Michigan’s season has reached the kind of early crossroads that makes everyone itch for a verdict, but the harder truth is that one is not ready yet.
The Wolverines are on pace for one of their worst seasons in more than a decade, and the math is ugly. They need to win four of their final seven games just to equal their worst regular-season record since 2014, with the shortened 2020 season set aside. After the strange loss at Minnesota and with three opponents still ranked in the top 12 on the schedule, even getting to 7-5 looks far from safe.
That would have sounded wild a few weeks ago, and it would have sounded even harder to believe when the season started. Michigan came into the year with a head coach who has been there before at the highest level and a roster that had been heavily funded, at least on paper more talented than last year’s nine-win group. Instead, the Wolverines are tracking well below expectations.
Still, the answer is not to start ripping things apart just yet. Not at quarterback.
Not on the staff. Not across the program.
There is too much season left, and too many moving parts, to stamp this team with a final label after five games.
“What’s at the top of the list is everybody has to go back and say, ‘What could I have done better?’ ” junior running back Jordan Marshall said Oct. 3 following the Minnesota loss.
Bryce Underwood sits near the center of the conversation, because that is what happens when you are the highest-rated quarterback recruit in program history. The sophomore flashed against now-No.
17 Iowa, then followed it with a 101-yard, two-interception day the next week. Eighteen games into his college career, the patience meter is starting to shrink.
But the situation is not simple. Underwood was pushed into action as an 18-year-old freshman under a head coach who was distracted, to say the least.
Then, heading into his sophomore season, most of the coaching staff and the playbook around him got torn up and replaced. He has to clean up the mistakes that come with youth, but the idea of handing things over now to freshman Tommy Carr feels premature.
That puts Jason Beck under the microscope too. The offensive coordinator has not settled on a consistent way to use Underwood, shifting how often he runs and how much the offense leans on the run-pass option.
At the same time, the staff has kept the passing game mostly in the short and middle areas. The result has been an offense that has too often lacked direction, with the issues coming from Underwood at times, from the run game at times, and from the playcalling plenty of the time.
Beck has not exactly earned a full shutdown of the idea that he can fix it. The offense looked flat against Western Michigan and Oklahoma, then improved against Texas El Paso and Iowa, even if Michigan still lost to the Hawkeyes. The Minnesota game was a low point, but it also might be the kind of jolt that forces real changes.
Maybe the spring and summer should have been enough time to sort all of this out. Maybe they weren’t. Either way, Beck now has five games of tape and a bye week to sort through what is working, what is not, and whether the Wolverines need broader changes, including moving away from the largely unsuccessful rhino formation.
The same patience applies to the head coach. He spent 30 years in one place before arriving in Ann Arbor, and that background matters when judging a full reset that includes a new scheme and a new culture. None of that guarantees success, but it does explain why this job may take longer than the usual turnaround.
“I’ve been in this profession 40-plus years, and this is maybe the biggest challenge I’ve had,” Whittingham said. “And we will get it figured out.
I promise you that. I’m not sure what the timeline is, but I promise you, we’ll get it figured out at some juncture.
But right now, we have a lot of answers that we got to come up with because we’ve got so many deficiencies.”
The bye week arrives at the right time. It is a chance not just to diagnose problems, but to build actual fixes. Penn State, which is on a three-game losing streak amid a program overhaul under new coach Matt Campbell, comes next and looks like the sort of game Michigan can use to steady itself at home.
“I told the guys, ‘Hey, this season can go one of two ways,’ ” Whittingham said. “ ‘It can fracture and go down a bad path, or we can regroup, and the leaders can step up, and the coaches can step up, and we can get things fixed.’ ”
That is where this sits now. Underwood needs to get cleaner and more consistent.
Beck needs to make the offense make sense. Whittingham needs to show whether he will adjust as this unfolds.
Only if those things do not happen should bigger questions start to take over. Less than halfway through Year 1, this is still the point for patience.
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