ANN ARBOR, Mich. — There were a lot of skeptics about the Michigan football defense entering the 2022 season. After Saturday’s debut, chances are, many of them are dying off.
But inside Schembechler Hall, what we saw against Colorado State is exactly what the Wolverine defense was expected to be.
“All the time, every day,” sophomore safety Rod Moore said. “We all compete and the whole team’s really good, so some days offense wins, sometimes defense wins. The defense is pretty consistent, like what we saw on Saturday, that’s really what we expect and what our goals have been.”
Moore particularly had success, netting his first-career interception after edge rusher Braiden McGregor forced CSU quarterback Clay Millen to step up in the pocket and make a quick throw.
The Michigan defense swarmed all over the Rams, with seven sacks and 11 tackles for loss. In fact, the Wolverines had just one sack in the 2021 season opener against Western Michigan one year ago.
One thing that stood out in the game was just how fast it was, with winged helmets surrounding the football on nearly every play. One factor in the game was linebacker Michael Barrett, formerly the VIPER in Don Brown’s defense. Barrett says that the team speed is in large part due to it being the second year of the system, even though there’s a new defensive coordinator in Jesse Minter.
“Yeah, I want to toot my own horn — a little fast. I feel like we were flying around just as a whole,” Barrett said. “I feel like we got a lot of guys that can move, a lot of guys who come off the edges, or in the secondary or in the interior. I feel like we got to just a lot of guys who are just flying around.”
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That said, while the defense looked fast and perhaps better than expectations in the season opener, even if it looks good again — as anticipated — in the next two weeks, it doesn’t matter much to the current players.
They know what’s ahead of them, in terms of the nonconference schedule vs. the Big Ten teams they’ll face for the majority of the season.
“Yeah, I mean, everything but just faster. Especially when we get to playing these the better teams,” Moore said. “Right now these are just kind of warm-up games, if you want to say. But when we get to playing the Penn States and the Michigan States, we want to have the same, where we play Saturday throughout every game of the season.”
Michigan’s next game will take place on Saturday night when it hosts Hawaii. Kickoff is set for 8 p.m. EDT and will be broadcast on Big Ten Network.
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