Michigan was projected to win 9 games. Now the Wolverines are on pace for 8 amid a QB injury. The horror.
Yes, Michigan is underachieving in Jim Harbaugh’s third year. No, it doesn’t have to mean something.
Photo by Justin K. Aller/Getty Images
It wasn’t particularly hard to enjoy making “Notre Dame went 4-8” jokes after the Irish struggled last season. A certain strand of Fighting Irish fan carries a level of, shall we say, self-importance, and when their team stinks, it’s fun to point it out. That’s not the same thing as saying their team is going to go 4-8 every year, but hey, in the name of ribbing, you have to live in the moment.
If you want to rib Michigan fans about how their team is currently tied with Rutgers in the standings, or how Jim Harbaugh has never — never! — finished better than third in the Big Ten East, then seize the opportunity. It’s pretty funny, especially considering what Michigan did to Rutgers last season. (The Butch Jones comparison is good, too.)
Harbaugh draws attention to himself for all sorts of reasons and manages to piss people off in the process; when people like that stumble, we point and laugh. It’s fine.
Just don’t expect it to continue for much longer.
Let’s recap Harbaugh’s Michigan tenure thus far.
- Harbaugh inherited from Brady Hoke a team that had gone 12-13 in 2013-14. The Wolverines fell to 61st in Off. S&P+ in 2013, then 89th in 2014. The defense was fine, but scoring points is a good thing, and Michigan didn’t do very much of it.
- In Harbaugh’s first season, Michigan doubled its win total from five to 10 and improved from 48th in S&P+ to fifth. The Wolverines won seven games by at least 21 points and lost to only three opponents (Utah, Michigan State, Ohio State) that combined to go 34-7. Against Utah, they lost because of a pick six. Against Michigan State, well, you remember that one. Not a bad debut.
- In 2016, Michigan came within a spot of the Big Ten East title. If officials mark J.T. Barrett’s fourth-down conversion attempt slightly differently, the Wolverines go to the Big Ten title game and likely go to the College Football Playoff. As it stands, they merely backed up the previous season with another 10-3 record, another top-five S&P+ finish, and losses by a combined three points against Ohio State and Florida State teams that won 21 games. All this despite a late-season shoulder injury to quarterback Wilton Speight.
- In 2017, they were projected to slide following the departure of almost all of the defense and receiving corps. They were still projected a healthy 10th in S&P+ because of recent recruiting and performance, but that’s still a drop. They began 11th in the AP poll but were picked a distant third in the Big Ten East poll.
- At the beginning of October, they were still ninth in S&P+ and sporting a 4-0 record. The offense was laboring with an all-or-nothing run game and rebuilt passing game, and then Speight got hurt again. In monsoon conditions against Michigan State, the Wolverines recovered zero of four fumbles and suffered some of the worst turnovers luck of the season in what was still just a four-point loss. The run game carried an overtime win over Indiana, but then the Wolverines got smoked by a top-three Penn State team.
- Without Speight, the offense has gone from mediocre to problematic, and a young, exciting defense proved mortal against Penn State’s offense. Michigan is now 27th in S&P+, worse than projected.
Matthew O’Haren-USA TODAY Sports
2. There are plenty of reasons to be less than 100 percent satisfied with Harbaugh’s performance so far.
No matter how awful the offense was when he inherited, he peaked at 38th in Off. S&P+ in 2015 and has only slid from there.
Quarterback injuries will do that, but it’s a mark against him that he hasn’t been able to field a backup better than John O’Korn. He’s signed four four-star quarterbacks in three classes and still hasn’t topped the mistake-prone Houston transfer. And with the overall recruiting he has done, it should have taken more than a single quarterback injury to create an offense that ranks 85th in Off. S&P+ and has averaged a paltry 4.3 yards per play in October.
Harbaugh has not provided enough evidence that, once he’s got all his pieces in place, he’s going to field an offense elite enough to take the division from Urban Meyer’s Ohio State, James Franklin’s Penn State, etc.
Harbaugh is also 25-8. He hasn’t proved he won’t take the division, either.
The Michigan defense has been elite since the moment he returned to Ann Arbor, and despite Saturday’s struggles in Happy Valley, it’s really difficult to worry too much about that side of the ball. Only five of the top 16 tacklers are seniors, and there are only about three or four senior contributors on offense. This was always going to be a transition year, and it was rendered even more so when Speight got hurt again.
Harbaugh is recruiting like gangbusters, and one could say he was an inch (and a win over Wisconsin) away from taking a program that had fallen into mediocrity to the CFP in his second season. If only we could all be such underachievers.
