I've been talking about this for a while and wondering how these things will work themselves out, but the picture is starting to clarify regarding Harbaugh's vision for his team in the age of NIL, and it's nothing short of fascinating.
What's more, he seems to be the only one (or one of the only ones) doing it. I have taken cursory looks at the rosters of OSU, PSU, ND, Bama and Georgia, and they don't seem to be doing what we are, which is: use NIL as a means of having more "scholarship" guys on the squad.
For those old enough to remember, having more than 85 was central to Nebraska's period of dominance in the '80s and '90s. It was customary for all the in-state players to pay their own way because Nebraska was such an inexpensive school to attend. It was a mark of pride, that they would do that in order to save spots on the 85 for out-of-state kids.
Ever since that has no longer been a thing... neither has Nebraska as a football power.
Right now we're at 101 for 2024.
Between guys likely to go pro and inevitable portal entries, that's more like 82-84 in reality... which means that if we were hewing to the 85 limit, we could take 1-3 more commits and then we're done.
Of course, we're not doing that. Just in the defensive front 7, there are CB/FC's out there for 1 NT, 2 EDGE guys and 2 LB's. Plus, we're inevitably going to take 2-3 more DB's, 2-3 more WR, 1 more RB, 1 more OL... and could make room for 1-2 more "supers" at any position.
So if you take the 101 we're currently at... subtract 17-19 for expected transfers out and early draft entries... but then add in the 12-14 more commits we seem headed for taking (for a class of, as @Jim__S forecasted, 28-30)... that will put us in the ballpark of 96-98 guys. Then expect a couple of strategic transfers in on top of that, for roster right about 100.
Which is right where we sit for 2023 as of now with the portal closed until after the regular season.
There are a number of different ways to look at this, from a compliance, ethics and a strategy standpoint. I'm not kidding here, it's REALLY interesting.
First... it's pay-for-play. Don't have any illusions about that. It’s adding 13-15 players to the team who wouldn't - couldn't - be here without the money. So we can't be on our high horse about "we do 'real' NIL while other teams just buy players". We're just using our money to expand the roster instead of using it on giant guarantees to 18 year-olds.
It grossly breaks the spirit of what NIL is supposed to be, but remains, by the letter of the rules, NCAA-compliant.
That said, if the player isn't being guaranteed any more than his tuition and expenses.- a quasi scholarship, just being paid by a donor collective instead of athletic department revenues - then it's kind of a "transactional/transformational" hybrid.
The transaction is that we'll give you enough money to cover college so long as you do some token quid-pro-quo (besides playing for Michigan - but for all intents and purposes, the service provided is "playing for Michigan".)
So even though it adheres to the letter of the rules by more or less "faking it" administratively... it's still objectively pay-for-play. But if all we're guaranteeing is a place on the team, then ethically, is there really a problem there? Perhaps not.
However - and this is a BIG "however"....
You can't cut a scholarship player. But you absolutely CAN cut a player who isn't technically on a scholarship. You just tell the collective to cut off the money.
So I don't think you can have incoming freshmen on this plan. It has to be the 5th year seniors, incoming transfers, and elevated walkons.
What I think we're dealing with here is:
The 85 number now applies only to NLI-signed 1st through 4th year players.
That's the only way our 2023 and 2024 rosters work in terms of the numbers.
So let's take a look at 2023, which, as I noted above, is at 99 now.
If you strip away all the 5th/6th year seniors (Keegan, CJohnson, Barrett, Velazquez, Sainristil, German Green, QJohnson, Kolesar)... and grad transfers in (Tuttle, Barner, Henderson, Nugent, Goode, Turner)... we're at...
85
!!!!!!!
Do the same for 2024 right now and, when you factor in likely early draft entries, you see where the room for a class of 30 comes from.
From a strategic standpoint, this is kind of amazing.
Recruiting, just like drafting in pro sports, is an inexact science. Even when you do it well, you're going to have a lot of misses. The teams that are good at it just miss less.
So how do you increase your odds of having nothing but really good players on the field?
Simply up the NUMBER of bites at the apple! That way, hitting and missing at the same percentage you always did yields more good players.
Bill Belichick did this brilliantly while Tom Brady was on the Patriots. By exploiting a market inefficiency - future draft picks valued at 70 cents on the dollar in trade - he would always trade back and get future picks. And every year it seemed like the Pats had 2-3 extra picks in the first 100. He got himself more bites at the apple, and also had a higher percentage of his roster on their first contract, which is what allowed them to afford Brady at top dollar for all those years and still have a winning team around him.
If you have 10-15 extra scholarship-level guys, that's 1-3 extra quality players in every position group, and the odds of you ever having a gaping hole on your roster are diminished sharply.
