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Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - BostonCard - 01-11-2015

http://www.maizenbrew.com/2015/1/11/7529207/quarterback-recruiting-Jim-Harbaugh-Stanford-Michigan-National-Signing-Day-2015

From the Michigan site...

Looking through it, we seen Andrew Luck, and a bunch of QB's who never really did much for Stanford.  Taysom Hill can't really be considered a recruiting miss, since he has done a fair bit for BYU, but still, it's a shame we couldn't keep him (and the reason is unfortunate).  Nunes wound up being the most productive QB for us other than Luck.

This does make me wonder... what would Stanford have been like had we not signed Luck?  And what would have happened to Harbaugh's career?  9 QB's recruited, one becomes a brobdingnagian success for us, one is likely to become a moderate success if he comes back from his injury, but for someone else, and one QB makes starts but had a real tough time.  Six QB's wound up being complete whiffs.

BC

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - CTcard - 01-12-2015

Some pretty impressive mangling of hackneyed phrases in that article.

"Arguably the number one overall pick in the 2011 NFL Draft, Luck stayed for his senior season ..."

"During his time at Stanford, he left the Cardinal holding eight Stanford career records ..."

"Nunes would see himself start to struggle ..."

"Olson, who is widely not ranked in the databases,"

"For arguments sake, Harbaugh accepted the San Francisco head coach position in January of 2011. Considering he had the majority of the time to recruit, the 2010 recruiting class can technically be considered his."
[This one wins for both mangling both syntax and counting.]


... and yeah, I think Stanford boards have previously discussed Harbaugh's questionable QB recruiting outside of Luck, and perhaps having an awful lot of luck in ending up with that guy.
But all that criticism was only while he was still our coach.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - socalstanfan1 - 01-12-2015

This kind of raises a question as well about how much you can "coach up" a QB. Coaches tried to,work with Tebow, without success; Kaepernick hasn't really progressed (seems to have regressed, if anything). Luck came in likely already having all the qualities necessary for success, just needing time and experience to refine them. It seems like great QBs are discovered, rather than made; while good QBs can be made to seem great by the right system.

So, I will be anxious to know how the rest of our QBs fare in the future, particularly Keller Chryst, the guy whose background most closely resembles Luck's

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - FarmBoy - 01-12-2015

Was Hogan not a Harbaugh recruit? I know Shaw was the coach of record when he signed, but was he not offered until Harbaugh left? If he was offered by Harbaugh, it's unfair not to credit Harbaugh for spotting the talent. By the same token, were Crow and Killsgaard not offered until Harbaugh joined the staff?

I think the coaching up part is a big part of Harbaugh's value. I bet Hogan (and perhaps Nunes) would have had better individual careers with Harbaugh as coach.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - socalstanfan1 - 01-12-2015

(01-12-2015, 05:42 AM)FarmBoy link Wrote:Was Hogan not a Harbaugh recruit? I know Shaw was the coach of record when he signed, but was he not offered until Harbaugh left? If he was offered by Harbaugh, it's unfair not to credit Harbaugh for spotting the talent. By the same token, were Crow and Killsgaard not offered until Harbaugh joined the staff?

I think the coaching up part is a big part of Harbaugh's value. I bet Hogan (and perhaps Nunes) would have had better individual careers with Harbaugh as coach.

There was a time I would have agreed with you, particularly after Kaepernick's first big year with the Niners: Harbaugh had success with Josh Johnson at San Diego, then with Luck at Stanford, then plucked Kaepernick out of the draft and he looked like the future of Quarterbacking in the NFL for a while. But suddenly Kaepernick has stalled and did not seem to improve under Harbaugh the last few seasons; Luck is still phenomenal, but would he have been any less phenomenal under another decent coach? Josh Johnson is a career roster-filler. Suddenly, to me, the resume doesn't appear so sparkling.  It's not bad, just not so incredible.

One thing we can say about Harbaugh: he is an outstanding recruiter. At a place like Michigan, free of the high expectations of admissions, Harbaugh will, no doubt, recruit like a madman and bring in top notch talent, and a few of those top kids will be QBs...with a big OL and big time RBs I'll be surprised if Harbaugh doesn't have that team back to national relevance by 2016.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - StanFan88 - 01-12-2015

I will give Harbaugh credit for Hogan.  Yes, Harbaugh left before he signed, but his visits, his offer, and nearly all of his recruiting process happened under Harbaugh.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - Bruce Wang - 01-12-2015

(01-12-2015, 06:08 AM)socalstanfan1 link Wrote:Josh Johnson is a career roster-filler. Suddenly, to me, the resume doesn't appear so sparkling.  It's not bad, just not so incredible.

Making a NFL roster as a QB from a FCS school is a pretty impressive accomplishment.  I saw him play in a pre-season games with the Bengals.  The guy is a pretty good football player.


Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - FarmBoy - 01-12-2015

Quote:Making a NFL roster as a QB from a FCS school is a pretty impressive accomplishment.

Yeah, if you're standard is "how many NFL QBs did that college coach recruit/develop", you're operating at a pretty high standard.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - Hulk01 - 01-12-2015

I loved what Harbs accomplished here, but he was hit or miss as a recruiter, particularly with parents.  And he botched at least one recruitment that may have cost us some wins in the last two seasons. 

