Dude, teams generally play 12 games a year. 8-4 is not average. Do the math.
Harbaugh has the 7th most wins in CFB since taking over at Michigan.
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Uhhh. Half of CFB is basically D2 (G5). The other half of CFB (P5) gets 2-4 gimme games against those G5 teams. An average P5 team is not 6-6 because they get guarantee games. The average high major CBB team isnât 16-16 either for the same reason. That also ignores the fact that the majority of CFB teams get that 13th game with the proliferation of bowl games. Weâre comparing Michigan against the power 5âŚnot Georgia State.
I donât really get why this series of facts is contested.
Also, the 7th most wins stat appears to be incorrect, at the very least by school it is incorrect (which is what matters).
I think that stat was coming into this year, and for P5 teams only. It makes sense that LSU, Washington and PSU would have pulled even or ahead since we now have two losses. So as of right now, we have the 10th most wins among P5 teams during that timeframe. There are what, around 12 teams per conference? So 60 teams? And we have more wins than 50 of them?
Let me tell you what is AVERAGE - the 46-42 record we had in the seven years before JH took over, and the 5-7 team he took over (and turned into a 10 win team in one year with a grad transfer QB that Iowa didnât want).
You talk about all these âbuilt in advantages,â but the reality is that Michigan doesnât cheat and has academic standards, which are two huge disadvantages in todayâs college football climate.
Go look at all the schools that have consistently went through coach after coach without getting any better. Do you realize Tennessee won a national championship more recently than we did? Theyâre a complete joke now. Bad hire after bad hire. Same with Miami. Nebraska is a disaster. FSU is going to have to fire Taggert (and pray they can find someone good). Notre Dame didnât win a bowl game for like 20 years. After Don James retired, Washington went through several terrible coaches.
But yeah, itâs easy to find a great coach. No offense, but I find this viewpoint to be really reckless and naive. And Iâm confident our AD hopefully does not see it that way.
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To be honest I do not care about the stats. Coach Harbaugh was to be a change agent and that change was to compete for BIG titles but National Championships.
Neither has happened with the regularity.
And to your last point about finding great coaches: Harbaugh just isnât going anywhere. Thatâs what I think needs underlining. The shrillness and apoplexy just doesnât do much but fade into the greater din that is the general run of media hysteria. The press sees that there is a feeding frenzy and is glad to generate more, but Harbaughâdespite plenty of disappointments, many of them the kind that goes with lifeâhas done well enough, including outside the W-L column, to insure that no sane AD is going to fire him anytime soon. And you can bet that both Warde and the regents are bent on sanity prevailing in a realm of overblown expectation and hype.
Rabid fandom just isnât going to prevail here, and shouldnât. And Iâm not, emphatically, saying thatâs what I see here, because people like Reegs formulate their arguments with considerable care. But in the end I do think that calm analysis reveals that Harbaugh is by enough indices succeeding, even as many of us regret losses, officiating, and other stumbles along the way.
In the second half Saturday we saw a good football team. Letâs see what happens against ND.
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Weâve literally gone into the Ohio State game with a chance to win the division (and likely the conference) 3 out of the 4 years Harbaugh has been coach. Two of those times, we were directly in playoff contention.
In those 4 games, weâve either taken them to OT on the road, jumped out to a 14-0 lead with our hands on a pick 6 to take it to 21-0, or been favored going into the game.
Meanwhile, Ohio State has been achieving success at a rate unprecedented in their own programâs history (not to mention theyâre a âwin at all costsâ program whose current starting QB is taking only online courses).
How in the world is that not âcompeting for championships regularlyâ?
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I canât wait for this football season to be over. I am so damn excited for basketball, more than even usual. I do think itâs going to be really interesting to watch the offseason. Genuinely fascinated to find out if thereâs really a hot seat, and how the athletic department might handle that. I think that is awfully hard to predict.
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Iâm âexcitedâ in the sense that itâs something completely new and different, and hopeful because I came in to Michigan with the Fab Five in the fall of 1991 and loved that team. But Iâm definitely a little nervous, as most of these college to the pros coaching moves havenât worked out, and our roster was recruited to fit JBâs style of play. Iâm cautiously optimistic.
Barring something crazy, there wonât be a âhot seatâ for Harbaugh. It wasnât long ago that we were giving away free football tickets with a Coke promotion. Iâm quite sure the AD remembers that well, and also remembers losing to teams like Maryland, Rutgers, and Minnesota, pulling out a goal line stand to beat Akron, and getting physically dominated by MSU every year.
I think it was Jerry Glanville who said, âWhen you start listening to the fans, you wind up sitting next to them.â
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Well we are going to see what happens with season ticket renewals. There are a lot of seats to fill, and I canât keep milking it at the cost that it currently costs and expect people are going to come in for this. I tend to think that for now and maybe for another year or two or even three people are going to hold their noses and renew those season tickets. But it canât go on like this for that much longer, you think.
I think you are looking in the right direction by watching the 
, but instead of ticket sales I think you need to watch the levels of donations to the athletic department. If that starts to dry up, then look out. Otherwise, itâs (literally) business as usual.
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As another poster mentioned, we have entered the OSU game in 2 of the past 3 years playing for the Big Ten East title. Thatâs really so bad that our fans are going to quit coming to games? That says a lot more about them than our team, IMO.
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Just going to lay down a marker here and say that Harbaugh will be here for the 22-23 season. In the meantime, however much bile you are swallowing, I urge all fans to try to get some pleasure out of the games you spend your many hours watching in the meantime. Itâs how we used to do it in the old days, when teams didnât owe us anything and our lizard brains didnât tell us WE were failures if the teams that we followed lost.
Thank goodness the kids can just get out there week after week and play for the pleasure of playing.
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Yeah, good point.
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Letâs think positively: when our fans send players angry emails, they donât have racist undertones.
Where is everybody? Ummmmmm, that was good!
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Also, if you wonder why people have disdain for Michigan and the fan base look no further than this tweet. Good god, letâs act like weâve been there before. This is literally from the Michigan Athletic Department account. This is baffling to me.
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No issue with that tweet at all.
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Itâs funny. Itâs a rivalry. No one will even remember in 2 days. And honestly itâs super tame.
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I was occupied with my birthday party. Friends and family filled the house to watch that curb stomping. Whiskey was flowing! Go Blue!
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