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**WM Wolverine** · February 18, 2015, 11:41 AM

True Freshman - 14
QB: Zach Gentry & Alex Malzone
RB: Karan Higdon
WR: Brian Cole & Grant Perry
TE: Tyrone Wheatley Jr.
OL: Jon Runyan Jr., Grant Newsome & Nolan Ulizio

DE: Reuben Jones & Shelton Johnson
DT:
LB:
CB:
S: Tyree Kinnel, Keith Washington
K/P: David Andrew

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Pretty self explanatory where our major needs are in '16... Offensive recruiting class for '15 ended up quite respectable, defensively this class is one of M's all-time very worsts since I started following.

**iam416** · February 18, 2015, 12:20 PM

It's interesting. In a way JH is positioned much like Coach Hoke was. He's inheriting a team has a substantial amount of older talent. He also has some massive gaps -- the 13-14 combo is really tough. JH can win right away if he gets decent QB play and could have a very good team in 2016. But then it seems like he'll almost certainly take a step back. Well, if you subscribe to the "theory" that recruiting matters.

This year's class has to be really high on top-end players with somewhat limited spots. They will need guys who can absolutely play by their 2nd year...and a lot of them. Then 2017 should be a complete depth year/hugely successful class.

**froot loops** · February 18, 2015, 01:04 PM

It seems like that is the way a lot of jobs are positioned for a turnaround in year one but with danger lurking in the next couple years. It makes sense, the HC is fired because the team failed to live up to expectations.

To me the challenge appears to be finding some solid skill players to produce. They may be there but we really haven't seen anything where you can hang your hat on to say, "This is who they are going to rely on." That is tough when you are also unsure at the QB position.

**hack** · February 18, 2015, 01:23 PM

Supports the idea of looking at some transfers and 5th-year transfers for that bridge year.

**Hannibal** · February 18, 2015, 01:24 PM

Hoke inherited a more barren cupboard than Harbaugh will inherit. The one expection is that Hoke inherited some elite players on offense, whereas Harbaugh isn't inheriting a single elite player.

**froot loops** · February 18, 2015, 01:35 PM

Don't discount the Warrior Spirit.

**hack** · February 18, 2015, 01:40 PM

Hoke also inherited Martin and RVB. Not elite players, but the two of them made Greg Mattison look awfully good in '11. On offense you can't discount Molk either. Harbaugh might not get four guys that good out of this current roster (counting Denard), but the talent is spread more evenly amongst the group and there's some serious potential untapped. The secondary should be elite immediately if Countess can bounce back. I wonder if Dymonte Thomas can be figured out or moved to RB.

**WM Wolverine** · February 18, 2015, 02:57 PM

JH is inheriting more Jr talent, Hoke inherited about the same amount of talent but it was more spread among the upperclassman, seniors and juniors ime. This helps JH more in year 2 than help BH had in year 2, who did better than most remember; losing mostly to top 5 teams.

**WM Wolverine** · February 18, 2015, 03:01 PM

Year 3 is where things started to fall apart (as expected given RR's lack of recruiting OL/DL) for Hoke.

**hack** · February 18, 2015, 03:24 PM

Shudder. Just, well, I'M SO GLAD IT'S OVER. What an insane shitshow.

**Hannibal** · February 18, 2015, 03:49 PM

Brian Cook with his best post in over a year...

THE FAILURE | mgoblog

http://mgoblog.com/content/failure-0

"In the world of branding, you build what's called brand equity" -Dave Brandon, Michigan Athletic Director, 2010-2014 [Eric Upchurch] I'm pretty mad about Dave Brandon on the internet, but in real life social cues prevent you from ranting for two thousand words at a time; mostly they argue for nodding silence. I kept the wild-eyed revolutionary on the internet. So it was crazy how Brandon angst followed me around. One day during my ACL rehab, I was doing my various stretching things when one of the therapists came in steamed. He started relating to one of his buddies that he'd been booted from his position with Michigan football in favor of a kid who had literally just graduated from college, because that kid would worship Brandon as a god. When we bought our house, one of the seemingly infinite signing ceremony things involved a conversation with someone who had been an assistant with a nonrevenue sport. My job came up, she had never heard of MGoBlog, she proceeded to sigh and say that the department was really something and then… not that any more. A woman who Brandon tried to get fired from the alumni association because she had the temerity to disagree with him. Her friendship with Jamie Morris was demonstration enough that she "had no character." One day, two staffers sent home for insufficiently ironed khakis, and then berated because their blazers were "from JC Penney." Report after report that the regents couldn't stand him and he had a year, tops, left. For three years. And of course, email after email in my inbox, all from the same insulting man prone to exclamation points and misused ellipses. ------------------------------- As a kid I was really good at memorizing things and had no friends. A large part of why, I would find out in retrospect, is that I was an annoying person. I was convinced I was the smartest person in the room, something that was often true for a given definition of smartest that stopped once the tests were turned in. It was never true when it came to interacting with something other than a piece of paper. My attempt to be an adult centers around that fact: I'm an idiot when it comes to a lot of things. Faltering progress has been made. I hired Tom VanHaaren back in the day when he was just a guy with an idea to use social media to get information about recruits (this was controversial at the time). Tom proceeded to get his own bat signal. To this day he gets requests from people on the internet to hold him. Tom's prose was rough at the time, prone to sentence after sentence with the same structure. A lot of adverbs. (I measure my progress as a writer by how many adverbs I edit out of my own stuff.) Twelve year old me would have been too annoying about it to deal. But by the time I made that decision I had realized that there were a lot of skills. zTalking to people you don't know and making them come out of that experience feeling like something good had just happened was emphatically not one I possessed. Tom is now at ESPN because of that skill. Everyone has peaks and valleys in their intelligences, which is why I can do this for a job and still get pwned by Tom Dienhart whenever I try to act like an Actual Journalist. That is how a guy can be in charge of three different things and still be an idiot: Dave Brandon's skill is for creating personal leverage for Dave Brandon. And there end the skills. There is that sub-genre of successful person that achieves seemingly without any reason to. They are nature's bullshitters. Charlie Weis is their treasurer. Dave Brandon is their king. [After THE JUMP: a sordid history and the lessons learned: none]

Dave Brandon's great failure is being a piece of shit human being. His overwhelming arrogance is not coupled with any intelligence. His skin is so thin he seemingly responded to every single shitty email he deserved. Despite growing up on and coming through Michigan he managed to escape without the tiniest semblance of why it might be special. He cannot stand dissent. He eviscerated Michigan's athletic department of its institutional memory specifically to engender personal loyalty. He identifies only one talent in the people he hires: his ability to make them heel.

**hack** · February 18, 2015, 03:53 PM

I got a fair way in and realized what a commitment this is. Saving it for later.

**drok** · February 18, 2015, 05:50 PM

Wow, just finished reading that post on MGoBlog. It's incredible to see all of the disaster of the DB Era so exhaustively summed up in one spot. I can't believe anyone was able to be so absolutely terrible.

It was a cathartic read.

**Hannibal** · February 18, 2015, 05:55 PM

It was, and it was impressive that Brian somehow managed to remember all of that crap.

**drok** · February 18, 2015, 05:59 PM

I get the feeling that he's been compiling "that crap" for a number of years, waiting for the appropriate time to piece it all together. It was an all-timer of a post.

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