Michigan’s edge rushers got a workout last week, and Lewis Powell came away wanting a deeper bench.
Western Michigan’s long drives kept the Wolverines’ defense on the field for more than 40 minutes, a workload Powell described with a firefighter analogy. He said his edge group usually thinks of itself as rushing into the chaos, especially when Michigan is working with short fields, but the extended time on the field against the Broncos also meant the unit could have used more help staying fresh.
“Most of the time, they’re thinking, ‘Hey, awesome time for us to go out there like firemen,’” Powell started to explain to the media on Wednesday. “Especially when we’re getting the short fields, everybody’s running out the building.
We’re running into the building, trying to calm down the fire, right. And not only that, we get more reps.
I feel like it was good for us to get all those reps. We needed it.
But it’s part of being a team, and if we could have - I would have probably rotated more just to keep getting guys fresh, and we’ll probably see that moving forward.”
That rotation could grow quickly. Out of the four edge rushers who saw the field, Dom Nichols logged 55 snaps, John Henry Daley played 43, Cam Brandt had 32 and Nate Marshall only eight, according to PFF. Powell said he wants to get “probably five, maybe six guys to rotate in the game.”
“I think you’ll see a little bit more rotation this week,” Powell said. “That was a good first game, but a lot to work on.
(We’re) excited moving forward to next week. We kind of put away what we did last week, took what was good, and learned from what was bad.”
Nichols made the most of his heavy workload. He finished with nine tackles, 2.5 tackles for loss and 1.5 sacks, and Powell made it clear he sees something different in the veteran edge.
“Dom is a special player, and with just a good mix of speed and power and size,” Powell said. “I’m not sure if I’ve ever coached somebody like him. He’s a special player, and he’s one of our leaders in our room.”
Nichols, for his part, sounded like a player who welcomes every snap he can get. He said he has always wanted more playing time, and he also stressed the importance of making the most of each opportunity in a sport where attention can move fast.
“I’ve always wanted to play more, and that’s been one of my things,” Nichols told the media on Tuesday. “But like I had said prior to this, yeah, you got to waste your turn.
I think in this era of college football, people kind of forget that, and if you sit there, people also forget about you. So it’s easy to get caught up in that stuff, but you can’t.
It’s just part of the game.”
The snap counts weren’t just about performance. Powell said the Broncos’ heavier 12-personnel looks pushed more work onto Nichols and Daley, while Brandt was used as a hybrid starter.
Marshall, meanwhile, should see more than the eight snaps he got, and Powell said he expects him to “get a good amount this year.” He also pointed to “nagging injuries” as part of why Michigan stayed relatively tight in its edge rotation.
Freshman Carter Meadows has been out, though Powell said he is “hoping he can play this week.” Benny Patterson III did not play either, and Powell expects more from Meadows and another freshman, Tariq Boney, as the season goes on. He praised both for their approach from the moment they arrived.
“Really talented freshmen, not only that but they came with the best mindset I’ve seen in freshmen coming in,” Powell said. “Those guys are talented, they come in with the right mindset, and they came in not thinking that ‘Hey, we’re just their average freshmen,’ they came in thinking that, ‘We’re going to come in and take somebody’s playing time or position.’ So love both of those guys, and those guys showed a lot of promise.”
Now the challenge gets bigger. Michigan faces Oklahoma on Saturday, and Powell said the Sooners’ offensive line is “one of the best, if not the best” in the country.
That makes the depth question more than just a nice-to-have for the Wolverines. If they end up spending another 40 minutes on defense, having five or six edge rushers ready instead of four could matter a lot.
Nichols sounds ready for that kind of test.
“It’s exciting, honestly, knowing that no matter what, you’re gonna be a factor in the game,” Nichols said when asked about Western Michigan testing the edges by going sideline to sideline and how Oklahoma will likely do the same. “When the plays come to you, you just gotta make them. And I feel like that’s just the mindset that everyone on this team needs to have.”
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