As @KevinWerner pointed out offline: by doing this with 5th year seniors and grad transfers, you're only paying for 1-3 semesters. So it's financially efficient. You're targeting resources on veterans whose contributions can be much more accurately forecasted.
This doesn't preclude the "transformational", "true" NIL for everyone else - and it does appear the market is coming back to us on that, just as Warde Manuel predicted it would when he refused to get into the unsustainable "transactional" game, much to everyone's great consternation.
But using NIL resources in this way is just f'ing genius.
Inevitably, everyone else will figure it out. But Harbaugh & Co being the innovators will give us an invaluable year or two of top-end competitiveness until other programs adopt the practice (or the NCAA gets wise and finds a way to close the loophole.). And that further cements Michigan in the very top tier we've been trying to get back into.
Now, there are pitfalls with this that have to be avoided.
First, you can only go so far with it. There are only so many lockers, seats in the position rooms, and practice reps to go around. There is a limit on the number of players who can even functionally enter the competition for playing time. Can you even have 11 EDGE/SAM guys actually competing to play, which is what we have heading into this fall?
And I still do worry about the effect on team chemistry of bringing in transfers to jump the line ahead of guys who have been working their way up. I would like us to be more judicious with transfers. I don't mind a Mike Danna or Jack Tuttle or Cam Goode coming in expressly to be a depth guy. And I don't mind a transfer filling a gaping hole, like Jake Rudock or Olu Oluwatimi did. It's guys like Drake Nugent and Myles Hinton that make me uncomfortable, because I don't think they were actually necessary and I don't like doing that to guys like Barnhart, Jones, Atteberry, Crippen and Anderson. And I think down the line there could be blowback from that practice.
But I'll tell you what: if our standard practice becomes, "if you still have eligibility after getting your degree, you can pay your own bills like a grownup now - but we'll cover it"... and that opens up the space on the 85 for more bites at the recruiting apple... then maybe a few years on, we'll almost never need transfers.
Of course, with higher class sizes will come elevated attrition. A smaller percentage of recruits will be able to see the field, so the football team is more or less going to operate like the Ross School of Business, where not everyone who gets into the university will get into the B-school. The new compact for incoming freshmen is going to be: half of you are NEVER going to play and are going to have to go somewhere else if you want to get on the field. Know that coming in.
Will this be a harder sell than when the odds of playing were a little bit better? Time will tell.
But for the short term, I think this is a brilliant innovation on the part of Harbaugh or whoever on his staff figured this out.
What's more, he seems to be the only one (or one of the only ones) doing it. I have taken cursory looks at the rosters of OSU, PSU, ND, Bama and Georgia, and they don't seem to be doing what we are, which is: use NIL as a means of having more "scholarship" guys on the squad.
For those old enough to remember, having more than 85 was central to Nebraska's period of dominance in the '80s and '90s. It was customary for all the in-state players to pay their own way because Nebraska was such an inexpensive school to attend. It was a mark of pride, that they would do that in order to save spots on the 85 for out-of-state kids.
Ever since that has no longer been a thing... neither has Nebraska as a football power.
Right now we're at 101 for 2024.
Between guys likely to go pro and inevitable portal entries, that's more like 82-84 in reality... which means that if we were hewing to the 85 limit, we could take 1-3 more commits and then we're done.
Of course, we're not doing that. Just in the defensive front 7, there are CB/FC's out there for 1 NT, 2 EDGE guys and 2 LB's. Plus, we're inevitably going to take 2-3 more DB's, 2-3 more WR, 1 more RB, 1 more OL... and could make room for 1-2 more "supers" at any position.
So if you take the 101 we're currently at... subtract 17-19 for expected transfers out and early draft entries... but then add in the 12-14 more commits we seem headed for taking (for a class of, as @Jim__S forecasted, 28-30)... that will put us in the ballpark of 96-98 guys. Then expect a couple of strategic transfers in on top of that, for roster right about 100.
Which is right where we sit for 2023 as of now with the portal closed until after the regular season.
There are a number of different ways to look at this, from a compliance, ethics and a strategy standpoint. I'm not kidding here, it's REALLY interesting.
First... it's pay-for-play. Don't have any illusions about that. It’s adding 13-15 players to the team who wouldn't - couldn't - be here without the money. So we can't be on our high horse about "we do 'real' NIL while other teams just buy players". We're just using our money to expand the roster instead of using it on giant guarantees to 18 year-olds.
It grossly breaks the spirit of what NIL is supposed to be, but remains, by the letter of the rules, NCAA-compliant.
That said, if the player isn't being guaranteed any more than his tuition and expenses.- a quasi scholarship, just being paid by a donor collective instead of athletic department revenues - then it's kind of a "transactional/transformational" hybrid.
