The Wolverines' schedule for 2024 looked like this from the beginning.

Michigan had to take a significant step back. Everyone in college football knew that, including the Wolverines' millions of fans. The team won all 15 games en route to the national championship last year, but then lost 13 draft picks and head coach Jim Harbaugh to the NFL. Some step back was inevitable.

Saturday was still a real shock. The Texas Longhorns came to Ann Arbor and beat the Wolverines to a tie. Texas, which opened with a one-touchdown lead, won by a score of 31-12 that didn't even fully reflect the one-sidedness of the performance. This was a game between the nominal defending champions and a current national championship contender. The score was 24-3 at halftime, and by that point Texas had controlled the ball for two-thirds of the afternoon. Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers took what he wanted as the air gradually drained from the 111,000-strong Big House.

It's not unprecedented for someone to destroy a defending champion this early in the year. (In 2020, LSU suffered an arguably uglier home loss in its first game after the title.) Michigan is dealing with many of the same problems that plague dozens of teams every year, including the best. Namely, it's difficult to quickly replenish after losing a ton of good players and most of a program's key coaches. But Michigan was also a victim of timing, as Harbaugh's move to the Los Angeles Chargers clashed awkwardly with college football's new calendar. Add a dash of post-championship complacency, and you have a recipe for a quick (if temporary) decline that no program has ever pulled off so well before.

Michigan's most glaring problem is its poor quarterbacks. The team has had JJ McCarthy, an NFL first-round draftee who threw and ran the ball, for the past three years. It hasn't developed a capable replacement, however, and an offseason that vacillated between excitement and concern has now materialized into a season of terrible quarterback play. The presumptive starter over the summer, as far as the public knew, was last year's best backup, Alex Orji. But most people never saw Orji throw more than a handful of passes. The job instead went to Davis Warren, a former walk-on who likely would have had more scholarship opportunities if he didn't have to devote time and energy to beating his cancer toward the end of high school. Now, after two games, it's clear that neither Warren nor Orji have anything going for them. Michigan's quarterbacks offer very little — not just compared to the dynamic McCarthy or a star like Ewers at Texas, but also compared to any Division I program. There are teams in the lower-tier Football Championship Subdivision that have better passers.

There are other problems. Over the past three years, no team has had a more consistent, physical offensive line than Michigan. The Wolverines' big guys up front were ferocious bruisers who enabled an excellent running game. It's no coincidence that Sherrone Moore — the man promoted to head coach during Harbaugh's 2023 suspensions and after his departure — coached that group initially. But the line lost all five of its championship team starters and has yet to develop into a dominant unit. Michigan also lost starting running back and program legend Blake Corum, and while they brought back a couple of veteran tailbacks, neither is Corum. The whole operation is much less special in 2024. Meanwhile, the team has a mediocre group of wideouts chasing passes from a weaker quarterback. That will be enough to beat most of the flotsam and jetsam in the Big Ten's middle of the pack, but not the best teams in the country.

Defensively, the Wolverines should still be pretty good. Most of their stars from a dominant 2023 unit are back. But they lost three top-100 NFL picks on that side of the ball, And They lost their coordinator, who left with Harbaugh for Southern California. Texas picked off some of the unit's replacements on Saturday and hit Michigan's defense harder than it has in several years. There is no area of ​​the game where Michigan appears to be better now than it was last year, except perhaps at kicker, where they got a top player from Arkansas State. It's possible that no team in college football history has lost more player and coaching talent from one year to the next. Things could get worse before they get better.

All of these problems stemmed from Harbaugh. He has wanted to return to the NFL for years, where he came within a whisker of winning a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers. The Chargers finally struck in January and made the deal, right after Michigan beat Washington to win the college title. Harbaugh is a great addition to the Chargers for the same reasons he was a great coach for Michigan.

When a college team loses its coach to the pros, it is a sign of a healthy program, but in modern College football, it's also a massive inconvenience that sets the team back compared to its peers. The NFL's hiring and firing carousel doesn't get going until January, when most college teams are done playing and the transfer portal “window” for teams to go after other schools' players is closed. Michigan doesn't rely heavily on transfers, preferring to develop and retain its own players. But the 2023 championship team was a good example of an elite team using the portal to add to His squad: Star edge rusher Josaiah Stewart came from Coastal Carolina, offensive tackle LaDarius Henderson from Arizona State.

So Michigan always had big holes in its roster. A few more players were signed shortly before Harbaugh left. But Michigan, preoccupied with both the College Football Playoff and coaching uncertainty, couldn't be a major transfer player after the season. Another transfer window opened in April, but there aren't many great players available this late in the year. Teams have already completed spring training, severance agreements with the schools' outside collectives have already been finalized, and the coaching change that triggers many transfers is behind them. Could Michigan's outside backers have held out a million dollars on a better QB? last Decemberbefore Harbaugh left? Almost certainly. Could the program have gotten someone better in April, though? The answer is probably still yes, but there just weren't many great QBs available at that point. The talent pool had shrunk, and Michigan may have thought (incorrectly) that its existing quarterbacks were better choices.

It was Harbaugh's long-running affair with the NFL — not karmic retribution for the sign-stealing — that put Michigan in a particularly bad spot this season. Wolverines fans would take that trade 1,000 times out of 1,000. Flags fly forever, after all. But Michigan would have been down even if Harbaugh had stayed. And then the delay in his move made it harder for Moore to patch his team back together in his first year as coach.

The program's long-term prospects remain bright. Michigan will never be displaced as one of the best teams in the sport, and Moore has every chance to be a solid head coach. He already showed signs of that when he filled in for the suspended Harbaugh for nearly half of last season. He was Harbaugh's obvious replacement, and it must have been nice for Michigan not to have to launch an elaborate search.

But it may not be this fun for quite some time. The eventual punishment the NCAA imposes for the sign-stealing scandal will not be as bad as the humiliation of being crushed by Ohio State this November for the first time since 2019. The best course of action will be to continue to stare very intently at the 2023 championship trophies. At best, they will be bright enough to provide temporary Blindness.