It was a major issue a year ago, whenever the Michigan football defense faced tempo offenses. This year, it’s been an amazing turnaround, under first-year Wolverines defensive coordinator Jesse Minter.
The issues came to a head in 2021 when the maize and blue faced rival Michigan State on the road, as the Spartans used tempo to keep Michigan off-guard. However, this season, it’s been a vastly improved element of the nation’s top-ranked defense, as the Wolverines haven’t just been prepared for teams who run fast-paced offenses but have found ways to hurt offenses when they substitute.
But how does Minter approach substituting when teams go tempo? That element was what got his predecessor, Mike Macdonald, in heaps of trouble. He says it’s all about waiting for the right moments to make changes to who’s out on the field.
He shared his philosophy with Jon Jansen on the Inside Michigan Football radio show by Learfield IMG.
“My understanding is, when the offense does sub, so whether it’s running back for running back or they go from one personnel to the other, the ref will stand over the ball for roughly two and a half to three seconds,” Minter said. “And, if you have to make a quick decision of whether you want to sub on defense, to one either match their personnel, so we might go from base to nickel, or we might be in nickel, and just want to do a one for one or a two for two or three for three or even like the whole front four — and so it’s a split second timing at times and sometimes when you play a tempo team, you plan for that. So it’s like, hey, they don’t sub a lot but when they do you have an opportunity to get a fresh guy in No. 1, to actually slow down the pace of their play. Yeah, for your guys that are out there to kind of catch their breath.
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“And so I thought it was a process for us. There was a couple opportunities early in the year that we learned from where we may have had a chance to — there’s times where an offense coordinator may decide with 10 seconds on the play clock to go from 11 to 12 personnel, and if you decide to sub, you can really put them in a tough bind. And so, we’ve had a couple of those that have worked out for us. But ultimately, it’s about No. 1, us matching personnel, No. 2, trying to slow down the game when it allows and just take advantage of the rules. If that they are what they are, we got to — there’s times where we can go 10 straight plays without subbing. So when we do get that opportunity to sub we need to take advantage.”
It’s made a world of difference thus far. We’ll see if that success continues in the final two regular season games coming up.
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