Michigan Football Needs to Stop Playing like a Jazz Band
The situation at Penn State has been downgraded from “angsty” to “sad.” For the third straight week, they lost a game it should have won, and the situation has gotten so untenable that the athletic fired the head coach, triggering his $50 million buyout clause.
Because it’s no longer angsty, I’m going to write about the Michigan-USC game because that one filled me with angst.
As a long-time hater of USC football, it brings me no pleasure to report that Michigan lost to a USC that is still bad. Their offense is a very shiny Rube Goldberg contraption that is admirable as engineering but not so much as a strategy. Their defense, meanwhile, will fold like an origami bird the moment it faces a competent, healthy offense. And one day, Michigan, my long-time favorite team, will once again have a competent, healthy offense.
On the contrary, online chatter is placing blame for Michigan’s loss on a woeful defensive performance. From the way Michigan fans are talking about it, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Wolverines gave up fifty points, and that every time USC’s quarterback touched the ball, Michigan’s pants fell down, revealing heart-shaped boxer briefs and a tattoo of a heart with the word “Mom” in the middle.
I understand why people feel that way. Michigan’s defense is a perplexing organism with Wink Martindale as the defensive coordinator. No, not the dead disc jockey, a 62-year-old former truck driver turned football coach who spent close to 30 years in the NFL before taking the job at Michigan in 2024 because no one in the league would hire him. Nevertheless, the hire made sense at the time; Wink was a mentor figure to the defensive coordinators that led Michigan to successful seasons in 2021, 2022, and 2023.
To speak in generalities, across those three years, Michigan found generational defensive success using deceptive simplicity. They rushed four defensive linemen at the quarterback while the linebackers and defensive backs dropped back into mixed coverages that were designed with varying degrees of sophistication. It felt simple, but was technically complicated. They able to do this, in part, because their defensive linemen were extremely big, extremely mean, and extremely allergic to quarterbacks standing on two legs.
They were basically the Soundgarden of college football. Heavy hitting and in your face, and also playing in a weird time signature, and also there are three key changes in the verse, and also the guitar tuning is some kind of black magic voodoo, but nobody listening notices because it just fucking rocks your world.
The defense under Wink is more like an annoying jazz fusion band. He likes to rush safeties and linebackers while dropping defensive linemen to replace them in coverage. And while you can technically do this, just like a pianist can play really fast chromatic scales on a really expensive electric keyboard, I don’t know why you would. I don’t know what it’s supposed to accomplish or who it’s supposed to impress.
The theory behind Wink’s atypical play calling is surprise, but it comes at a cost. He is asking people to do things you would not always expect them to do, but often times that’s because I don’t know why you would. In others, he is asking young adults, who are not professional footplayers, to do things that are outside of their innate skill sets.
I also speculate that installing a scheme of this complexity comes at the expense of teaching fundamentals like tackling—the main thing that defensive football players have to do. Michigan’s players are aware this is an issue. Senior captain Rod Moore answered the first three questions of a post-game press conference by saying, “just gotta get better at tackling.”
But even with Wink’s overthinking hamstringing Michigan’s defense, they did manage to hold USC—the best offense in the country by a variety of measurements, even if I think this is a statistical mirage—to 24 points until the waning moments of the game. The Wolverines did not play well. They also did not get run out of the building. The team was in this thing. They just had to keep up on offense.
Now, the Michigan offense is very good at running the ball, so, naturally, on their first drive they came out passing. Michigan’s freshman quarterback couldn’t make anything happen and he overthrew the running back on a swing-out screen (the easiest throw he could make!) that would have been good for a first down, or at least close to it, because the running back is Justice Haynes. Justice Haynes is a star because Justice Haynes is a crazy man who is also very, very fast.
But it is hard to be very, very fast with a tweaked oblique, which is what I’m reasonably certain he left the game with before the end of the first half. He would not return, putting the game on the shoulders of Bryce Underwood, the freshman quarterback who—it cannot be emphasized enough—is a freshman. He is six-foot-three and two hundred something pounds, but he also turned only 18 a week before the start of the season. He may be a Man, but he is barely a man.
I’m not talking down about him. He did not play horribly. He acquitted himself rather well considering the quality of his protection and receiving corps. He was the top recruit in the country for a reason, but he made freshman mistakes. He overthrew a couple of balls. He took a bad sack early in the game that took Michigan out of field goal range. Near the end of the game, when Michigan was attempting to make a comeback, Underwood arguably misread USC’s pass coverage and threw a deep ball toward the sideline when he probably should have ripped one to the slot receiver running open down the seam.
This is a decision I’m willing to defend, though. The slot receiver, Semaj Morgan, has a tendency to drop the ball at inopportune moments, and this was no time for drops. Meanwhile, the outside receiver was Donovan McCulley, a six-foot-five contested catch specialist. He is on the offense for moments like this, and he probably would’ve been able to catch the ball had a USC defender not been hugging him like a four-year-old hugs his mom on the first day of pre-school. This is a penalty, but this penalty was not called, and the interception occurring on the play was allowed to stand, effectively ending the game.
It was one of many annoying things done by the referees. Other agitating moves include:
USC’s first touchdown was off an obvious offensive pass interference penalty that went unenforced. Had it been, the down would
But they did call a ticky-tack false start on a Michigan tight end that stalled a drive with momentum.
They gave USC multiple free reviews, but didn’t review USC’s longest and most questionable catch of the day, forcing Michigan to call a timeout to plead their case.
USC cheerleaders being on the field during a play did not lead to a penalty.
None of these were deciding factors, but they did help matters.
Ultimately, Michigan lost the game because they are not yet a complete team. The key pieces of the roster are young and inexperienced, and they are being asked to do things that are not quite in their grasp yet. The coaching staff needs to stop asking them to play jazz. Get back to basics. Play rock’n’roll.
Either way, though, this is a team that is probably only going to win nine games. That is the same number of wins as last year when the team had a truly horrible offense, but that was because the 2024 team outperformed expectations. Vegas set the over-under for Michigan’s win total at nine-and-a-half; the 2025 team is coming in exactly at expectations. There is nothing to panic about. Not yet. 2026 and 2027 are the years this team should be competive
Now please excuse me while I sit pensively by the window and stare into the steam rising from my coffee cup. If anybody asks, I’m meditating and not imagining three straight horrible losses that result in Michigan firing their head coach.