After Michigan football lost to Washington in Week 6 to go to 4-2 on the season, the coaches and players said there was now time for urgency, but there was no time to panic. After losing another to Illinois, the team still says it’s not time to panic.
Well, Fox Sports’ premier color commentator Joel Klatt is sounding the alarm, saying it is time to panic.
Nothing seems to be going right for Sherrone Moore in his first year coaching the maize and blue. So on Wednesday, Klatt devoted some time on his show to discuss why things aren’t working in Ann Arbor, what’s going wrong, and why there’s such a drop off from last season.
(And for those lurking rival fans, no, it’s not Connor Stalions.)
“Let’s start with the Michigan Wolverines, because right now it ain’t going well,” Klatt said. “Another bad loss on the road, this time against a pretty good Illinois team. This Illinois team is tough. They’re scrappy. Bret Bielema has done a really nice job with Illinois, by the way. I loved the uniforms, the throwbacks. I thought were really cool, absolutely leaning into the history of the game.
“Here’s the first thing that we’ve got to kind of address with the Michigan Wolverines. They fall to 4-3 on the season. They’ve got back-to-back losses now. They lost on the road at Washington and on the road at Illinois. Bottom line, boilerplate — Joel, how do we feel about Michigan? I think it’s time for some alarm bells here. I think that this is panic time. This is panic time. Michigan is in a dire spot right now, not only this season, but maybe even looking forward. So let’s dive into it.
“What’s going on right now? What’s the current state of Michigan? And I think this is the most obvious, and the obvious is, is that they’re getting no contribution for the quarterback position. They’re getting no contribution from the passing game. They’re 129 right now in passing offense. 129, that’s just not going to cut it. And not even close. By the way, their turnovers are up. They don’t convert on third down. It’s far too predictable. Their offense, it’s its run, and then throw it to Colston Loveland. That’s all they’ve got. And Colston Loveland is double covered in the majority of those scenarios, and so they’re just throwing him contested catches, and if he doesn’t come down with it, they’re punting it away. There’s just no ability for them to have sustained offense right now unless they pop a big run. And I don’t think that they’re a bad running team. I do think that they’re physical at the point of attack. They’re doing some quality things in the run game, but they’re not throwing the football well enough to win.
“Then you compound that with the fact that they have turned the ball over this year far more than they did a year ago. And it’s panic time, because this offense is not anywhere close right now, not anywhere close. And again, namely because they just overvalued what they had on their own roster, at the quarterback position, unfortunately. I think they wish that it would have gone differently in the offseason, but it hasn’t, and this is what we have now at that position. They overvalued the quarterback position, they overvalued the wide receiver position because they didn’t address that. Remember, now, in this day and age of college football, you can address areas of needs, and even really good teams have done this. Even some of the best teams in the country have done this. Look at Texas. Texas needed to address the secondary. They got Mukuba from Clemson. They needed to address the wide receiver position. They got Bond from Alabama. They got Ryan Wingo from a recruiting perspective, they addressed those positions, because in the modern college football you can construct a roster. Michigan, maybe they didn’t have enough time to do so, and that’s fair, and that’s fair because of the coaching change of when Jim Harbaugh left and when Sharon Moore became the head coach. But the bottom line is, is that they did not accurately evaluate their own position groups on their roster, and they overvalued them. And when you do that, man, it it doesn’t work out. It doesn’t work out.
