Grading Michigan Football’s defense/special teams vs Minnesota

At one last look back at the win for Michigan football over Minnesota, here are our grades for the Wolverines defense as well as their special teams.

The Michigan football team is now a couple of days removed from the big win over Minnesota to open the season, but before we turn the page for Michigan State, we wanted to hand out our final grades for the defense/special teams.

Here’s a look at the grades we had for the different position groups on offense and now, we want to take a deeper look at a unit that allowed 24 points to Minnesota but was able to force some turnovers and notched a total of five sacks.

Certainly, there were some bright spots in the debut of Don Brown’s unit, but also some things that will need to be improved upon.

In the basic sense, Minnesota, which had one of the better passing offenses in the country and the Big Ten last year, was held to just 197 yards. That was impressive, especially considering Tanner Morgan at quarterback and Rashod Bateman, a player with first-round potential, at receiver.

The biggest issue was the run defense as Mohamed Ibrahim ran the ball 26 times for 140 yards which was much better than I expected him to do. Not all of it had to do with the front seven and there surely some missed tackles, but still, that was the biggest concern.

But as far as each group, we’ll evaluate the defensive line, the linebackers, the secondary and specials teams before turning our focus to #BeatState week.