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If you’ve listened to the Locked On Wolverines Podcast over the course of the past few months, at least during the recent stay at home order, then you’ve heard us talk about several aspects to Michigan and leadership.
Now we can expound a little more on it all.
There’s been some hints that the Wolverines have needed a little more leadership in the locker room, a notion which started with some words shared by Michigan cornerback Ambry Thomas after the loss to Alabama in the VRBO Citrus Bowl earlier this year.
“We could’ve been in that fight much longer — we could’ve won, honestly,” junior cornerback Ambry Thomas told the team’s Inside Michigan Football show outside the locker room after the game. “In that fourth quarter we let it slip away. Guys started getting their heads down. It’s just the mental aspect, a lot of people weren’t in it no more. It’s just next year, we’ve gotta make sure that everybody toughen up and get ready to go in big games.”
We’ve spoken to multiple people about this afterwards, including one person unaffiliated with Michigan as of current, but with strong knowledge of the inner workings there. They told WolverinesWire that one place that Michigan lagged behind Ohio State was in the leadership department, in that the Buckeyes had a stronger established player-led culture that held their teammates accountable. That person indicated that was somewhat lacking in Ann Arbor.
After speaking to another person, they shared that Michigan was taking strong steps this offseason to remedy exactly that — which is what we tentatively shared on the Locked On Wolverines Podcast. However, we couldn’t share the details at that time.
But now what we were told about has now been publicly discussed on the In the Trenches podcast with Jon Jansen.
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Jansen had offensive coordinator Josh Gattis on his most recent episode, and Gattis addressed the dearth of player-led leadership as Thomas had discussed previously. As we alluded to, Michigan has taken a hands-on approach at changing the culture and cultivating a stronger locker room. One major thing the team has done is hiring a former Navy SEAL captain to teach the players how to be better at holding each other accountable, and it’s already showing early dividends, Gattis says.
“We feel like the culture of our team and the leadership of our team is in the best place it’s ever been,” Gattis said. “We started small. This offseason was a really big challenge to create a culture that was driven by our players. When I say we started small, we started with breaking down our team into small groups and Coach Herb did a really good job of assigning group leaders and we also have another (person) who works with our guys with leadership is (a) former Navy SEAL captain. They’ve broken the team down into individual groups, small groups.
“The project they were assigned is clean up the locker room. How well you take care of the locker room and how well you take care of the space that you live in will determine everything else and how you carry out the rest of – get throughout your day. And our kids really did accept the challenge. That was obviously something that, from a culture standpoint, is huge. Taking care of each other and taking care of your responsibilities.
“But now that we’ve been remote, they’re doing little things. They’ve got little tasks that they do. Whether it’s make your bed today or they’re sending pictures to (team nutritionist) Abigail O’Connor, pictures of food that they’re making, food that they’re eating. They’re just doing all little different things to really show leadership. They were sending pictures to their groups as well. They’re showing accountability in the groups. They’re addressing each other. I really love the culture.”
Gattis says that the staff recognized that it couldn’t be the ones leading — especially in light of what Thomas said. The coaches can only do so much, and as cliche as it might be, a team is only as good as its weakest link.
And while we’ll have to wait and see how much of an on-field impact it might have, these new changes, the differences are already impressing Michigan’s second-year offensive coordinator.
“When you look at it offensively, I’ve got about 12 guys on offense that I meet with weekly, which I kind of consider our offensive leadership council,” Gattis said. “And the biggest message is: leadership is gonna be driven by the players. It can’t be driven by the coaches. If you can drive the leadership, the culture and the message, then someone else will. There’s always going to be an opening because there’s always gonna be some message that goes to the locker room, that goes to the players. The biggest thing that we’ve made them aware is that the message has to come from them. They’ve got to be able to hold each other responsible, they’ve got to be able to hold each other accountable. And we’ve got a unit like that, that unit right there can really set the standard and set the tone for everything. And that’s what we’ve been trying to accomplish as a team, but I think that’s probably one of the biggest areas of growth that we’ve been able to see as a team over the past few months.”