The transaction is that we'll give you enough money to cover college so long as you do some token quid-pro-quo (besides playing for Michigan - but for all intents and purposes, the service provided is "playing for Michigan".)
So even though it adheres to the letter of the rules by more or less "faking it" administratively... it's still objectively pay-for-play. But if all we're guaranteeing is a place on the team, then ethically, is there really a problem there? Perhaps not.
However - and this is a BIG "however"....
You can't cut a scholarship player. But you absolutely CAN cut a player who isn't technically on a scholarship. You just tell the collective to cut off the money.
So I don't think you can have incoming freshmen on this plan. It has to be the 5th year seniors, incoming transfers, and elevated walkons.
What I think we're dealing with here is:
The 85 number now applies only to NLI-signed 1st through 4th year players.
That's the only way our 2023 and 2024 rosters work in terms of the numbers.
So let's take a look at 2023, which, as I noted above, is at 99 now.
If you strip away all the 5th/6th year seniors (Keegan, CJohnson, Barrett, Velazquez, Sainristil, German Green, QJohnson, Kolesar)... and grad transfers in (Tuttle, Barner, Henderson, Nugent, Goode, Turner)... we're at...
85
!!!!!!!
Do the same for 2024 right now and, when you factor in likely early draft entries, you see where the room for a class of 30 comes from.
From a strategic standpoint, this is kind of amazing.
Recruiting, just like drafting in pro sports, is an inexact science. Even when you do it well, you're going to have a lot of misses. The teams that are good at it just miss less.
So how do you increase your odds of having nothing but really good players on the field?
Simply up the NUMBER of bites at the apple! That way, hitting and missing at the same percentage you always did yields more good players.
Bill Belichick did this brilliantly while Tom Brady was on the Patriots. By exploiting a market inefficiency - future draft picks valued at 70 cents on the dollar in trade - he would always trade back and get future picks. And every year it seemed like the Pats had 2-3 extra picks in the first 100. He got himself more bites at the apple, and also had a higher percentage of his roster on their first contract, which is what allowed them to afford Brady at top dollar for all those years and still have a winning team around him.
If you have 10-15 extra scholarship-level guys, that's 1-3 extra quality players in every position group, and the odds of you ever having a gaping hole on your roster are diminished sharply.
As @KevinWerner pointed out offline: by doing this with 5th year seniors and grad transfers, you're only paying for 1-3 semesters. So it's financially efficient. You're targeting resources on veterans whose contributions can be much more accurately forecasted.
This doesn't preclude the "transformational", "true" NIL for everyone else - and it does appear the market is coming back to us on that, just as Warde Manuel predicted it would when he refused to get into the unsustainable "transactional" game, much to everyone's great consternation.
But using NIL resources in this way is just f'ing genius.
Inevitably, everyone else will figure it out. But Harbaugh & Co being the innovators will give us an invaluable year or two of top-end competitiveness until other programs adopt the practice (or the NCAA gets wise and finds a way to close the loophole.). And that further cements Michigan in the very top tier we've been trying to get back into.
Now, there are pitfalls with this that have to be avoided.
First, you can only go so far with it. There are only so many lockers, seats in the position rooms, and practice reps to go around. There is a limit on the number of players who can even functionally enter the competition for playing time. Can you even have 11 EDGE/SAM guys actually competing to play, which is what we have heading into this fall?
And I still do worry about the effect on team chemistry of bringing in transfers to jump the line ahead of guys who have been working their way up. I would like us to be more judicious with transfers. I don't mind a Mike Danna or Jack Tuttle or Cam Goode coming in expressly to be a depth guy. And I don't mind a transfer filling a gaping hole, like Jake Rudock or Olu Oluwatimi did. It's guys like Drake Nugent and Myles Hinton that make me uncomfortable, because I don't think they were actually necessary and I don't like doing that to guys like Barnhart, Jones, Atteberry, Crippen and Anderson. And I think down the line there could be blowback from that practice.
But I'll tell you what: if our standard practice becomes, "if you still have eligibility after getting your degree, you can pay your own bills like a grownup now - but we'll cover it"... and that opens up the space on the 85 for more bites at the recruiting apple... then maybe a few years on, we'll almost never need transfers.
Of course, with higher class sizes will come elevated attrition. A smaller percentage of recruits will be able to see the field, so the football team is more or less going to operate like the Ross School of Business, where not everyone who gets into the university will get into the B-school. The new compact for incoming freshmen is going to be: half of you are NEVER going to play and are going to have to go somewhere else if you want to get on the field. Know that coming in.
Will this be a harder sell than when the odds of playing were a little bit better? Time will tell.
But for the short term, I think this is a brilliant innovation on the part of Harbaugh or whoever on his staff figured this out.
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