Michigan Football: Spring Football — Chat Notes — Talent

Posted at 12:00pm — 4/15/2014

Michigan Football: Spring Football — Chat Notes — Talent

We are going to share some notes from our past chats. Not all the information will be available, but we will share some of our past Michigan football spring chat reports.

Overall, like our talent, disagree with those who downplay it, who don’t even see it up-close and personal. Like the players and think it is a bad move by some that have thrown some of these players under the bus that haven’t even seen them play in the spring besides what was shown on the TV or for that matter not since high school.

Dec 28, 2013; Tempe, AZ, USA; Michigan Wolverines head coach Brady Hoke in the second half against the Kansas State Wildcats during the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl at Sun Devil Stadium. Kansas State defeated Michigan 31-14. Mandatory Credit: Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY SportsReally mean this and we know it might be tough for some to understand, but in our opinion this is the best Michigan team we have seen in 7-8 years. Let’s me be crystal clear though, we think this team is better than the Sugar bowl team, but this team is going to play a much tougher schedule this coming year especially on the road with all three rival games on the road this season (ND, MSU, and OSU).

Biggest take-away from this spring? Believe the program is finally headed in the right direction.

One other comment, for almost a decade, we really thought our summer S&C was not productive at all. During Coach Carr late years it was almost non-existent except for the players that took it upon themselves to put the work in such as Jake Long type of players. During the RR era, Coach Barwis had the players run all the time. During Coach Hoke’s first years here, our depth has been horrible, so certain players were going to play no matter what happened because they knew they were better than others.

This year, we think players are really going to develop because they have no choice and this goes back a few years when we told you the story about Ricky Powers and Michigan and we are really starting to see that in the program right now finally. More important, if a player on this team decides he does not want to put in the extra time this summer, that’s fine, but there is plenty of talent to take their place now and the competition level is very close where putting in the extra time in the Summer could make all the difference. The coaches are not messing around this year with the depth as deep as we have seen it in many years if you don’t perform you wont be playing or not as much as you believe you should be playing.

There is been no joking around at practices like we have seen in the past with some players the past couple of years and we don’t have to name the names here for most of the posters to figure them out since some are now gone and some are still here, but nice to see them taking a more “business” approach at least in the spring. This needs to continue in the summer and fall for Michigan to be successful.

The Saturday before the “Spring game” was the longest scrimmage of the spring and it was different in many ways. For one thing a lot of the parents of the players were there to attend because they were not sure how the weather was going to be the following weekend. So they tried to make this scrimmage as close to an atmosphere of football game day as possible because they basically said the “Spring game” would be more of a practice than anything else with very few scrimmage type of action.

Sorry, if this sounds so optimistic, but this was the best we saw a Michigan football team look (in spring) for over a decade. Remember now we said spring, but we don’t know how this team will look this fall so please keep that in mind.

Concern is they need to continue to improve because they are not there yet, but things are really going in right direction in our opinion. The weakest position right now, hard to say, jury is still out on offensive line, tight end has little depth, but every position group looked vastly improved in just a month of spring football. The run game was inconsistent, but they had just one negative play on big scrimmage we saw in person on Saturday before the spring game and that was when Hurst burst through the line. Other than that, we gained positive yards.

As far as recruiting goes, we still need to get elite level talent. We missed on several recruits last year, but we have upgraded with some as well. Most know about Peppers as being the main one, but Canteen is a very good prospect and look for him to start at the slot position this fall. Missing out on some key recruits last year with such a small class will put pressure to land those players this year which once again will be a small class. As we have mentioned before Michigan doesn’t have the luxury of getting transfers, Juco’s, along with it seems the school isn’t quite ready to start accepting 5th year transfers as well. This only hurts the program or makes those recruits that much more important and make them a “can’t miss” type of deal where a program like Alabama can do all those things above along with recruit 25 players ever single year because of the way they deal with players that aren’t producing by cutting them after their second year of scholarship is guaranteed.

We need to keep recruiting good offensive linemen especially finding a player that can play left tackle. We need more athletic linebackers, and we need to find what every college coach in America is looking for that defensive end that is a freak and can demand double teams, but still gets the job done which they don’t actually grow in trees or have that many in the Midwest so that makes it a lot tougher for Michigan as well.

After this season we will not only be talented throughout the roster, but will have experience at almost every position group with not losing to many players on the two deep. That is something that hasn’t been able to be said in quite along time and we as fans should start seeing this team not only compete in the Big Ten, but nationally as well against almost every team out there.

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Written by GBMWolverine Staff

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