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Michigan football will rebound in 2021, but that isn’t the correct framing of the question. The correct question is by how much?
Most fans and pundits don’t anticipate a breakthrough season for the Wolverines, especially considering the maize and blue host Washington and Ohio State while playing Wisconsin and Penn State on the road. Indiana, Maryland and Rutgers all looked vastly improved, albeit in a COVID-19 altered 2020 campaign. So will Michigan achieve 10 wins or will improvement be going from two wins in 2020 to six or seven?
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According to ESPN’s advanced analytics guru Bill Connelly, the Wolverines will improve (link requires a subscription), but that improvement will likely mean the projected eight wins, which would mean potentially losing to the four tougher aforementioned teams. Still, as Connelly points out, Michigan under Jim Harbaugh hasn’t been nearly the debacle the punditry insists his tenure to be.
For years, it was easy to make the case that Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan tenure was being painted with an unfair brush. His Wolverines had won 10 games in three of his five years (they had done so only once in eight years before his arrival) and had finished 10th or better in SP+ four times after averaging a 31.1 ranking in the decade prior. His biggest crime was simply being unable to keep up with an Ohio State program achieving maybe its highest ever cruising altitude.
It’s a lot harder to make a defense after 2020. The Wolverines significantly underachieved last fall, going 2-4 and not only struggling to keep up offensively (not a new thing) but also regressing significantly on D.
SP+ projections take longer-term factors into account — your recent history beyond last season, your recent recruiting — and those factors suggest the Wolverines have good odds of improving over last year’s performance. You can be forgiven if your eyes disagree. The Wolverines have one genuine star (defensive end Aidan Hutchinson). Their starting quarterback will likely either be a frequently injured Texas Tech transfer (Alan Bowman) or a redshirt freshman (Cade McNamara) with a single strong performance, against Rutgers, on his résumé.
Still, SP+ is here to remind you of the good times. (Who says stats and stats people are antisocial?) There are plenty of ways for Harbaugh’s changes — namely, bringing in Mike Macdonald as defensive coordinator — to go awry, but they certainly aren’t guaranteed to.
If Michigan’s defense particularly rebounds and the offense can look more like it did in late 2019 than it has otherwise under offensive coordinator Josh Gattis, certainly there’s a chance that the Wolverines are vastly improved in Harbaugh’s seventh year. However, if neither of those things happen, such prognostications will likely be for naught.
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