There is a single word that can be used to describe how Michigan football has been doing through the first five weeks of the 2026 season. It’s a word that sixth-year safety and third-year team captain Rod Moore actually said after the Western Michigan scare in Week 1.
That word is “soft.” And until this program collectively decides to do something about it, no amount of talent is going to save this season, which went completely off the rails on Saturday following a 20-14 upset at Minnesota.
Let me
back up for a minute. After Michigan nearly lost to WMU — a game in which the Wolverines were four-touchdown favorites and only won due to a Hail Mary and a gift from the Big Ten officiating crew — Moore sat in front of the media and said this:
“No, I don’t think there’s really a so-called reason,” Moore said as to why the Wolverines struggled as much as they did. “I think we just went out there and played soft. Like, it was simple as that. It kind of surprised me that we kept going out there on defense. And I really wasn’t paying attention to the score until maybe five minutes left in the game. And I’m like, it’s 7-9. I’m like, it’s Western Michigan and it’s 7-9.
“But I mean, there’s not really no reason. I think we just didn’t have the right mindset, the mentality that we were supposed to have to go in that game and execute like we were supposed to.”
That was five weeks ago. Coming out of Saturday’s embarrassingly bad performance at Minnesota, Michigan has apparently learned nothing in the month since. Minnesota — a program that has not beaten Michigan at home since 1977 and in general since 2014 — took the Little Brown Jug back because Michigan once again walked onto a football field believing talent alone would be enough. Because Michigan has more talent than Minnesota, right?
In all actuality, that is true. Michigan has more four- and five-star talent on the roster than Minnesota does. Michigan’s blue chip ratio is 47.8 percent this season, while Minnesota’s is 15.0 percent. It actually may not be far off to say Minnesota’s entire roster is worth nearly as much as quarterback Bryce Underwood is by himself.
But at the end of the day, football is not won by the team with the better collection of individual talent, it is won by the team that plays better football. And that’s what happened on Saturday. Running back Jordan Marshall, however, disagrees with my assessment. Here’s what he had to say, courtesy of On3’s Anthony Broome:
“I’m confident in saying that I think we’re a better team than both of the past teams we played,” Marshall said after the Minnesota game. “But we have not performed that way. And for me, I think the scary thing is that I don’t know how to respond because I’m so used to having all the answers, and it just doesn’t … these things that we’re doing don’t show up at practice.
“So it’s new to me to see these things, and I’m just like I don’t know how to fully grasp it. All I can say is, ‘Guys, let’s go! Like, strap it up! We have to go! Like, it’s time to go!’ Everybody has to look at themselves in the mirror, and I’ve said this more than once, but we have to be more connected. I don’t know. We have to be more connected outside the building, in the building. It has to all come together.”
A lot of what Marshall said in the second part of that quote is understandable, and I actually agree with a lot of what he’s saying there.
But to be completely blunt, no, they are not better than the last two teams they played. How do I know that? Well…they lost those games, and Marshall saying that with so much confidence is really concerning.
Marshall even went a step further on the In The Trenches postgame podcast, saying: “I just think (Minnesota) played harder, they strained, they had a lot of energy. Kudos to them. Again, their coach always has a lot of energy and they feed off of each other, and that’s what they did. And they fed off each other and we let them hang around. And when you let a team like this hang around like an Iowa team — it’s just they’re pretty much, they play the same. They want to melt the clock and that’s what they did. They played good defense, got us off the field, held the ball, made us feel out of rhythm and we have to have an answer for that.”
Another veteran player, linebacker Troy Bowles, also spoke on the postgame podcast and said, “They weren’t doing nothing special. … They weren’t doing nothing crazy. … We definitely respected them as a good duo of (running) backs, but we’ve played against good backs before and they run their offense kind of like Iowa. So it wasn’t really nothing new they were doing.”
It’s nice that those quotes have mentions of respecting the opponent, but does that part even really matter when you’re saying things like “we let them hang around,” and “they weren’t doing nothing special?” Those words turn what should be genuine compliments into back-handed ones.
We have heard these things time and time again, and it needs to stop. If you are a legitimate contender year in and year out, you are allowed to say those things once per year if you have a bad game against an opponent you are projected to beat.
For example: Michigan’s game in 2023 against Bowling Green in Week 3. Quarterback J.J. McCarthy threw a career-high three interceptions in that game alone — he only threw one more during the entire national championship-winning season. After the game, he didn’t point any fingers or say they overlooked Bowling Green. Instead, McCarthy went the opposite route.
“I’m gonna take all those (interceptions) on the chin — put ‘em all on me,” McCarthy said. “There’s a lot of stuff that just obviously didn’t go my way, didn’t go the offense’s way, but I just can’t wait to watch the tape and just see the mistakes that were made and get better from it, honestly, but I’m gonna take all those on the chin.”
McCarthy is a unicorn, a one-of-one competitor who took personal accountability at every turn. A program like Michigan should have players like that on its roster every single year. The team does not appear to have any of those things this year, or at least none of those voices have emerged just yet.
I don’t want this to appear as if I don’t believe the players and coaches want to get better and improve. They certainly do. But I think a lot of their problems could be resolved if they took a step back and understood what they are right now — a team with an arrogance that it hasn’t earned with no identity, especially offensively.
As far as the on-field product goes, it’s as if nothing has changed since Sherrone Moore was fired last December and Kyle Whittingham was hired a few weeks later. This is an undisciplined, unorganized and completely out-of-whack program right now, and there’s nothing I can point to that gives me faith that things are going to suddenly change after the bye week.
One of the reasons Michigan hired Whittingham was his reputation for building disciplined, fundamentally sound teams. His Utah teams were not always the most talented, but they were almost always the best prepared and the most difficult to beat because they simply did not beat themselves.
The fact Michigan has not even remotely resembled a Whittingham-coached team through five weeks is a huge concern. All the penalties that have stacked up so far this year are the opposite of what Whittingham’s programs are known for, as are the mental lapses and the arrogance that has been on display.
I’m not sure this was the best thing for him to say after the game, but Whittingham, himself, is even facing an uphill battle.
To me, that reads like a coach who is still learning how to manage a type of player he didn’t regularly have at Utah. Players that had four or five stars next to their high school recruiting profiles with enormous expectations and significant NIL opportunities before they had ever played a meaningful snap of college football. That is a different challenge than coaching players that have spent years being told they need to earn everything.
Whittingham even said himself last December during his opening press conference that the players “will become us, we will not become you.” So far, that doesn’t appear to have happened.
If the culture at Michigan is going to change, it can’t simply be demanded. That has to be established, and it should have been done so during the offseason. Perhaps it’s a longer process than we all expected, but to have this be a problem in October is a huge concern. The players are still operating with the same loose, undisciplined approach that plagued the program under the previous coaching staff.
The talent on the roster and the coaching staff is good enough to win every remaining game. I’m not disputing that one bit. But talent has not been Michigan’s issue this year — the problem is this program has spent five weeks learning the same damn lesson over and over again without any legitimate change taking place.
And that brings us back to what Moore said on Sept. 5: “I think we just went out there and played soft.”
At the time, that quote could be dismissed as a veteran player trying to explain an ugly Week 1 performance. But a month later, after another loss to an opponent that Michigan was projected to beat, it sounds like a diagnosis of the program and not just an explanation for one game.
Right now, after two embarrassing losses, the season has gone completely sideways. And until something changes, we’re going to continue watching a soft football program.
