When it’s all said and done, and college football finally returns to some sense of normalcy in a post-pandemic world, there’s one sentence a lot of Michigan fans are going to be saying for a good while:

“Thank God they hired Josh Gattis.”

To be fair, I’m already saying that just a year into his tenure as Sanford Robertson Offensive Coordinator for the Wolverines, but that’s because I see how much things have already changed with Michigan’s offensive identity that not everyone else does. A lot of people are taking notice, but you still see the lazier arguments about their offensive performance under Jim Harbaugh since he’s been head coach. Everything from “he can’t develop a QB” to “he doesn’t know how to use his receivers” and the famous “he’s too stubborn to take his hands off the reigns.”

Alright, there’s some truth to that last one before 2019, but that’s what people need to understand about this situation. For all of the struggles and caterwauling about Michigan’s offensive output in the last five years, there’s been one constant that so many fans have ignored as the primary culprit: inconsistent offensive system.

Let’s wind the clock back to 2015. Harbaugh comes in with Tim Drevno and Jedd Fisch, dumps the hybrid hodge podge mess from the Brady Hoke era and installs a true pro style offense, but instead of being a straight “3 yards and a cloud of dust,” he allows Fisch to innovate with creativity in the passing game using NFL concepts. This pays off immediately with a team that had more talent on it than its 5-7 record in 2014 indicated. They needed the first six games to get into a groove, but they found it in the middle of the crazy Halloween Minnesota win that season. After that, Jake Rudock looked like a world beater until Ohio State(of course), and then had a great bowl game against Florida.

The 2016 season brought nearly everyone back except Rudock, but it was still the same system from the previous year, complete with Fisch’s innovations. Statistically, that team remains Harbaugh’s most potent and dominant offense since he’s been head coach, averaging over 400 yards of offense and over 40 points per game. It remains the closest Michigan has come to reaching the Big Ten Championship Game and likely the College Football Playoff.

That’s the last time Michigan played a season in which they used the exact same offensive system as the previous year.

As we all know, Fisch left after 2016 and was replaced with Pep Hamilton, and so went the innovation and consistency, which was bad timing giving how much talent left at WR and OL from the previous year. This, plus a reliance on underclassmen and a shaky at best QB room with Wilton Speight, who went down for the year against Purdue, John O’Korn, who outside of the Purdue game just didn’t have anything in the tank, and Brandon Peters who kind of became the lame duck, and you see why 2017 was as bad as it was, even for a team that still made a bowl game, which it lost.

This led to the firing of Tim Drevno, the hiring of Ed Warinner and the pursuit of Shea Patterson as a transfer QB, but with Patterson also came the need for RPO to suit his style of play, meaning that the rest of the team now had to learn another offense to get going on that. This one didn’t take them as long to figure out, but it still lacked innovation from the top and it was too slow to call plays, which was ultimately part of their demise against OSU for the umpteenth time that season, and why the stats just weren’t there. Harbaugh was still mired in the pro style “manball” ideal, whether it had Fisch’s innovation or not.

Meanwhile, the entire rest of the Big Ten was switching to spread offense concepts, except for Wisconsin, who will never, ever do that so long as Barry Alvarez is in charge, and Iowa, who will only do it on weird occasions to beat OSU once in a decade. The Buckeyes embraced the smashmouth spread when Urban Meyer came to town and it was a physical brand of the fast, potent offenses seen across the country. Once it started smashing Big Ten schools, most of them followed suit with some version of a spread. Michigan didn’t.

To be fair to Harbaugh, he was fighting against Bo’s legacy on this one and the lineage of the program itself. The most recent memory Michigan fans had of the spread offense in Ann Arbor was Rich Rodriguez, and those aren’t good memories, even if the problem was largely a lack of defense. People wanted the program to get back to basics and run the same “manball” it did in the 90’s when beating OSU was a more than reasonable expectation. The problem is that the rest of college football moved past that, including OSU. Now, spread is king and pro style is ancient, and furthermore it’s starting to take over the NFL too. Franchises are taking spread offense QBs in the draft and crafting their offenses to fit them and the other speedy personnel coming with them. It’s not a fad anymore, it’s now the evolution of the game.

