Harbaugh --> NFL speculation. I do not blame recruits' families if they don't trust Harbaugh and his word right now, to be honest. If he says to you "I am done thinking about the NFL", he may be telling the truth, but it's hard to trust a guy who took an interview with an NFL team only a couple months ago and has coached in the NFL before. Those rumors were already powerful negative recruiting tools a few years ago, but actually interviewing with the Vikings and showing interest in that gig made it 100x worse.

Recruits and their parents want to know the man who will be coaching them. Legacy kids like Semaj Morgan were going to Michigan regardless of who the coach was, but for the many, many kids who didn't grow up with maize and blue bedsheets, it matters who the coach is. And when there is considerable doubt about who the coach will be over the next five years, it hurts recruiting. It hurt recruiting last summer when we went into 2021 wondering if Harbaugh's neck was on the block below the guillotine, and it hurts recruiting this summer after the NFL flirtation.

[AFTER THE JUMP: Big fish worth following]