“So they didn’t address it in the transfer portal, they didn’t address it in recruiting. And then now we get to a position where the play at those positions is just not good enough. It’s just not good enough. I think it’s difficult to target transfer receivers if you’re going to play the style of football that Michigan does, so I’m not going to be as hard on them about the wide receiver group as the quarterback group. And then this is what you have to kind of realize, folks, is that JJ McCarthy was incredible, incredible. And I think a lot of people thought that it was just the offensive philosophy. It was just their ability to run the football that made them successful, and that McCarthy was just a system guy. But it couldn’t be further from the truth. Now they think that, and I understand why, because in a top 10 matchup, they went on the road and ran the ball 32 straight times against Penn State. Now they had that in their bag, and they were able to lean into that physical nature and go and win a football game on the road against a team that wanted to rush the quarterback. But if you actually dive into the numbers, you see that JJ McCarthy was brilliant on third down, not just good, not just adequate. He was brilliant on third down, and namely, on third-and-long. When you go back and you look at the numbers, he was unequivocally the best quarterback in the country on third and long, not even close. And so what they were able to do is continue to lean into their philosophy and their style, knowing that he bailed them out time and time and time again, and he never got credit for it, and only now in hindsight do we all look back and we say to ourselves, you know what? JJ was pretty damn good — and he was, whether it was utilizing his legs or his ability to make plays with his arm down the field, he was the best quarterback in America on third-and-long. And candidly, it wasn’t even close. He converted more third-and-longs than anybody in the country.
“So then you look at the wide receiver position, and maybe you underestimated the contribution that a guy like Roman Wilson made, or Cornelius Johnson — like these guys made big catches. And then you dive into it, and you watch, like, red zone film from a year ago, or third down film from a year ago, and you start to realize it was like, oh, dang. Like Roman made huge catches all the time. I mean, he had, I think it was like 12 touchdowns last year. So when they lose these guys, it’s impossible to replace them. In particular, if you overvalue your own roster more than anything in modern college football, I think that a coach’s ability to clearly evaluate his own roster and then build a roster moving forward, whether that’s roster retention or construction from outside, I think that’s the most important thing going on, and they didn’t do it.
“So that’s where we’re sitting at here on the offensive side, and then that has affected their defense, because they don’t have the depth on defense that they did last year, in particular in the front seven. So when I would sit with Jesse Minter, we would talk a lot about what they had from a depth perspective in the front seven. And he thought that that was key, not because he got to play a lot of good players, which is which is true, but it was the freshness aspect. So like so, for instance, when I’m preparing last year for the Big Ten Championship Game, as Michigan was about to face Iowa, you go through and you looked at like the average number of snaps per game for any of their defensive linemen, OK — edge players or interior defensive tackles — none of them played much more over 30 snaps per game. In fact, Mason Graham played the most snaps per game, and it was right around 30. So the depth allowed them to stay more fresh, and then they were able to rush the quarterback with much greater effectiveness, in particular later in games, which is what we saw in some of those big matchups, whether it was Alabama, or whether it was Ohio State, or whether it was Washington, that’s not there.
“I think we also maybe underestimated what the defensive secondary was and the second level, Junior Colson, the linebacker, Michael Barrett, their combination. They started together at the linebacker spot for about two and a half years. OK, so now you’re trying to replace that, and they’re doing it with transfers, Hausmann and Barham. And then you come to this last guy, and it’s like, you know what? He might have been the best defender on the field last year, and that’s Mikey Sainristil. He’s not out there. When Nick Saban praises an opponent to the level that he praised Mikey Sainristil, then we should all take notice, because he’s watched the film. He knows what’s going on. They had to game plan against him.
“So all of those guys are gone. They don’t have the depth. They didn’t evaluate the quarterback position, right? They didn’t evaluate the wide receiver position, right? And here we are, and remember, they’re trying to use the same philosophy. This is not a team that blew people out a year ago. It was a boa constrictor. I talked about it tirelessly right here on this program is that Michigan was the boa constrictor. And when you use the boa constrictor philosophy, you are creating a small margin for error where you’ve got to do everything right. So it matters if you’re able to hold on to the football because you don’t, you don’t play a style that’s going to be able to come back from behind. So you’ve got to win the turnover margin, you’ve got to win the field position battle, you’ve got to win the time of possession battle. You’ve got to be good on third down. They were last year, in fact, in a lot of those categories, they were the best in the country. They were the boa constrictor. They did it great. Nobody better. But the key is like, JJ on third-and-long, keeping the defensive line fresh. There’s these little ingredients that they don’t have this year. And so when you play small-margin games and you don’t have those things, you lose. And that’s what’s going on with Michigan. So that’s the current state with Michigan, and now we’ve got to look forward. And I hate to say this to Michigan fans, but it’s probably going to get worse before it gets better.”