Will Michigan Football’s defense look the same in 2022?

With the Michigan football defense (and offense) now back on the practice field for spring football practices, we take a look at the scheme and background of new defensive coordinator Jesse Minter to see just what he has to offer in his new role. 

Last offseason, the Wolverines made a push to hire not just Ravens linebacker coach Mike Macdonald, but the Ravens defensive backs coach as well, Jesse Minter.

Michigan football ultimately ended up with both, but at two separate points, with Macdonald serving as defensive coordinator in the 2021 season and now Minter taking over that role headed into the 2022 season.

At just 38-years old, Minter has already been a defensive coordinator at two separate stops, and was praised by Michigan’s head coach Jim Harbaugh as a “seamless fit” for the Wolverines.

A big piece of why many Michigan football fans are excited by Minter’s hire is that he too has a background with the Ravens defense, working there from 2017-2020, overlapping with Mike Macdonald.

Many assume that the defense then will hardly miss a beat, and Harbaugh even alluded to as much when talking about the Minter hire, telling Jon Jansen on his In the Trenches podcast that, “It’s the same system. Both came out of Baltimore little over a year ago, knowing the same system, running the same system.”

What Harbaugh meant by the “same system”

In many ways, this is a bit of “coachspeak” from Harbaugh, as the nature of building a defensive playbook and game-planning remain far more complex than most fans would naturally assume.

Harbaugh even addressed this in the next sentence, talking about how there are some “new nuances”, but noted that the linguistic aspects of the defense will remain unchanged.

Much of this is because good coaches adapt their defensive schemes to the players they have, and coaches usually try to work in and expand other concepts that they have been around to help do so.

For example, even in 2021, Mike Macdonald did not really run the same scheme that he had learned in Baltimore under defensive coordinator Don Martindale, now the Giants defensive coordinator.

In Martindale’s defense, the Ravens played a 3-4 base that emphasized man coverage on the outside with a lot of Cover 1 over the top, and tons of blitzing from his front seven. Martindale’s scheme was incredibly blitz-happy, with a 2020 blitz rate of 61% according to Pro Football Focus.

That is quite different than what Mike Macdonald ran in Ann Arbor last season, using more of a 4-2-5 base package, playing more 2-high safety looks, and with an emphasis on Cover 7 and man-match principles, while not blitzing anywhere near as much as the so-called Ravens scheme would have suggested he might.

This is because Macdonald built the defense to the personnel, rather than force a system on a group of players not well suited for it.

For example, the Wolverines were able to generate pressure with just four quite often, thanks to the dynamic pass rushing duo of Aidan Hutchinson and David Ojabo. And with Michigan’s cornerbacks not being suited to the high volume of man coverage responsibilities the generic Ravens scheme would ask of them, Macdonald wisely adapted the man-match principles, which fall more into the background he got from then-Georgia defensive coordinator Todd Grantham, allowing the secondary to pass off routes, bracket tight ends, and adjust to attempted rubs and scrapes from 3×1 patterns.

Thus, when Harbaugh praises the hire of Minter for his ability to run the same system, people should understand that this does not mean the defense will look exactly the same, but rather it will operate with the same language, the same methods of game-planning, and so forth.

If Minter is indeed a strong hire, then he would certainly demonstrate his abilities by adapting the scheme of Michigan’s defense to adequately reflect the strengths of the 2022 football team before him, rather than forcing the exact same looks and strategies onto a very different looking group than the previous year.

Minter himself brings some unique perspective to the table along with the fluency of the Ravens system, having run a defense on his own at Indiana State (2011-2012) and Georgia State (2013-2016), before working last season under another well-regarded defensive mind in Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea.

With this unique background, expect Minter to keep a high level of continuity from the previous Wolverines team, but certainly not the exact same scheme, instead mixing and matching concepts from several different stops throughout his career to tailor the defense to the strengths of Michigan’s 2022 personnel.