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - StanFan88 - 01-12-2015

(01-12-2015, 07:57 AM)Hulk01 link Wrote:I loved what Harbs accomplished here, but he was hit or miss as a recruiter, particularly with parents.  And he botched at least one recruitment that may have cost us some wins in the last two seasons.

I'd say the number of wins his recruits got Stanford outnumbered the number his botches cost them by at least 5:1.  Remember where Stanford was in the heierarchy of college football when he arrived - absolute bottom feeder after five years of awful football.  He got players to come here on nothing more than faith, and he did it without any FBS track record.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - Hulk01 - 01-12-2015

With the exception of Skov and his great fight to land Gaffney, Harbaugh did not land those elite recruits, and he often disagreed with the staff's assessments of recruits, which later proved to be better than Jim's.  (We give him credit for Luck, who was not Harbs first choice and may not have been his second.)

His style simply does not work with some players and recruits.  When you look at the styles of those staff members who have drawn players to Stanford--Anderson, Sanford, Shaw, and Pritchard--it seems you are looking at the anti-Harbs.

None of this is to minimize what he and his staff accomplished here.  We would not be here without him. 

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - stupac2 - 01-12-2015

(01-12-2015, 10:16 AM)garvin link Wrote:I think this is a classic non-issue.

Well, it's an interesting question in terms of projecting how well Harbaugh will do at Michigan.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - Nan3cy - 01-12-2015

I think Harbaugh will do just fine at Michigan, for x years. What I wonder is how long "x" is.


Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - BostonCard - 01-12-2015

I think it is fair to include Hogan and Crower in the list.  And Hogan, while unlikely to be a future NFL starter, will probably be a 3+ year starter at Stanford and two time (hopefully three) conference champion and Rose Bowl winner.  It is hard to consider him a "miss".

As for his USD recruit, the fact that he got a FCS division QB to the NFL has to be considered a brobdingnagian win.

Lastly, to Gavin, Harbaugh recruited RGIII, but wanted him to come as a wide receiver.  He went to Baylor because Briles promised him he could compete at QB.  The two QB's Harbaugh would have picked over Luck were Landry Jones and Dayne Crist, who committed to Notre Dame.  Jones would have been a serviceable QB, though nowhere near Luck.  Crist wound up being benched at Notre Dame and later transferring to Kansas, where he again got benched for playing poorly.  Harbaugh and Stanford dodged a bullet when Crist committed to UDFG.

BC

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - washingtonismoney - 01-12-2015

Of course, it's hard to know what the counterfactual is. Harbaugh is a very good QB coach overall,* and it's plausible to me that Landry Jones would've been a different, better QB under Harbaugh's tutelage.

*(There's been some doubt about this, but it's nevertheless true. Alex Smith is the most remarkable example. I've always thought it was strange that Kaepernick is used as an example against Harbaugh, with the argument apparently being that he didn't improve last year. This is strange to me, because it assumes that continuous improvement up through whatever glass ceilings there are is somehow the norm.

An honest look at anyone's life reveals that, no, continuous improvement doesn't happen. Improvement, at all, is kind of miraculous, really.

And even in sports we're awfully selective with this standard. Gregg Popovich is hailed as a genius for making Boris Diaw and Danny Green into highly useful role players; no one's criticized him for failing to turn them into Anthony Davis and Klay Thompson, because that would be a really stupid criticism. Part of it is our persistent inability to be rational about quarterbacks and other leader-types -- "BUT IS HE ELITE?!?!??!?!?!??!?!?" "WHY CAN'T HE LEAD?!??!" -- but part of it is just we're not very consistent.)

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - socalstanfan1 - 01-12-2015

This thread has focused on Harbaugh as recruiter of QBs, but for me the more interesting (and probably totally unresolvable) question, is how much did Harbaugh improve the QBs with whom he worked? How much responsibility does Harbaugh deserve for the development of his players? (particularly the QBs since this is where the thread started, and where for a while I think Harbaugh had built a reputation based on Josh Johnson and Andrew Luck). 

I understand that, since we cannot see how Johnson and Luck would have developed under another coach, so that hampers our ability to make any judgement.  But we do get to see if Kaepernick will make any progress now that Harbaugh has moved on.  Again, even if he does, it could be just part of the maturation process of Kaep.(a la Steve Young, who made a similar transformation after years in the WFL, Tampa Bay Bucs, then as an understudy to Joe Montana).  But if he does make a serious improvement once Harbs leaves, it gives us a bit more info on this.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - CompSci87 - 01-12-2015

How much did Harbaugh even improve Alex Smith? The alternative proposal is that Smith was already a solid, experienced quarterback who just needed to be in an offense that made use of his strengths. He's doing fine at Kansas City too, and I don't really think that's because Harbaugh improved him and KC is now reaping the benefits.

Re: Revisiting Harbaugh's recruits at QB - Mick - 01-17-2015

(01-12-2015, 07:57 AM)Hulk01 link Wrote:I loved what Harbs accomplished here, but he was hit or miss as a recruiter, particularly with parents.  And he botched at least one recruitment that may have cost us some wins in the last two seasons.

So I hear.  I wonder if he'll learn from the recruiting faux pas's when he recruits for Michigan?