Michigan Football needed a reset but it will require patience

Michigan football desperately needed a reset and Jim Harbaugh can still find success but it’s not going to happen overnight. 

If you don’t know what to expect from Michigan football in the 2021 season, you aren’t the only one. The Wolverines might be one of the toughest teams in the country to read.

Our most recent memories of Michigan football on the field were of a 2-4 season, one that featured four losses in five games and some, that were rather lopsided, thinking of the 49-11 defeat at the hands of Wisconsin.

Josh Ross was right when he said that wasn’t Michigan football. It’s not and it hasn’t been under Jim Harbaugh, who has the program in a better place than he found it, despite all his critics.

Outside of last year’s disaster, Harbaugh won 47 games in his first five years as Michigan football coach and the Wolverines could do much worse than a coach who averages nine wins a year.

It wasn’t that long ago that Harbaugh led Michigan football to 10 straight wins, including eight in a row in the Big Ten before being blown out at Ohio State in 2018.

Harbaugh wasn’t viewed as a failure up to that point and he was coaching his second legit playoff contender in three years. But the offense and defenses were outdated, as was the recruiting operation.

Don Brown was unable to adjust and the 2018 game was a classic example of this staff having overconfidence.

Michigan had a dominant running game that season and the week before, Ohio State got run over by Maryland in an overtime win. I honestly think Harbaugh and company thought they were going to beat up the Buckeyes like they did Wisconsin, Michigan State, and Penn State that season.

So instead of throwing the ball on early downs to Nico Collins, Donovan Peoples-Jones, and others, U-M tried to ground and pound.

However, against an inspired team, playing in Urban Meyer’s final home game, it didn’t work. In fact, it failed spectacularly.

It was like bringing a knife to a gunfight and when the defense had no answers for Ohio State, it turned into an ugly mess the program still hasn’t recovered from.

Yet, Michigan had been close to beating Ohio State and winning the Big Ten in 2016, as well as 2018 before that final loss. So it’s easy to see why it was hard to change course.

Change will be good for Wolverines

That’s why last season’s results and the seismic changes it caused might end up being a good thing. It brought what’s essentially an entirely new coaching staff — one that’s much younger and will give Michigan football a much better chance to compete at the highest level.

Harbaugh landed an NFL-caliber defensive coordinator. Mike Macdonald has some things to prove as a coach and recruiter, but he’s the kind of innovative mind Michigan is going to need to overcome its talent gap with Ohio State, which I hate to tell people, isn’t going away.

But Michigan has the talent to consistently be the second-best program in the Big Ten and heck, even LSU beats Alabama once in a while. That’s an attainable goal.

It’s not a transformation that will happen overnight though.

Michigan will be better than expected this season and I believe the Wolverines will win 8-9 games, which won’t make some fans happy, but will be enough to keep key recruits such as Will Johnson on board.

And while the 2022 recruiting class won’t meet the expectations of some, it’s to be expected with so much turnover on the coaching staff. Some of these guys were just hired in January, less than a year before early signing day.

With many of these recruits deciding this summer, it didn’t give those guys a chance to do much relationship building. That turnover also knocked Michigan out of contention or at least backward in a number of key recruitments.

The 2022 class is still solid but getting a blue-chip ratio of better than 50 percent seems like a challenge when that number is currently 4/16 (four-star recruits or better). If Michigan added nine more recruits and none of its current pledges got upgrades, every commitment from here on out would need to be at least a four-star recruit to get above 50 percent.

That being said, Michigan football seems to be doing a solid job in the class of 2023. A number of in-state recruits and other prospects will be visiting the BBQ this weekend and that’s the cycle where the impact of the new staff will be felt on the recruiting trail.

Armed with a five-star quarterback in J.J. McCarthy, a five-star running back in Donovan Edwards, plus an elite DB in Will Johnson, assuming U-M plays well enough in 2021 to hold his commitment, there are some exciting pieces in place.

And as crazy as it sounds, I still believe in Harbaugh. I love the hires he made and that the culture is invigorated.

Of course, none of this will matter if Michigan has another losing season, and honestly, if that happens, I don’t know if Harbaugh will survive.

But by the same token, fans shouldn’t take an 8-9 win season as some sort of disappointment. Instead, that should be viewed as a step forward and a precursor to what could be the best years of the Harbaugh era.

The Michigan football reset was needed and if given time, it could actually work.