How many had two top 10 recruiting classes already on campus when they took over?
They actually had the same number of win in the 7 years prior - 46. But no one is comparable to Saban.
"on campus" Michigan probably had none once Harbaugh got here. A lot of those kids were gone once Harbaugh got here or within the first year he was here.
Wait you mean Michigan is the only school that has players not pan out and/or transfer?
and without repeating my argument against Alabama, there's a lot of other teams without Nick Saban that I listed.
That was the majority of the top-end talent from those classes you keep mentioning. You can't say that Harbaugh had this top 5 recruiting class talent when he didn't. It's misleading.
And you can say that about every single team but you want to act like every other team hits on every recruiting class. It’s misleading. And let’s ignore the fact that Harbaugh had, what, 12 players drafted from his first team there. Most in all of college football. Yep, no talent at all when he got there.
That's because Harbaugh was such a great developer. That took 3 years for that development to happen. In the first two years we had 3 players drafted. And most of the players from that draft spanned 3 different recruiting classes.
I'm also not out here arguing Harbaugh is Nick Saban. I don't think Alabama is good to use as an example in almost any case for or against something football related. Everything surrounding their comeback is extraordinary.
It must be so tough developing all that 4 and 5 star talent into NFL players.
Like I said, that talent spanned 3 different classes though and required some kids staying a 5th year to group all that talent into 1 class like that. It was unusual in that guys like Butt don't usually stick around.
That doesn’t change the fact that there was a ton of talent on the team when he got there. Michigan had more talent on their team than nearly all coaches do when their predecessor was fired for poor performance on the field.
I'm sure there weren't talent issues at Bama, OU, UGA, ND, FSU and some of the other teams mentioned either...
Again, situations are entirely different. Notre dame has faced OSU 6 times in history, twice in the 30's, twice in the 90's and twice since 2000. They've lost the last 4. Now imagine finishing every year against that while trying to rebuild a program. Urban Meyer finished 54–4 in the B10 and because of the rivalry spent more time making sure he would beat Michigan than any other team. No other school listed had to deal with anything similar coming out of a rebuild.
