CBS Sports puts Michigan football in striking distance of 2024 national championship

Recruiting is the lifeblood of any college football program. But when fans follow recruiting, they’re at the whim of the analysts who decide who are the best of the best coming out of high school. But coaches may have other ideas, players could be diamonds in the rough, and there’s also the development piece where players get better than previously anticipated.

Take Michigan football in the national championship run last year. Sure, there were several ‘blue-chip prospects’ who were on the Wolverines. Five-stars like Will Johnson and Donovan Edwards both played big parts, as did four-stars like Blake Corum and Colston Loveland. But Mike Sainristil was a three-star and he put the dagger into Washington. Mason Graham and Kenneth Grant may have been four-stars by the time the recruiting rankings came out, but they both played like five-stars down the stretch.

CBS Sports’ Bud Elliott likes to look at what he calls the ‘blue-chip ratio,’ evaluating which teams have the most talent in an effort to prognosticate who could win it all. Last year, Michigan football came in with a 54% blue-chip ratio, and yet it won it all. This year, the Wolverines are second-to-last of his 16 teams that could win it all, but with a higher mark at 56%.

Unsurprisingly, Ohio State is No. 1 with a 90% rating.

But teams like Ohio State, Alabama, and Georgia have always dominated recruiting and the Buckeyes haven’t won a championship since 2014, Georgia won it in 2021-22, and Alabama’s last championship was in 2020. As Michigan showed us, player development and team cohesiveness (as the Wolverines would also call it, culture, or complementary football) also play a big part. Yet, those aspects often get overlooked.

It’s funny, because usually when a team does something different and has success, the college football world is quick to say that’s the new norm. Back at the outset of the 2018 season, when national championship game participants Alabama and Clemson both rotated two quarterbacks in their season opener, analysts proclaimed that teams needed two quarterbacks to be able to compete — that was a new norm. Yet, weeks later, both had settled in on the younger backup as the starter. Likewise, after a couple of legendary matchups between Penn State and USC, both were considered in the upper echelon of college football — yet, neither has accomplished much since 2017.

Michigan may be the outlier and its run last year could be an aberration in the grand scheme. But, especially with the College Football Playoff expanding to 12 teams, the Wolverines showed they have a formula and as long as there is enough established talent mixed with player development intertwined with a full-team buy-in, anything could happen.