College Football Morning: Michigan Is Not LSU

Building back won't be easy in Ann Arbor.

Four years ago, LSU followed up one of the most dominant seasons in college football history with a 5–5 campaign. What Michigan’s doing is not unprecedented, even in the recent past. One-shot national titles happen, and the aftermath can be grim, and flags fly forever, as the old saying goes. Michigan’s likeliest to finish 7–5, better than LSU’s .500 mark in Ed Orgeron’s comedown year. If the Wolverines can avoid drawing an SEC opponent in their bowl game, that well might become 8–5. An eight-win record isn’t as unsightly as 5–5.

At the same time, though, LSU’s 2019 accomplishments were more impressive than those of 2023 Michigan. 2019 LSU arose in a dynastic era of college football, one ruled by titanic Alabama, a powerhouse at Clemson, and (in what was then the near future) one of the most annually talented rosters in history over at Georgia. Michigan caught more breaks, leaning on Covid eligibility to develop their offensive line and meeting Nick Saban after his peak. Michigan played by at least the effective rules of the sport, and Michigan earned its national title, and comparing just about anyone to 2019 LSU will end badly for the team compared. But 2023 Michigan was both luckier and not as good as 2019 LSU. And to make matters worse, 2024 Michigan stands a good chance of being worse than LSU in 2020. Even if Michigan does manage to finish 8–5, they’ll do it with wins over Fresno State, Arkansas State, and a bowl opponent, all teams 2020 LSU—who played a ten-game SEC schedule and nothing else—did not get to enjoy.

So, while we’ve seen plenty of national champions fall off the next year, and while we recently saw one fall off dramatically, that shouldn’t lessen concern at Michigan. Michigan has the national championship, and they’ll gladly take it in exchange for what’s to come. But from appearances right now, the days ahead are bound for famine. The Harbaugh era is over. The post-Harbaugh era has begun. It’s looking a lot like the days of Brady Hoke.

We’ll expand on Moore in a minute, but to extend the LSU comparison for a moment more: Even at the worst point in 2020, there was no doubting LSU’s ability to bounce back. LSU’s one-shot title was driven by elite recruiting, a hallmark of LSU’s identity. That was never going to go away. LSU won its last title by acquiring a massive stock of talent and placing it under the care of all-or-nothing vibes guy Ed Orgeron. Orgeron wasn’t going to outfox opponents, but he could make a group of 18 to 23-year-olds play their very best every game. LSU rolled the dice on Orgeron, and it worked until it didn’t.

Michigan built its championship team more deliberately. Michigan couldn’t rely on bringing the best talent to its campus. The Michigan model—the blueprint for winning a championship as a non-Ohio State program in the Midwest—centered on excellent position-specific coaching. Moore might not be cut out to be a head coach, but he was great at developing an offensive line, especially when blessed with that extra year in which to do it. For a school like LSU, recruiting doesn’t go away. For Michigan or any college program, coaching is harder to retain. Position coaches want bigger roles. Head coaches are drawn to the NFL. Programs don’t get to keep Moore, Jesse Minter, and Steve Clinkscale as assistants forever. Not in college ball. This is why it’s so imperative for Notre Dame to keep throwing money at Mike Denbrock, Al Golden, Al Washington, and Mike Mickens. If you’re not going to build a program with top-five talent, you need to develop something comparable enough to compete.

Why can’t Michigan just learn to recruit like LSU? There are three reasons. One is respectable—among college football’s iconic programs, Michigan’s admissions office is second only to Notre Dame’s in its willingness to turn away recruits (Northwestern and Stanford are different beasts). One is circumstantial—Michigan is in Michigan, while LSU’s in talent-loaded Louisiana. One is cultural—Michigan’s boosters don’t care as much about football as LSU’s. They care a lot! But they don’t care as much about football as LSU’s.

We knew this was the case with LSU. LSU went 5–5 in 2020, and we shrugged and said, “They’ll be back.” That’s taking a while, but it appears to be happening. Beat Texas A&M this weekend and LSU will probably make the playoff. There’s an outside chance they could win the SEC. Even if they meet neither of those goals, they’ll finish as a top-15-caliber team with plenty of inbound talent.

For Michigan, the early thought was that the program culture would remain. We knew this year’s team wouldn’t be as good as last year’s, but the Maize and Blue brought back a ton of talent on the defensive side of the ball, and Moore’s previous offensive leadership made us believe the offensive line would execute well enough to keep that side of the ball respectable. Seven games in, we’re pulling the plug on any optimism for this program over the next few years. Maybe we’ll be just as wrong as we were preseason. Maybe Moore and his team will rally. But things look bleak. Things look very, very bleak.

