ANN ARBOR, Mich. — The hype beast of the offseason for Michigan football was transfer linebacker Jaishawn Barham. Having come aboard from Maryland, Barham is a freakish athlete who was spoken behind closed doors as a potential first-round talent.
However, it’s been a rocky start for Barham, who was abused by Texas in Week 2, and has often found himself out of position — seemingly in part due to confusion in a new (to him) defense, and the other part being that his freakish athleticism meant he’d often run himself out of plays.
But his position coach, Brian Jean-Mary, says that he’s trending upward and he can see the progress he’s made from Saturday to Saturday.
“He’s gotten better every week,” Jean-Mary said. “I know it doesn’t always show on the stat sheet or sometimes on the video, but he’s getting more comfortable in the system. I think he’s making a lot more tackles within the system. I think he gets frustrated. He’s a dynamic guy when it comes to pressuring the quarterback, and people are IDing him, which I tell him is part of it. It helps free up some of the other guys on defense, and that’s one of the things that happens when you’re a good player, and especially as explosive as he is.
“He’s been doing a better job of playing within the framework of the defense. There’s things he can improve on. Obviously, it’s going to be finishing plays a little better. I thought he was in position a couple times in some of those underneath passes, in particular the fourth down where if he knows where it’s going and cheats a little bit toward there, the ball doesn’t get completed. But those are things that as a young player, and I still call him a young player. I know he’s a third-year guy that started in this league, but he’s young in this system. That’s going to keep getting better.”
Considering his athleticism, WolverinesWire asked Jean-Mary a follow up about how he runs himself out of plays from time to time. Jean-Mary says that coaching that out of him is part of his job but Barham came to Ann Arbor to be able to follow in the footsteps of his predecessors within this particular defensive schematic framework.
“It is, but I think it’s a challenge that he’s embracing,” Jean-Mary said. “He came here for a reason. He saw the success that we had and obviously the success that guys like Junior and Mike Barrett had in the past, and I think he understood it was going to be different, and he’s getting better at it. He understands there’s a lot of good players on that field with him, and he just wants to be a part of it. Anything he can do to help us win, I think he’s all for it.
“It’s always frustrating. You want guys that want to make tackles. You want guys that want to make the game-changing plays and are able to wreck offense’s game plans. You want that. You don’t want to take that away from them, but he’s understanding how to do that within the framework of what we do.”
Barham will get another chance this week to right his past wrongs when he and the Wolverines travel to Seattle to face Washington.