Michigan football lost 13-6 to Indiana in overtime, and it was a tale of two parts: the exceptional defense and the moribund offense.
Joel Klatt was on the call for Fox Sports, and it was his third time seeing the Wolverines. And he had a lot of positive to say about the defensive side of the ball for the maize and blue.
“Michigan is wasting one of the best defenses in all of college football right now,” Klatt said. “Jay Hill, the defensive coordinator, and these guys on the Michigan defensive side of the football — this is a top-three, top-five D, and that’s, I think, conservative.
“I think you can make an argument they’re one of the two or three best, but I’ll just say one of the three to five best defenses in the sport. In the sport.
“I know
that Indiana was playing largely one-handed, and they were doing a lot of things differently than they would want to do in the way that they were attacking this defense, but this defense was outstanding.
“They did not have — they were shorthanded, by the way, as well. Dom Nichols did not play in this game, the defensive end, and he’s excellent. John Henry Daley is not 100% at defensive end. They’ve got some young players out there, including some freshman defensive ends. But they are excellent.
“Their structure is good. Their secondary is phenomenal. I think it’s one of the two or three best secondaries in all of college football. They cover, and they support the run.
“Let me tell you what I saw on film, and I thought this was so great from Jay Hill. Jay Hill, the defensive coordinator, what you see from him at times is a lot of man coverage, and he’ll mix up the style of man. You know, sometimes it’s man in order to blitz. Sometimes it’s man in order to cover, all right?
“And they’ll do things like — rather than playing — so they’ll play like Cover 2 man and have two high safeties and man underneath. They’ll play Cover 1 robber, which is a free safety deep and then a robber in the middle of the field and man underneath.
“Sometimes they just play man free, one guy deep, everybody manned up underneath, and maybe a twist and a stunt and one linebacker on the blitz. They do all sorts of that.
“And then I saw a different variation on Saturday. I wish I could have seen this live in real time, and I’m kind of kicking myself. This is when I kick myself.
“They took their concept of Cover 1 robber, OK? So they’ve got a free safety deep in the middle of the field, and then normally this guy, the other safety, would just drop down and be what I would call in the hole, right about 8 to 10 yards over the ball, and he’s in the middle of the field, and he’s trying to rob middle routes. That’s why I call it Cover 1 robber, and everybody else is in man coverage.
“Well, they took that concept, one robber, and they — I’m inventing a term here — it was one support.
“And so what would happen is Chris Bracy, from his safety position, would just run down into run support, and he’s a completely unblocked player, and he was all over the field.
“It was a great scheme. A great scheme. And they didn’t use it on every single snap, but they used it quite often, and it was effective.
“And they didn’t just stop the run, because Indiana had some successful runs in there, but it was difficult on them. It was very difficult on them.
“And then the coverage on the outside against these two great wide receivers, Marsh and Becker, was outstanding.
“So these guys can cover. They can tackle. Indiana started to try to block Chris Bracy with the wide receivers. So the wide receivers get these big inside releases, and here they come, they’re trying to block the safety that’s running downhill.
“And what happens? The corner just replaces him in support. And so you’ve got Jyaire Hill, and you’ve got Zeke Berry, and you’ve got Smith Snowden, and they’re making tackles in the run game. They’re tough and rugged.
“They cover. They’re fast. They’ve got good ball skills, and then the front seven gets after it.
“Fantastic defense. Fantastic defense. That is a championship-level defense, and the offensive side is struggling. And struggling is putting it nicely.”
But there’s the other side of the ball: a terrible offense that’s showing no signs of getting better.
Klatt has already had a few breakdowns of how to fix the offense, but on Monday, he broke it down even further.
“Let’s start with this: if you’re struggling to this point, and it’s not going well as a coach, you have to evaluate things,” Klatt said. “You have to evaluate things. You have to evaluate them in three tiers: players, scheme and coaches. You have to evaluate those, and you have to be honest, OK?
“You can’t do it through, you know, maize-and-blue glasses. You can’t sugarcoat things. You’ve got to be honest with yourself. Is it the players? Is it the scheme? Or is it the coaches?
“Sometimes it’s a combination of all three. Sometimes it’s one, and there’s a glaring weakness in one of those pillars.
“But here’s the thing: You can’t change the players at this point, even though they have tried, largely. They’ve played with five different combinations of offensive line, not because guys are getting benched, but because of injuries.
“So you’ve got all these different combinations of offensive line. Now you’ve switched the quarterback out, and you’ve got to move to scheme. You have to move to scheme because the scheme is not fitting what they’re doing.
“So in a bye week, and as the season progresses, as an offensive guy — and I was a quarterback — there’s a process that you go through as a team.
“You don’t know exactly in preseason and in fall camp what you’re going to be. It has to reveal itself in game, OK? In a live game. What are we? What are we good at? What do we do well? What do we not do well? What do we do poorly?
“All of those things materialize during the course of the season, and it’s on you as an offense, and more particular, the offensive staff, to evaluate really two things: What do we do well? What do we do poorly?
“And then it’s incumbent on you to take what you do well and build upon that, and you take what do you do poorly and you throw it out.
“That’s evolution. That’s developing. That’s developing an identity. That is leaning into an identity.
“You can’t press upon a group of players your identity as a coach. You can’t do that.
“You can do it from a culture standpoint, and you can want to do certain things schematically, but if it is not happening, you’ve got to look at what’s going on.
“And this offense right now is not working.
“If you look at the numbers, OK, so I’ll give you some numbers. I’ll give you some film as well.