Movelor, our college football model’s rating system, exists to provide as accurate of single-game spreads as possible. To do this, it reacts to each game’s results and adjusts a team’s rating accordingly. It’s not quite this simple—there are some offseason adjustments as well—but this is mostly how it works. Overall? It’s pretty accurate. So far this season, it’s only about a point and a half less accurate than the famously accurate betting markets.

Movelor’s one shortcoming? The thing we need to address this offseason? It sometimes reacts too slowly. It rarely moves a team’s rating more than three points in a given week. Its average postgame ratings adjustment this year, nationally, is 1.85 points per game. Only 26% of the time has it moved a team’s rating in any direction by more than 2.34 points, meaning only 13% of the time has it decreased a team’s rating by more than 2.34 points.

Michigan is averaging that 2.34-point deduction after each of its games.

No football team in the combined FBS and FCS has disappointed Movelor’s preseason expectations more than Michigan. Michigan’s current rating (+30.1, or 30.1 points better than the average FBS/FCS team) is 16.4 points worse than where they began the season, and 18.4 points worse than where they ended last year. Right now, Movelor would project this year’s Michigan to lose to last year’s Michigan by 18.4 points on a neutral field. That’s probably a significant underestimate. 1.85-point changes work very well once Movelor’s in the ballpark on a given team. Movelor works well because it’s always already in the ballpark on most teams. With Michigan, though, Movelor has yet to find the ballpark. It keeps giving Michigan fourth-quartile shifts downward, and those keep not being enough.

Other models are struggling to understand the Wolverines too. ESPN’s SP+ and FPI, which generally track within a point of betting markets for accuracy, still have Michigan 24th and 38th in the country, respectively. Betting markets are far less optimistic, and even betting markets are struggling to find bottom on this team. From what we can tell, betting markets currently have Michigan somewhere around the 55th-best team in the FBS. Betting markets are our most accurate tool. The mid-50’s is where our most accurate tool has this team. But Michigan has failed to meet betting markets’ expectations in six of their seven games this year. Michigan should play right about to the spread this week. By the nature of the market, there’s a 50% chance they underperform.

In less than one full season, Michigan football has allowed more than 50 programs to pass it. Some of these—Duke, maybe—should be relatively easy to pick back off. But Michigan’s only nationally competitive seasons in the last twenty years came about as the product of a long, slow build. Michigan has only shown itself capable of winning national titles slowly, and with a bit of luck. If it took Harbaugh eight years to go from the Citrus Bowl to a national championship, how long will it take Moore to go from 7–6 or wherever this ends to a top-three team?

The answer most likely doesn’t exist. Moore most likely isn’t the guy for this job. Michigan will wait a few years to pull the plug, and then whoever they hire next will have a new long build on their hands. There’s no guarantee that this next coach will succeed. More likely, the task will get passed to yet another coach. That’s how these things tend to go. It’s easier to win at Michigan than it is at a lot of schools, but it’s harder in this era than it is at Ohio State or Oregon and maybe even USC. Michigan is Penn State with a more recent title and a prouder admissions office. By all appearances—and please pardon my language here—Michigan is fucked.

Promoting Moore was the right call. Players loved him. He’d coached this team before in real live football games. Any NCAA action from the Harbaugh era crime spree will likely be toothless, but the threat may have been enough to scare off hotter names, and Alabama’s coaching search provoked a lot of contract extensions. Promoting Moore was the right call. Promoting Moore made sense. Seven games in, though, it’s going worse than badly. A top-20 roster is not a top-20 team. The offense is a constipated opossum, and though the defense is still good (SP+ has it tenth, though again that might be an overestimate), there is no good reason for the defense to not be great.

How is Moore responding? This is where it gets worst. Moore’s response is pure panic. Pure, unabated panic. Sherrone Moore is picking up quarterbacks and hurling them against the metaphorical wall, praying to a Jim Harbaugh bobblehead that they’ll stick. The man who realized he could beat Penn State last year with eight passes and simply ran the ball 46 times? He’s putting 25-year-old Jack Tuttle on a football field and asking him to save the season. The man whose offensive line was good enough to run the ball 46 times against a top-ten team? He’s letting Illinois sack Jack Tuttle five times.

Few things are final in life or in sports. Moore has plenty of time to come back, and everyone knows how nervous Ryan Day will be on the morning of November 30th. It’s hard, though, to remember a worse start to an internal promotion’s head coaching career.

It’s not Alex Orji’s fault.

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After deeming ourselves “Probable for the rest of the week,” we were a late scratch yesterday, so we’re about to double up today. Next post incoming shortly. Bark.

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This post was also published at www.thebarkingcrow.com, where you can always find all of Joe Stunardi, Stuart McGrath, and NIT Stu’s work.