Joel Klatt didn’t sugarcoat Bryce Underwood’s tape after Michigan’s wild win over Western Michigan, and his message was blunt: the sophomore quarterback has a lot to clean up, fast.
Underwood finished the game with the final, dramatic answer - a 47-yard touchdown on the last play - but that one throw doesn’t erase what came before it. Through most of the afternoon, he was shaky.
He went 11-of-21 for 123 yards and an interception before the Hail Mary, and he also coughed up a late fumble while trying to scramble for a first down. The box score may include the miracle finish, but the rest of the performance was far from reassuring.
Klatt, speaking on his podcast, dug into the film and zeroed in on the details that bothered him most. Even after Michigan opened with a touchdown drive, he said the warning signs were already there.
“The fifth play of the game, he throws it into double coverage. The Mike linebacker is running right into the read, and he throws it that direction.
It's a completion and it's a first down, but it's the exact wrong throw,” Klatt explained. “They've got two different concepts going on: one to the field, the wide side; one to the boundary, and the read is the middle linebacker.
The reason I know that is because the tailback runs to the field, so if he drags the Mike linebacker to the field, the wide side of the field, you play opposite of that and you bracket that hook curl defender into the short side. That's the concept back there.
And what does he do? He throws it directly into the Mike linebacker, who almost tips it.”
Klatt’s point wasn’t just about one snap. He tied it to a broader issue that’s followed Underwood: diagnosing defenses.
For a quarterback, that’s the job. Miss it, and the whole operation starts to wobble.
He pointed to more miscues early in the game, including a wrong-direction read on an RPO and a misread on an offensive line double team. By his count, those issues were showing up on Michigan’s first series.
“The seventh play of the game, it's an RPO. He goes the wrong direction.
Ninth play of the game, they were targeted wrong on a double team on the offensive line. So this is all part of their first series.
So I'm thinking to myself, like, man, is it? Did it get worse?
Yeah, it got worse.”
And from Klatt’s view, it absolutely did. Michigan didn’t score again until that final snap, and he said Underwood’s mistakes only piled up from there.
“I’m just telling you right now that Bryce Underwood regressed from year one to year two,” Klatt said. “He's throwing curl routes into sitting safeties.
He he's throwing spot routes and leading those players into cover two corners. This is day-one quarterback stuff.
These are things that you can't do as a quarterback.”
Now the challenge gets even steeper. Oklahoma is next, and Brent Venables is known for making quarterbacks miserable. With Todd Bates alongside him, the Sooners have a defensive staff built to disguise looks and force confusion, which is hardly the kind of matchup a quarterback looking for a bounce-back wants to see.
Klatt said the film from Western Michigan will be hard for Michigan to sit through, because it lays everything bare.
“[Western Michigan] is film that is going to be incredibly hard to watch for everyone on that team because it is laid bare for everyone. It was laid bare for all of us watching, and now they're going to go in, and they're going to watch that film, and there's going to be major questions about what his status is this week going into the Oklahoma game,” Klatt explained.
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