Michigan Football: On Harbaugh and Decommitments

With the recent string of late decommitments from Michigan football’s 2016 class, we should talk about potential issues with recruiting tactics.

Jim Harbaugh is a great football coach. He’s phenomenal at developing talent, and he’s rebuilt programs at the college and pro levels. He is also incredibly eccentric and has one of the best Twitter accounts around. He seems like a nice enough guy, if not a little too intense.

Related Story: What to make of Erik Swenson case

After the past few weeks, you’ll likely see Harbaugh accused of being something different. Michigan players are taking grad transfers, and recruits are taking back their commitments. Less than a week ago, our own Tyler Fenwick talked about how to make sense of longtime-commit Erik Swenson’s decommitment and Harbaugh’s alleged lack of communication with him.

The Swenson issue was big, but you could reason with yourself about it. Michigan can’t officially state anything, but word is it was disappointed that Swenson did not come to a Michigan camp. Swenson’s play also seemed to become less-than-stellar. Some said Michigan tried to make it clear that he wouldn’t be guaranteed a spot. That either isn’t true, or there was a miscommunication. Michigan and Harbaugh didn’t look stellar, but it wasn’t damning of the program like some writers of steaming hot takes would like you to believe.

Things start to become much, much less excusable with Monday night’s decommitment of Florida defensive end Rashad Weaver, who said that Michigan stopped contacting him and eventually told him there was a good chance they would not have room for him come National Signing Day. The other decommitments aside from Swenson and Weaver may have been mutual partings or issues with academics, but these two show there at least is an issue with regards to recruiting, not keeping in contact with the recruit and deciding late to say there’s little to no room for them.

Many college football programs want to recruit the “right way,” and not practice recruiting tactics that are in an ethically gray area. Michigan fans especially want this to happen, what with the fanbase’s almost insane expectations of excellence. In light of Swenson and Weaver’s decommitments, it shows that the program is almost certainly not doing this the “right way.”

Yet the issue is not the program stopping its relationship with a recruit. Despite what rival fanbases may tell you on Twitter because their team is perfect in every way, programs and recruits part ways like this all the time. The issue is that Michigan took so long to contact the recruits, giving them less time to find a new school. The coaches should have been clear with Swenson as soon as they became concerned with his performance. They should have made it clear to Weaver as well.

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Michigan fans should have also known this would be a potential issue with Harbaugh as a coach, as looking at his time at Stanford will show similar attrition.

There’s also an issue with the recruiting process as a whole. A team will likely have about 30 slots open at most for an individual class. To fill up that class, coaches may hand out over 100 offers, because individual players will be given offers from sometimes dozens of top-tier programs and it’s good to have back-up plans if the top talent goes elsewhere. When a good amount of both top talents and the fringe players commit to the program you get oversigning issues.

Michigan would not have fans or the media crucifying the team and Harbaugh if communication came sooner and clearer. These student-athletes would have had more time to find other opportunities and possibly get into a university of at least somewhat similar stock. It’s unfair to them that they have to find new places for themselves with National Signing Day around the corner and other programs filling up.

More wolverines: Michael Dwumfour commits to Michigan

NCAA sports and especially college football have ethical issues. It’s an awful aspect of a great thing. It’s difficult to do everything the right way, especially in a highly-competitive environment like this. Still, you would hope Harbaugh and the staff would approach these issues better than they did here.