ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- The offensive problems that Michigan football has at the moment are so glaring, you can see them from space. And though many analysts have had feasible solutions -- things that have worked in the past for the maize and blue that seem to work when the Wolverines run them
-- Kyle Whittingham and the offensive coaches seem to shrug, scratch their heads, and wonder aloud how anyone could possibly fix the issues.Considering twice now that Whittingham has said that the staff would have to reevaluate everything and he would have to have the tough conversations (after both Minnesota and Indiana), WolverinesWire asked him on Monday how he would go about that and what the conversations are like. He didn't share a method as much as he went
through the obvious issues that Michigan has on that side of the ball.
"Well, we've got to get better on offense. Anybody in the country can figure that out," Whittingham said. "We're playing defense at an elite level right now. No. 1 in the country, actually, in yards per play. I think we're second in total defense. And so, a lot of good things going on there, but we're struggling on offense in a lot of areas.
"Not running the ball well enough, not throwing the ball well enough, not good enough on third down, not good enough in the red zone. We're turning it over too much. So, there's a lot of things to improve upon. And so, it's a work in progress, and we're certainly giving it all our attention, every bit of our attention. So, hopefully we see some improvement."
Whittingham is unsure why offensive coordinator Jason Beck had success at New Mexico and Utah but hasn't managed to get the offense going in Ann Arbor. Is it Beck himself? Is it the Big Ten? Is it the personnel?
Again, he doesn't have the answers, just the same questions everyone has.
"We're asking ourselves all those questions that you're posing," Whittingham said. "Asking if they've got much traction yet. And we're looking at everything, and it's not one thing. It's a combination of things. We've got to get, like I said, better. We've got to coach them up better in pretty much every position. And we're not getting that done right now. Plain and simple. We're not getting it done from a coaching standpoint at this point in time."
The biggest narrative is that Beck wants to do things that his players aren't good at, and that the players are good at things that Beck doesn't want to call. Despite some of the stats bearing that out, Whittingham disagrees with that assessment.
"I don't think that's completely fair," Whittingham said. "There may be some validity to it. But when you look at offenses as a whole, there's not a ton of variation these days. Everyone's doing more or less the same runs, the same concepts in the throw games. So it's not as varied as you might think. But it is a matter of the essence of coaching is getting things in the scheme that your players can do and can execute. And we just haven't found that yet. We're still searching for it. Seven games in, unfortunately."
One of Michigan's upcoming opponents, Oregon -- a team that was expected to contend for a national championship this year -- is also 4-3 this season. The Ducks fired their offensive coordinator on Sunday as a result of the struggles on that side of the ball.
Whittingham says that he has fired a coordinator in-season, but he says this won't be one of those times.
"Absolutely, yeah, I have done that before," Whittingham said. "There's not much I haven't done in whatever, however many years I've been doing this. You start to see that show up across the country. I mean, how's the timing here? You're seeing the head coaches lose their jobs, playcallers being demoted and that type of thing. My job is to do whatever is best for the program. I'm fully aware of that.
"If there's tough decisions to be made in that regard, I'll certainly have made them before and will again. But right now, I don't think it's time to panic. I guess you could say we're two or three plays away from 6-1 or 7-0. We're primarily doing our defense. We're in games each week because of the defense. But again, from inside the program, you can't make a division and say, 'Well, this side of the ball would have done this or that,' because we're all in it together. And so you've got to protect the locker room. You don't want to have divisiveness at all in any way, shape or form. And I don't believe we do. I think our guys are all on the same page now, which is a credit to them because it could have been very easy at this point in time to start to have some divisions. But I don't see that."
It should be noted that Whittingham has not fired a coordinator in-season, but in 2024, his offensive coordinator with the Utes, Andy Ludwig, resigned on October 21 of that year. At that time, Whittingham noted: "I don't think we've, to my recollection, replaced a coordinator during the season. I think one year, we changed play-callers." He also noted in his opening statement in that very press conference: "Andy Ludwig, on his own volition, has decided to step down as the offensive coordinator," thus indicating that he was not fired, but resigned.
The Wolverine offense is currently ranked No. 130 out of 138 teams -- one spot below where they finished in 2024 with Kirk Campbell as the O.C.
Michigan will go on the road to face Rutgers next.
This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Kyle Whittingham addresses whether Michigan will fire Jason Beck