Harbaugh finally realized this in 2019, which led him to hire Gattis. It’s honestly the move he should have made in 2015 when he was hired, but he didn’t know any better, and now he was locked into what would be Michigan’s third different offensive system in three years. Just like 2015, it took half the season for the players to get into a rhythm, but when they finally did, starting in the second half of the Penn State game, they rolled. Seriously, they kicked ass…...up until OSU(Broken record at this point).

The thing is, if you look at the Harbaugh tenure overall, it’s abundantly clear that not being able to stick to one offense has been by far the biggest problem this team has had in his time. You recruited Donovan Peoples-Jones, Tarik Black and Nico Collins for a pro style offense with innovation. They ended up playing in one that had no innovation, then one that had RPO mixed in with still not much innovation, and then finally a pro spread, the whole time taking orders and learning systems from three different sources, whether it was Drevno in 2017, Hamilton in 2018 or Gattis in 2019.

Putting that into perspective, you can see why DPJ went pro and Tarik transferred, because this wasn’t what they signed up for. It wasn’t what Nico signed up for either, but he adapted and used his size to his advantage to become a deep ball threat. The ultimate point though is that when you don’t have any consistency with your offense, you can’t get your players into a groove because they’re never comfortable having to learn a different offense every year, and you can’t recruit consistently because you’re constantly changing the type of athlete you’re looking for to suit your always changing system. Plus, it gets harder to bring the top kids in when they know you don’t have a clue about running a consistent, aggressive offensive attack that they can thrive in and put up numbers with.

This has KILLED Michigan in the past three years statistically with their own players, and recruiting-wise with missing out on top tier talent. It didn’t help that Harbaugh was acting like lord and master of it as well, because he’s not a spread offense guy at his core and when he’s trying to call plays in addition to being the head coach, it just doesn’t work efficiently. At all.

This is why Gattis is the most critical hire he will likely ever make at Michigan. A younger offensive coordinator who runs the type of spread offense that fits Michigan and the Big Ten very well because it uses pro style concepts, he has a clear idea of what type of athlete he wants at every position on offense, and recruits skill players very well. Pay any attention to the type of talent he’s been after since he got to Ann Arbor, and you see a pattern that screams his mantra, “Speed In Space.” Fast WRs. Speedy and strong RBs. TEs that can get downfield when needed. OL that can run tempo and no huddle. Aggressive, dominant and relentless. That is how you sell your program to top recruits, by letting them know what you’re running, how they fit into it, and being consistent with your vision.

The back end of 2019 was a preview of things to come. You had Patterson, who personally was on his FOURTH offensive coordinator in his career(and you wonder why he had consistency issues), and an offense full of upperclassmen that were finally settling into the pro spread, along with a frosh RB Zach Charbonnet, who has known nothing but pro spread since Day 1 in Ann Arbor, along with WRs Giles Jackson, Mike Sainristil and Cornelius Johnson. When the freshmen were on the field last year, you could see the speed and the energy change, because they were kids recruited to fit into this system from the beginning. Everyone else had to adjust to it from their previous habits.

Now imagine Year 2 of the pro spread. Sure the team is younger at OL, WR and even QB with either Dylan McCaffrey or Joe Milton, but they all know the system now, and what’s more the incoming freshman like WRs Roman Wilson and A.J. Henning or RB Blake Corum, are all players recruited by Gattis for this pro spread system. So they will be working to be the next cogs in the system along with Nico, Giles, Sainristil, Cornelius and Ronnie Bell. All fast, all quick and all ready to roll in an unchanged offense.

Don’t stop there, though. Have some more fun and think about Year 3 when Cristian Dixon and Xavier Worthy start blazing trails on the field along with all the aforementioned talent, while JJ McCarthy prepares to take over the future of the QB position. Imagine who else top tier that could end up being a part of that as well. It is clear that above all, Josh Gattis has a plan for Michigan’s offense and it is predicated on consistency, aggressiveness and speed demonry at the WR position.

This is what will finally get Michigan going on a steeper incline, because it is finally making the transition into modern college football that largely everyone else, especially OSU, has learned over the past 5 years. How well it will work remains to be seen, but fundamentally speaking it has far more potential than anything else we’ve seen to this point in the Harbaugh era.

Thank God he hired Josh Gattis.