Joel Klatt sees similarities between 2024 Michigan and teams from early Jim Harbaugh days

Michigan still hasn’t lost a game in 611 days. But things were a little too close for comfort last weekend against Fresno State.

“That’s a six-point game with six minutes left in the game,” FOX Sports analyst Joel Klatt said on his show Monday. “So if you watch the game, and I know millions of you did, it was a more concerning performance than 30-10 would indicate.

“All of us agree on that. So the question for me is like, ‘What is this version of Michigan going to be?'”

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The Wolverines, of course, had a program-record 13 players taken in this year’s NFL Draft, including seven in the first three rounds and most notably quarterback J.J. McCarthy. The offense alone lost 10 starters.

And, even though Sherrone Moore was promoted to full-time head coach, Michigan experienced significant staff turnover, too, with program frontman Jim Harbaugh and his defensive coordinator, Jesse Minter, leaving for the Los Angeles Chargers.

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Some sort of regression from a 15-0, dominant season was expected from the defending national champion Wolverines. But Michigan coming up with 269 total yards of offense against Fresno State raised some serious questions. Klatt entered the conversation Monday with another.

“Let’s just stop for a moment and think to ourselves, like, ‘What was this Michigan team? What are they? What is this version?'” Klatt said. “You know they’re going to play good defense, and then now it becomes, ‘How well can you develop on offense, how complementary can you play in all three phases? Can you go out there and just win the game?’

“Because it’s never really been about the showmanship of, can you blow somebody out? Really, until last year, Michigan was always a methodical team that would pull away late. I think, over the course of the Harbaugh era, the score would always get to a point that was not indicative of the game that was played.”

Klatt added: “There was a lot of one-possession games late in the third quarter, early in the fourth quarter, and then Michigan would wear people down. They would get that two-possession lead and sometimes a third. That would happen. That happened a lot, which I started thinking to myself, ‘Man, what’s so familiar about this?’ When I’m watching the Fresno State game, I’m thinking to myself, ‘There’s some familiarity with what I’m seeing.’ And I started thinking to myself, ‘This was early Harbaugh Michigan.'”

More specifically, Klatt believes the floor of 2024 Michigan is the 10-win 2015 Wolverines team that won the Citrus Bowl and finished No. 14 in the final College Football Playoff rankings. Klatt sees the ceiling of 2024 Michigan as the 10-win 2016 Wolverines team that reached as high as No. 3 in the CFP rankings and was a fourth down stop away against Ohio State — or a more favorable officiating spot away, for that matter — from having a great shot at the four-team field.

To Klatt, this year’s Michigan team is really good on defense and simply finding its way on offense. That was life for the Wolverines early in the Harbaugh era when quarterbacks like Jake Rudock and Wilton Speight were piloting the ship.

Klatt made it clear: During Harbaugh’s nine-year stay, Michigan was a “development program.” He believes the Wolverines, in that way, are no different under Moore. They’re not going to reload like Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State and Texas, and they don’t recruit like those schools, either, Klatt said.

“You’re going to have peaks and valleys at Michigan,” Klatt said. “I don’t think that you’re just going to have a sustained best-in-the-country program year in and year out, because that’s not what they do. They recruit and develop and recruit and develop and recruit and develop. So now all the sudden, you’ve had these guys leave, and you’re going to have a little bit of a dip so that you can dip down and start that development process.

“I thought Saturday night was the starting of a development process. I think that this team can still win nine games, maybe 10 games, depending how they develop, depending how the offensive line plays, how the quarterbacks continue to play. Again, the Jake Rudock Michigan team of 2015 shocked everybody and won 10 games.”

Klatt pointed out that, at the moment, Michigan’s new-look offensive line is trying to find its footing. He’s not sure the Wolverines wideouts are good as they were a year ago. But he’s not pressing the panic button after a 20-point win over Fresno State that wasn’t as decisive as the margin of victory suggests.

“I think Michigan will be OK,” Klatt said. “I think that we just need to change the framing and expectations by which we watch them. We can’t expect them to be the 2023 national champions and reload and then go right back up there to the upper echelons of the sport.

“That’s not how they’ve recruited. Self admittedly, they develop.”