Wolverine Watch: Clink Go The Scales

Michigan football fans executed a 180 on the road to attitudinal atrophy over the past couple of days.

They needed to, fragile as they are at this point. They’re teetering, coming off a 2-4 COVID-infected season featuring the fewest victories for the Wolverines since Bump Elliott’s 1962 crew.

Throw in the fact that their favorite team stands 0-5 against Ohio State under Jim Harbaugh, and 3-3 against Gang Green to the northwest, and it’s easy to put the erstwhile faithful on edge.

Then toss in the loss of new coach and super recruiter Mo Linguist, who bolted for Buffalo after eight weeks and no games as a U-M coach. That one left fans of the Wolverines more morose than 100 parading Hummer drivers in an East Coast gas line.

Jim_S — The Fort’s own football recruiting guru — gets it.

Kind of.

“When Mo Linguist decided to accept the head coaching job at Buffalo … I was sort of surprised by the negative sentiment, if you look at the Michigan fan boards, such as The Fort, and the fan reaction to that move,” Jim_S offered.

“It showed, first of all, that [Jim] Harbaugh in initially hiring the guy, hired someone who is a hot coach. If you’re not a hot coach, you wouldn’t be wanted by other programs. The alternative is to take a second-tier guy who you know is not going to be poached.

“Now, no one anticipated he’d be poached three months after joining.”

Furthermore, Michigan fans don’t expect anyone coming to coach in The Big House to trade in that opportunity — before the first whistle blows — for an industrial strength snowblower and a Scott Norwood-signed 47 Wide Right football.

Dispassionately, it’s a promotion for Buffalo’s new head coach. Viscerally, for still-smarting U-M followers, it’s another sign of the Apocalypse.

Well, it was, for a few days. The next hot coach — former Kentucky assistant Steve Clinkscale — put the globe back into its proper spin, and allowed those in maize and blue glasses to spin it as an upgrade.

It just might be, Jim_S offered.

“He’s done a very, very effective job in attracting metro Detroit-area, pretty highly rated talent down to Kentucky, which is not an easy sell,” Jim_S noted of Clinkscale. “Although Kentucky is in the SEC, they’ve always kind of been considered a bottom-feeder program in that conference, sort of the antithesis of their reputation in basketball.

“To come into the state of Michigan and get a kid like Justin Rogers a couple of years ago — who was the first- or second-rated player in the class that year … and he’s picked up other kids as well. Earnest Sanders [IV] signed with Kentucky. He’s an outstanding athlete, as was his dad, Earnest Sr., who was a safety for Michigan back in the mid-‘90s.”

The new coach could flip some in-state talent he’d been working to get to Kentucky, the U-M guru opined. Clinkscale might also polish up some relationships that hadn’t been maximized in the recent past.

“Clinkscale has got a good relationship with Belleville, which could significantly repair some of the damage that was sort of self-inflicted between the earlier assistant coaching regime and the Belleville staff,” he noted. “Hopefully, that will help out, because Belleville is one of the great talent producers in the state of Michigan.”

The sudden mood switch shows how much hope Michigan watchers are placing in the new coaching hires to set the Wolverines back on the path to greater success.

What they’d seen thus far out of the newbies involved Linguist making a couple of high-profile lands of recruits previously unlinked to U-M.

“Right away, he landed two verbals from two highly regarded defensive backs out of Tennessee,” Jim_S said. “One de-committed a month later, but still, they saw an immediate impact from a new coaching hire.”

They’ll see a relatively quick one from Clinkscale, Jim_S opined. Kentucky has been one of the first schools to offer a host of strong prep talent, and those offered just happened to coincide with Clinkscale’s recruiting area.

Jim_S noted those offers may be coming soon, from a Big House near you.

That said, results aren’t likely to be instantaneous, he cautioned.

“That 2-4 record and all the coaching transition that took place right after that season have led us to getting off to a slow start, when it comes to 2022 recruiting,” Jim_S noted. “You just can’t expect everyone to come in [and succeed right away.] All of these outstanding recruiters — Mike Hart’s going to be an outstanding recruiter, Ron Bellamy is going to be an outstanding recruiter … and now Steve Clinkscale is going to be an outstanding recruiter.

“It’s not going to happen right away. It was sort of like a mirage there, when people saw Linguist get two guys from Tennessee, thinking this was going to be the norm.

“This is still, in my view, going to be a very difficult class to put together a top-10 sort of class. A lot that is going to be dependent on the numbers.”

He referred to the number of signees in the class, potentially bolstering the bottom-line class ranking. But everybody knows some other number — wins and losses — will affect not only what’s going on in the minds of recruits, but what the masses are thinking.

For a fan base near the ledge, it doesn’t take much of a nudge these days.

(For the full Jim_S podcast, check here).

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