A bad June raises questions about Jim Harbaugh and Michigan football's recruiting
Not long before top-100 prospect Raylen Wilson decided this week to back out of his 2023 commitment to Michigan football, Jim Harbaugh was asked to assess his program’s recruiting.
"It’s going really good," he told host Jed Hughes on the June 19 edition of the search firm executive’s eponymous podcast.
It seemed an odd way to characterize what so many see as a hot mess ablaze in a dumpster floating down a muck-filled river. Then again, everything that has transpired this offseason has been peculiar, causing fans to wonder how their beloved Wolverines have lost steam. Angst, dread and fury now saturate team message boards, where only six months ago optimism was the prevailing feeling. Back then, Harbaugh gushed about the revived buzz at Michigan and spoke of a "new beginning."
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The rhetoric wasn’t exaggerated. Instead, it fit the moment. The Wolverines had just vanquished rival Ohio State, won their first Big Ten title in 17 years and claimed their first College Football Playoff berth. The juju in Ann Arbor was as good as it had been in decades.
But these days, it’s just plain bad.
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Michigan, fresh off its best season this century, entered June with only six commitments in its 2023 class. It exits that month still at that same number, with Wilson's rejection canceling out the addition of three-star tight end Deakon Tonielli. While the net-zero result doesn’t portend doom, considering how much time remains before December's early signing period, it is troubling. The Wolverines’ 2023 class includes only one blue-chip prospect and is ranked 55th in the nation by 247 Sports — below 12 other Big Ten teams — following a four-week period when they hosted many of the country’s best high school players. Some of those stars toured Ann Arbor only to deliver a verbal pledge elsewhere. Others simply drifted away.
The loss of five-star quarterback CJ Carr to Notre Dame may have seemed preordained but it stung anyway because he grew up in nearby Saline and is the grandson of Lloyd Carr, the last coach to lead Michigan to a national championship. The 2024 commit's choice of a rival couldn’t be rationalized away by a fanbase tortured by a steady drip of bad news. The stream of negative updates sowed confusion and raised existential uncertainty about whether U-M has the ruthlessness to compete in an arena where teenagers can make big bucks off their name, image and likeness. Harbaugh stoked those doubts when he told reporters he pitched the Michigan experience to recruits as “transformational” instead of “transactional.”
Harbaugh, more than anyone, knows it can be both.
In his first seven years as the Wolverines’ coach, he banked north of $50 million as he evolved from the presumed savior of Michigan football to a disappointment to a redeemed leader to his latest iteration: A Rorschach inkblot, ever subject to interpretation.
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Should Harbaugh be celebrated as the man who launched the Wolverines to their highest point in the 24 years since Carr's national title? Or decried as the coach who squandered the momentum of a 12-2 season by flirting with the NFL this past winter and destabilizing the structure of his organization? Is he the reason Michigan still has a fighting chance in this new age, or the root of festering problems that may soon hold the program back?
There are no clear answers, which makes this offseason that much more vexing.
As Harbaugh sees it, the Wolverines remain on solid footing.
“The state of Michigan football is scary good right now,” he said in March.
In the short term, Harbaugh has reason to feel bullish about the program’s prospects. The offense is loaded with talent while the defense has a stockpile of young players with tremendous upside.
A favorable schedule this fall presents the opportunity for the Wolverines to achieve double-digit victories for the second straight season.
But then what?
The outlook grows hazier in a nebulous future where competition on the NIL front may determine college football’s winners and losers.
Harbaugh acknowledged he has no idea what that landscape could look like and how it may still be defined. Perhaps he doesn’t want to know. After all, it’s easier to remain divorced from reality when the naked truth is too much to bear. It may explain how the coach of the reigning Big Ten champions can say recruiting is going well when all the evidence before him would suggest otherwise.
Follow Rainer Sabin on Twitter @RainerSabin.