ANN ARBOR, Mich. — At long last, it’s game week and the defending national champion Michigan Wolverines will start what they call ‘the road to Atlanta’ on Saturday when they host Fresno State for the season opener at The Big House.
One not-so-different thing between the two teams is that both will have first-year head coaches — Michigan with Sherrone Moore and Fresno State with Tim Skipper. Skipper served as the team’s linebackers coach before he was the acting head coach for the team’s bowl game. Incumbent head coach Jeff Tedford eventually stepped down from the program over the summer due to health concerns.
For Moore and the Wolverines, especially with Skipper having a defensive background compared to Tedford’s offensive bona fides, the maize and blue have to be prepared for anything and everything come Saturday.
“I think, first of all, whenever you have a new coach, obviously being a new coach, but whenever you have a new coach, there’s the unknown,” Moore said. “There’s the not really sure. Coach Skipper has been in the system. He’s been there. He’s been with them, so he’s evolved in the culture. It’s something that’s been very successful, so I don’t see him diverging too much from what they’ve done.
“I know he was a defensive coordinator, so I don’t know how much evolved he will be with the defense or not, but I can see that there’s definitely going to be some wrinkles and things that we’ve got to be prepared for, but they’re a good football team. They went 9-4 last year. They’re tough. They’re blue-collar. They play extremely hard, so it’s going to be a challenge for us to make sure we do the same thing.”
The biggest concern when it comes to defending the Bulldogs comes in the way of junior quarterback Mikey Keene.
In 2023, Keene completed 67.1% of his passes for 2,976 yards, with 24 touchdowns to 10 interceptions. Moore says that the biggest key to the game, at least defensively, is to get Keene off-balance and work to force him into some mistakes.
“Yeah, I think it starts, No. 1, with their quarterback, Mikey Keene,” Moore said. “He’s not as big as a lot of quarterbacks, but he gets the ball out quick. He’s mobile. The offense all goes through him, so for us to be successful against him, it’s about how we stop him, how we contain him. He’s going to make his throws. He’s going to do some really good things. He’s going to be able to scramble outside the box, so we’ve got to keep him contained and confuse him a little bit with coverages and things we do and make it messy for him because it really goes through him. When he’s healthy for them, he does a really good job of ball control and controlling the offense, and you can see that the offense has a lot more confidence with him in the game.”
Fresno State wasn’t a slouch defensively last year, either, ranking 48th in yards per play allowed in 2023. Michigan’s goal, of course, will be to show that it can move the ball, complete drives and score touchdowns instead of settling for field goals.