It really is funny that they’re tied with Rutgers, though.
3. Holy parity!
Michigan isn’t alone in the “blue blood stumbling out of the S&P+ top 25” department. USC is currently 26th, LSU 29th, and Florida State 40th. College football never remains in a parity state very long, but outside of the top 15, at least, we’re seeing it this year:
Every conference currently has at least one team in the top 35, and every conference has at least two teams ranked 90th or worse. Only the SEC doesn’t have at least one team ranked in the 100s ... and it still has four ranked 89th or worse.
Last year, there was a 17-point difference between the top conference (the SEC, at 8.9) and the bottom (Sun Belt, -8.3), and that was a downward shift from the previous years, when the SEC’s average was 10 or higher. This year, there’s only a 12.4-point range between the Big Ten and the Sun Belt.
Looking just at power conferences, last year there was a 3.3-point difference between the No. 1 SEC and No. 5 Big 12. This year, there’s a 1.9-point difference between No. 1 Big Ten and No. 5 Pac-12. Everybody’s good. Everybody stinks.
Here are some more comparisons between 2016 and 2017:
- At this point last year, there were seven teams with an S&P+ rating of at least plus-22.4 (as in, 22.4 points per game better than the average team). As of now, there are two. The average top-10 team currently has a rating about three points per game worse than last year’s average top-10 team.
- It’s the same effect at the other end: The average bottom-10 team is 2.4 points better than last year’s average bottom-10 team. The range between the best and worst team at this point last year was 61.3 points. This year: 50.6.
- At this point in 2016, there were 12 Group of 5 teams in the top 50. This year, there are 15.
- There were four power conference teams ranking 101st or worse; this year, there are six.
College football has gotten a bit nutty this year. We haven’t entirely noticed yet — blue bloods Ohio State, Alabama, Penn State, and Georgia are the current S&P+ top four, after all — but things have gotten awfully weird beneath the surface.
4. Big Play Watch
Welcome back to the big-play party, Penn State!
During the Nittany Lions’ 6-0 start, James Franklin’s squad displayed dramatically improved offensive efficiency and proved adept at Little Things like field position and finishing drives. They were also less explosive than last year’s funnest-team-in-football attack. Where’s the fun in that?
Apparently they were just keeping cards close to the vest.
“It’s stuff that we worked on in camp,” James Franklin said after the game, about a new wildcat wrinkle with Saquon Barkley. “Then each week, we go back and say, what do we want to use out the playbook and from back in camp? Having that recall helps. All of this stuff you saw tonight, we’ve run before. We’ve got a mature football team that can recall on previous experiences.”
Against Michigan, PSU found some of its best matchups were downfield. Quarterback Trace McSorley completed passes of 17, 23, 26, 27, 35, 36, and 42 yards; toss in a 69-yard Barkley run and a 23-yarder by McSorley, and it’s fair to conclude the Nittany Lions’ 42-13 win was powered by 2016-era big-play ability.
The performance was good enough to improve PSU’s IsoPPP (my primary explosiveness measure) ranking to 16th; adjust for opponent, and the Nittany Lions are up to eighth. All is right with the world once again.
5. Gunner of the Year Watch
Out of pure curiosity, I’ve been tracking special teams tackles this year. Maybe we’ll give a pretend award out to whoever has the most of them at the end. Winner of the award gets it named after him.
Your fake award watch list through eight weeks:
- South Alabama’s Deonta Moore is your new leader in overall special teams tackles, with 11. The junior running back has participated in 10 stops on kick returns, and opponents are only averaging 18.8 yards per return when he’s involved. The Jags currently rank 125th in kickoff success rate, so if he doesn’t make the stop, it appears no one does.
- WMU’s Alex Grace remains in contention. He made another half-tackle on Saturday, giving him 9.5 special teams tackles overall, second in the country. Opponents are averaging just 17.8 yards per kick return when he’s involved.
- USF’s Nate Ferguson continues to keep pace; he’s now up to eight ST tackles overall, while other familiar Watch List names — Maryland’s Jake Funk, UCF’s Gabriel Luyanda — are holding steady at 7.5.
- A new name to watch in the gunner field: Kansas’ Kyron Johnson. The freshman linebacker is up to seven ST tackles, and opponents are averaging just 2.3 yards per punt return when he’s involved.
- In terms of overall value, it’s hard to ignore another riser: Miami (Ohio)’s Bart Baratti. The sophomore defensive back has 6.5 ST tackles — he has been involved in four punt return stops (average return: 1.5 yards) and four kick return stops (average return: 17.3 yards). A unit full of Baratti’s would be dominant in the field position game.
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