Joel Klatt has seen Michigan football twice this season, as he called the Week 2 win over Oklahoma and then the loss at Minnesota. But given that Fox Sports' premier college analyst has called dozens of Michigan games in the past decade-plus, he knows the personnel that the Wolverines have and what they're capable of when they're at their best. And what he's seeing now from the maize and blue is, of course, far from the best.
On his show, The Joel Klatt Show, he broke down why he believes the maize and blue are struggling so mightily thus far this season, noting that the problems essentially exist only on one side of the ball. But he goes deeper, noting there is a strong divergence from what the coaches want to do schematically compared to the players
that they have at their disposal.
"Let's move on to the Michigan side of things. OK, there's obviously, there's going to be a lot to talk about Michigan, but let me get through this fairly quickly," Klatt said. "When things are bad and when problems arise in any program -- OK, and by the way, I think that you could extrapolate this out to any group: it could be in business, it could be anything. But specifically in football, let me tell you what the good coaches do. And you'll see these types of signs in coaches' offices quite often if you're ever in them. It'll say scheme, players, coaches, and what does that mean? It means that when things go wrong, that's how you evaluate it. Is it our scheme? Is it our players, or is it our coaches? So Michigan's going to have to evaluate that. And let's just do that right here.
"From our point of view, I have watched the entire film, and I obviously called the game. And let me tell you right now on the defensive side of the ball for Michigan, I do not see any problems. The defense is fine. In fact, even though they were on the field basically the entire time from the 10:35 mark of the second quarter until about what? Five, four minutes left to go in the third quarter, they were on the field the entire time. It was like at one point it was like 32 snaps to three. And guess what? Michigan still had the lead. It was 14-13. Michigan's defense had scored a touchdown. They had created interceptions. They had done their job. They had created short fields that their offense was unable to capitalize on. They've got the right scheme. They've got the right players to execute that scheme. And obviously Jay Hill knows what he's doing. He's been running that defense for a long time. So I do not see any problems on the Michigan defense.
"Now we get to the offense, and on the offensive side, I see massive problems. All right. Let me just start with, I believe that there is a fit problem between the scheme and the players. And because there is a fit problem between the scheme and the players, that becomes a coach's problem. So the problem now for Michigan lies in all three categories, because it's both scheme and players; it becomes a coach's problem. And the only way forward is to adjust either the scheme or the players. That's my estimation. Now you could be saying, if you were in a, like on the Michigan point of view, Joel, it was fine against Iowa. We'll play better moving forward. And you know what? That's fine. Now, Iowa ran a very different style of defense than Minnesota ran. Minnesota ran a very similar defense, not, not completely in structure, but in style and philosophy, like Texas Tech did to Utah a year ago, upfield with the edges attacking the quarterback. Utah could not handle that. They lost that game at home to the Texas Tech Red Raiders. And now Minnesota used that defense very similar to even what Western Michigan ran. That slow horizontal offense doesn't deal with that very well.
"Plus you've got this fit issue that I was talking about. You've got a scheme that goes back to the Utah where it was very successful. And yet the Michigan players don't really fit that scheme. You see Utah's offensive linemen were athletic, and they played a lot of teams that they could overwhelm at the line of scrimmage. Now it's very different. You don't have that. At Utah, they had quarterbacks that had the explosiveness to be the explosive rushers of the offense. If you go back and you look at all the 20-yard runs that Utah had a year ago, a lot of them, the overwhelming majority of them, were from the quarterback, and Bryce, as talented as he is, is not an explosive runner. OK.
"So now you've got these Michigan players, and this is a program that was built differently than what this offense is trying to do. They were more direct. They were more downhill from the offensive line and the backfield. And now they're trying to run this different style of offense. That is a lot more horizontal, stretch the defense and then cut. So it's a lot of cutting. It's a lot of stretching horizontally. And quite frankly, it's not really working.
"Then you get to the more of the quarterback issues. And listen, when Bryce drops back, and he's got to be a drop-back passer, there are times when he predetermines where he wants to throw the football. I think that the interception that you're seeing on YouTube right there is a great example of that. He had Marsh wide open. If he just reads it out, he's the read is the corner. You've got a wheel right behind the go route. And so all you're trying to read is as the corner goes with the go, then you've got the wheel. If he sits on the wheel, then you've got the go route, and he throws it on a sitting corner. Like you can't really do that. He locks in on those wide receivers. And so their drop-back passing game, you know, it's a lot of half-field reads. He predetermines where he wants to throw the football, and that has to get better when they're at their best. He's rolling out reading progressions versus zone movement keys -- I know this is a lot of technical speak, but the basic issue is that there's a fit problem with Michigan.
"I don't think that they've got the players to execute this scheme on a week in and week out basis. And it has to adjust. I believe that they need to get more direct and downhill at times in the run game. And you see it at times, there are moments during the game where you're like, OK, like there's some downhill runs and you're getting four and five. And then all of a sudden it goes horizontal. And what at least I have been used to with Michigan, and I know it's a different coaching staff. And so I understand that there's gotta be at least some type of marriage here, but what I'm used to is that Michigan was very comfortable in the threes and fours and fives being direct and going at that time after time, after time, rather than you get one. Now you try to go horizontal, and you try to stretch out the defense. They've had trouble with the mesh in the backfield.
"So right now there's going to have to take a hard look at what's going on. And I do think that there's going to have to be some adjustments. So again, scheme, players, coaches, and right now without a fit between the scheme and the players, at least in my estimation, it becomes an issue for the coaches. And at some point you're going to have to adjust. Everyone's going to have to adjust. It was sloppy, and it's certainly got to get better if they want to improve."
Head coach Kyle Whittingham noted in the Minnesota postgame that he intends to look under the hood at all things offensively in order to figure out where the problems lie. Michigan has this week off to reevaluate before it faces Penn State next week.
This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Joel Klatt identifies 'massive problems' with Michigan offense
