Michigan is its own worst enemy when it comes to NIL

Michigan football recruiting is crippled right now because of a lack of NIL and while Michigan basketball hasn’t been hit as hard, it could be. 

If you aren’t worried about Michigan football‘s 2023 recruiting class, you should be, even if it’s only the month of June.

The month doesn’t matter because whether it’s August, September, October, or early national signing day until Michigan gets its act together with NIL, which means rolling around in the dirt, recruiting will continue to suffer.

Wonder why Dante Moore went to Oregon? Well if one school was offering a big-time NIL deal and the other school offered literally nothing, where would you go?

It’s easy to criticize these kids but millions of dollars would change your life and theirs. Plus the risk of seeing all that money go away because of an injury is gone. And while the education is valuable if you have millions in your pocket already, you get can get that elite education anytime.

Money is generally the biggest obstacle, so trying to sell the “Michigan degree” and all that to someone over millions of dollars, even six figures, is just foolish.

There were plenty of reasons why Michigan football failed to get CJ Carr and will fail to get Dante Moore. Matt Weiss did a terrible job recruiting Moore and there’s no sugarcoating it. He didn’t understand the job and he failed, miserably.

The Wolverines also didn’t do a great job with CJ Carr, but the truth is that NIL played a factor in both recruitments and NIL is a big reason Notre Dame continues to eat Michigan’s lunch on the recruiting trail.

Michigan is acting all high and mighty, while Notre Dame is doing what everyone else is doing while offering a premium education, so it’s easy to see why top target after top target is choosing Notre Dame with Michigan as a close second or third (just like tonight with Charles Jagusah and last night with top 2024 wideout Cam Williams).

Some looming recruitments will also tell the tale of whether Michigan can still win a contested recruitment in this NIL environment. Enow Etta and Collins Acheampong should be slam dunks. They are edge rushers, spent time with Aidan Hutchinson and David Ojabo as they got their Big Ten championship rings, and could easily follow that same development path to the NFL.

Michigan football was the clear leader for both. Now, there is a question. Michigan State, which is light years ahead of the Wolverines in the NIL game, is pushing for Etta, while Miami, another program dominating in NIL, is doing the same for Acheampong.

Etta was expected to visit Stanford and he values academics, as does Acheampong. So if both of those players choose the NIL option over Michigan, that should be all you need to know.

It’s simply baffling to me that Michigan State can manage to do NIL, literally in the same state, yet the Wolverines just keep saying essentially, “Pay for play is illegal.”

Michigan has to get its head out of the sand

Pay for play is illegal. But that’s what NIL is and the NCAA is never going to stop it. There won’t be punishments and Michigan athletics is committing malpractice in my opinion.

Hunter Dickinson told us that Michigan football and Michigan basketball were going to miss out on elite talent and it’s happening. The Wolverines don’t have a single top-100 commitment in the 2023 class and with their current NIL stance, they won’t get one.

Michigan basketball hasn’t suffered as many hits but we’ll see if the 2023 class is impacted. Papa Kante should be making a decision this summer and Marvel Allen, a top-30 recruit just said he’ll be taking an official visit to U-M.

Can the Wolverines win these commitments without NIL guarantees if competing schools are making those offers? Juwan Howard has a lot he can sell to recruits; Jim Harbaugh does too but when other programs are offering money and similar opportunities, that’s hard to pass up.

So maybe, losing some recruitments in a really embarrassing way is exactly what needs to happen. Then again, it’s hard to get more embarrassing the missing out on two five-star quarterbacks from the state of Michigan in consecutive classes.

If it gets worse than this, I shudder to think what that looks like.