Why Michigan football isn’t recruiting using fads, only football

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Michigan football has been under fire for its recruiting efforts in the 2023 cycle, and it’s somewhat deservedly so.

Coming off of a College Football Playoff appearance and Big Ten championship, the Wolverines are lagging, missing out on a lot of high-profile recruits. The biggest being in-state quarterback Dante Moore, a five-star prospect rated by 247Sports as the No. 2 player in the country, regardless of position. Jim Harbaugh offered Moore when he was in seventh grade, and the maize and blue appeared to be the team to beat, but things went sour over the course of the last year, and Moore opted to go to Oregon, a team with a new head coach in Dan Lanning, who’s primarily defensive-minded.

Moore isn’t the only one, of course. The Wolverines have been seeing players they would normally get go elsewhere, presumably due to the new name, image, and likeness landscape. Harbaugh has said that he views NIL in the sense that Michigan will be transformational, not transactional, and that whatever money that would come would arrive after the player has signed and made a name for themselves — not before. There are merits to this line of thinking, but is Michigan being lapped in recruiting as a result?

On Sunday, co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss, who also oversees the quarterback position and was the primary recruiter on the aforementioned Moore, discussed his thoughts generally on the matter (that is, not specific to Moore himself). Having come aboard from the Baltimore Ravens, where he oversaw the most prolific rushing attack the NFL has ever seen, Weiss thought recruiting would have more to do with the product you put on the field than the accouterments that could come with signing to a various school. However, things have gone quite differently, and though Weiss is still looking for advantages to other merits, he explains why the current recruiting landscape in college football makes little sense.

“That’s one thing I’m…