Michigan football: In Depth Review of Fresno State and Looking Ahead to Texas

Defense

The defense looked great Saturday night. I was honestly really encouraged by what we saw. The star players of Mason Graham, Kenneth Grant, Jaishawn Barham, and Will Johnson all looked really good. New starters like Ernest Hausmann and Jyaire Hill flashed a lot of talent. And this Michigan football team looked a lot deeper than we expected coming into this year.

This defense is right there with last year's in terms of talent. While last year's team was historically deep, this year they should still be one of the deeper teams in the country.

While I think that Jesse Minter was a massive loss simply because he was probably the best defensive coordinator in the country last year, I was really encouraged by what we saw from Wink Martindale. The concern coming into the year was that he'd blitz too much and play too much man coverage, similar to the Michigan defenses under Don Brown that got exploited by Ohio State every year. Essentially, they'd be too high risk, high reward.

Everyone is going to latch onto the Cover 0 play call (blitzing six players with man coverage behind) that Fresno State scored a touchdown on. However, for the concern that he would be running this coverage every play like Don Brown did -- that was the only time Wink called a Cover 0 play all night. He mixed in a lot of zone coverage and simulated pressure. Overall, the defense looked a lot more similar to the 2022 and 2023 iterations than I expected. Martindale didn't really even blitz that much, he simply found creative ways to rush four players.

NFL analyst Brett Kollman along with the LA Chargers just published a great video that I highly recommend Michigan football fans watch detailing Jesse Minter's style of defense. Based on what we saw the other night, I think that this defense is going to keep a lot of the things that scheme-wise made them dominant the last three years.