“In the last six quarters of football, last two against Penn State and then against Indiana, if you look at the yards that they gain running the football between the tackles, it’s 7.4 yards per carry.
“When you look at the runs outside of the tackles, on the perimeter, it’s 1.4 yards per carry outside the tackles.
“That is a glaring message of what do you do well and what do you do poorly. It’s right there. It’s right there.
“If you look at the season, yards per carry between the tackles, it’s about 5.7. Outside of the tackles, it’s about just over 3, 3.3, by the way.
“Those 3.3 yards outside of the tackles, on outside-of-the-tackles runs, that’s 136th out of 138 college football teams. It’s not working.
“They’ve run it outside, and this is where it really kind of rubber meets the road.
“You could tell me, like, well, Joel, they run it 80% of the time inside the tackles, but that’s not the case. That’s not the case.
“And if you told me that, I could say, like, OK, well, at least you’re trying to keep people honest. Maybe this is a schematic thing where you’ve got to get stretch out of an end in order to attack in the interior. That can be fine.
“But when the numbers are the numbers, and you’re 136th in college football running the ball on the perimeter, and then you tell me they’ve run it outside on the perimeter, outside the tackles, 67% of the carries, which is the fifth most in college football, now there’s a disconnect.
“Now there’s a disconnect, and this shows up on film. This shows up on film.
“The most effective drives that they had, and even stretches of drives, were when they were trying to attack downhill in between the tackles.
“That’s what their backs can do. Marshall’s a downhill runner, Jordan Marshall. Savion Hiter is a downhill runner, and the vertical — the horizontal stretch offense is not working.
“I know I showed some film on that a couple of weeks ago, and it largely got pinned on Bryce Underwood. This is not a Bryce Underwood thing.
“It was the same exact schemes that we saw against Indiana that we did against Minnesota, and it was largely the same result.
“I thought Carr had little chance in this game, in particular in the passing game.
“Let’s get to the passing game, because that’s just the run game.
“Well, in the passing game, here’s what’s going on.
“One, they don’t run it all that successfully, so it’s very difficult to influence the defense with play-action pass. And if you can’t put players in conflict, then it’s very difficult to get players open.
“So Carr is sitting back there, and nobody’s open, all right? On a few passing concepts that there are people open, he’s not finding them.
“So I’m not here to tell you that Carr played great. I thought that he battled for a 19-year-old true freshman against Indiana’s defense. He battled, and he scrambled around, and he gained some yards. There’s no doubt about that.
“But the issue in the passing game is that there’s not always influence in the passing structures, OK?
“So what am I talking about there? All right, well, first and foremost, I’ve got a great description of passing game in the YouTube channel.
“All you got to do, go find it. You can subscribe. It’s called Understanding Football, and I walk you through a quick passing game, three-step passing game and drop-back game, and you can listen to that, and you can understand that passing game is about pictures and spacing.
“And it’s not that every guy in the picture or in the spacing can get the ball on any given play. I mean, there’s ways that that happen.
“It’s that you are influencing defenders. You are walling off defenders in order to put certain defenders in conflict, all right? That’s how you complete passes. That’s how you get guys open, and that’s how you create space.
“They don’t do that very well.
“One of the reasons why they don’t do that very well is that they drop back and pass with a sixth offensive lineman on the field quite often.
“In fact, their rhino package, which is a sixth offensive lineman on the field, they used it in over half their snaps on Saturday.
“Now, it doesn’t help them run the football more effectively like it used to, and like, let’s say, 2023, when they would throw extra offensive linemen on the field like they did against Penn State, and they ran it 34 straight times.
“They did that successfully. One, they had really good offensive linemen. They had Blake Corum in the backfield, right? You don’t have that right now.
“So the rhino package goes out there, and it’s not giving them the bump that I would expect, and in particular in the passing game.
“Because when you drop back and pass with a sixth offensive lineman on the field, that’s supposed to be another pass catcher, like a tight end, and if he’s not out in the route concept, then he’s not influencing the structure of defense.
“If he’s not influencing the structure of defense, then they can double and have numbers on the other parts of the picture.
“So, for instance and for example, on the interception that Carr throws that it was batted up into the air, they’re trying to run in-cuts on third down.
“They’ve got the rhino package in, but it’s supposed to be a three-by-one set.
“Well, that tight end or the rhino, if he has any sort of middle route, he’s going to influence the middle linebacker, who has to go with him just based on the numbers.
“But if that’s an offensive lineman who’s just going to be in and pass protection, then that Mike linebacker is a free player, and all he did was float with the eyes of the quarterback.
“And all of a sudden, the passing window into the boundary side of it was filled with four defenders, partly because they’re not influenced by the five routes that could potentially be out on the field.
“I know that that was a ton of technical stuff, and I’m really sorry if I lost you right there. I would go watch Understanding Football.
“But I’m here to tell you that a lot of things are not working for Michigan.
“They’ve got to go and identify: What do you do well? What do you do poorly?
“You take what’s going poor, and you throw it out. And I don’t care if it’s been successful in previous years at previous locations. You throw it out, and you say, what do we do well? And then you build on that.
“I think that this should be a downhill running team with boots and play-actions off of that, with tight ends on the field in delay checkdowns like they were able to get in some of those route concepts on Saturday.”
It’s a pretty strong indictment on Michigan football. Perhaps the elixir is to play Rutgers, which has on of the worst defenses in the country. The Wolverines travel to Piscataway to face the Scarlet Knights this Saturday.
This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Joel Klatt says Michigan is wasting a great defense
