The Michigan Wolverines are not the Alabama Crimson Tide. Michigan can’t go anywhere in the country to pick and choose five-star recruits to add to a star-studded recruiting class like Alabama does year in and year out. The Wolverines aren’t even like their archrivals, the Ohio State Buckeyes, when it comes to recruiting.

But that doesn’t seem to matter for the Wolverines (15-0, 9-0 Big Ten), as they beat both the Buckeyes (11-2, 8-1 Big Ten) and Crimson Tide (12-2, 8-0 SEC) this season en route to winning the College Football Playoff National Championship game against the Washington Huskies (14-1, 9-0 Pac-12) Monday night.

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While Michigan has been ranked in the top 20 of the 247Sports recruiting rankings in each of the past six cycles, the Wolverines’ best class has topped out at No. 8 in that time frame. In comparison, Alabama did not have a recruiting class worse than second in the country across those six years.

Teams have to bring in highly rated recruits and top talent if they want to win at the highest levels. There’s a reason we don’t see teams like Vanderbilt (2-10, 0-8 SEC) — who is often in the cellar of the SEC — win a National Championship, as the Commodores consistently bring in low-rated recruiting classes.

Once teams bring in top talent, though, they have to develop those recruits into college football players, something the Trojans (8-5, 5-4 Pac-12) have not done well, but Michigan has excelled at for the past few years.

Michigan’s graduate defensive back Mike Sainristil is a prime example. Sainristil was rated as a three-star recruit in the 2019 class as a wide receiver, but the Wolverines were able to move past that low rating and turned Sainristil into a star on the defensive end. The defensive back led Michigan with eight tackles in the National Championship game and added an interception with less than five minutes in the game that all but sealed the win.

The Trojans have not had such success developing their high school recruits, even the highly rated ones. USC has brought in six five-star players in the past six recruiting cycles, four of whom have transferred away from the program. The other two are freshman wide receivers Duce Robinson and Zachariah Branch, meaning there is still a lot of time for the two first-years to transfer if they feel USC is not developing them well.

This is where the Trojans can learn from the Wolverines. Recruiting ratings and rankings do not matter if the coaching staff cannot develop that talent. This is not to say that USC has not developed players at all — in the same way, Michigan has not been perfect in developing its recruits. Look at former Trojan cornerback Mekhi Blackmon. Blackmon transferred to USC rated as a three-star and turned into a third-round pick in the 2023 NFL Draft.

What is troubling, though, is the transfer-portal attrition the Trojans have seen from five-star recruits, players who are supposed to be the cornerstone of a program. If USC wants to win, and win consistently, the coaching staff has to do a better job of scouting the players they are recruiting.

The Trojans took a big step in that direction when Head Coach Lincoln Riley hired D’Anton Lynn to be USC’s new defensive coordinator, a coach who took a UCLA (8-5, 4-5 Pac-12) defense lacking in any former five stars and turned it into the 14th-best scoring defense in the country.

That’s called development.

The Trojans need to continue to take pages out of Michigan’s book — no, not the sign-stealing one — and move past arbitrary star ratings. The USC coaching staff should still recruit five stars — there’s no apparent reason not to — but only if they believe they can develop those recruits, along with the three- and four-star recruits, into college football players.

Big Ten football is often referred to as “nitty gritty football” because of its physical style of play, and for good reason. USC needs to adopt that mantra throughout the program if the Trojans want to succeed in their new conference.

The first step? Follow in the footsteps of its new conference mate, get into the nitty gritty and develop recruits beyond a simple star rating on a recruiting website. The Trojans have to be able to develop those high school recruits into college football players if they want to see any sort of success in the Big Ten.

Especially since they will have to play the likes of Michigan in Ann Arbor Sept. 21.