I’ll openly cop to being one of Don Brown’s biggest defenders during the first four seasons (2016-19) of his tenure at Michigan. I always felt as though he got a bad rap for a few down performances, specifically against Ohio State, and was on the whole one of college football’s best defensive minds.
After all, Michigan’s defense was legitimately awesome in 2016 and remained well within the top 20 in 2017 and 2018. It started to falter a bit in 2019, but it was easy to chalk that up to a result of Michigan’s increased offensive tempo with the arrival of offensive coordinator Josh Gattis.
I think that in part, that’s still a distinction worth making. Michigan is running a fast, spread offense now (or at least trying to), and Brown’s defense was never really built to work in tandem with that kind of system. He’s a classic Jim Harbaugh DC, not a spread offense DC, with the primary difference being that Brown’s defense was never really built to be on the field for as long as it has had to be this season.
Now, that’s not to say that Brown is completely blameless in creating one of the worst defenses in the country in 2020. His scheme - which was once the his greatest strength as a coach - has become a serious weakness for a lot of the same reasons that Greg Schiano struggled at Ohio State in 2018: man coverage just doesn’t work as well as it used to.
That’s bad news for Brown, who leans heavily on man coverage and has struggled mightily against spread and RPO offenses this season because of it. As mentioned, a lot of these issues are the same that Schiano had in 2018. Michigan is in man across the board with two blitzers, leaving five defensive backs to defend the pass. The single-high safety floats over the top in cover 1, with the other four backs taking on wideouts and a tight end.
That works in theory, right? There are enough defenders to cover every Penn State target with one left over the top, while six blitzers matches Penn State’s five-man front and running back left in the backfield to block. That’s not congruent with how college football actually works, though. These are not professional cornerbacks, and without help across the middle in the form of an underneath linebacker zone, they’re almost certainly going to be a step behind on essentially any quick route that goes across the field. Once that happens, that six-man pressure no longer matters, because it cannot possibly reach the quarterback in time to matter.
That first play wasn’t an RPO but this one is. These cause similar problems even without a blitz call, because linebackers are taught to run fit first when they see run blocking. Once they bite down to play the run, the middle of the field is once again vacant for an easy throw, with the defensive backs completely alone on islands.
There’s just no easy way to fix this with a coach as committed to a scheme as Brown seems to be. He isn’t going to suddenly become a zone fanatic because that’s not his system, meaning that Michigan is essentially stuck working within a defense that absolutely requires elite talent (and more likely than not, a slower offense to keep the defense off the field). That’s just not there on this team.
Because of that, even when Brown does make interesting tweaks that could legitimately help, specifically against the short passing game, the Michigan defense is still gashed. Here, Michigan is still in man coverage across the board with a single-high safety, but it manages to get some help across the middle in the process by dropping both edge rushers into short zones on either hash mark after showing rush after the snap.
The goal is to either make the QB read a rush and try to throw the ball quickly, right into one of those dropping defenders, or to gum up his read and force a reset, providing time for the rush to get home or for those zone defenders to fill the passing lanes and take away those quick routes.
Sean Clifford reads this correctly and shows off that reset, but the rush never threatens him, so he’s still able to complete this pass. That’s a huge issue for this defense right now: even when Brown makes a positive scheme change, there’s still a talent issue holding all of this back from succeeding consistently. Michigan needs a defensive lineman than can provide pressure or a cornerback that can play man coverage here, and it has neither. No matter what the Wolverines add onto the defense, the talent foundation is always going to limit it. The scheme itself is outdated and ill-suited to square off against modern offenses, certainly, but the recruiting and development here is either going to force Michigan into a very conservative zone scheme that may be susceptible to big plays, or, if Brown stays put, it’s just going to keep leading to this.
It isn’t like this is new for Brown or the Wolverines, either. Ohio State has killed Michigan with game plans exactly like this and a talent advantage for Ryan Day’s entire tenure in Columbus. The book is out on beating this group and when it’s down like this and every conference opponent now has the book, the results are going to be, understandably, pretty awful.
Does that mean that Brown’s tenure is untenable, and that there’s no fix here that could arrive in time to save Harbaugh’s job? I think it certainly could. The talent isn’t likely to improve any time soon and offenses aren’t going to suddenly get worse in the Big Ten, meaning that the only real stop gap here would be a shift to more cover 3, or a full embrace of that edge drop look used on that last RPO.
Without that, though, there’s just not much to be encouraged about here, especially with the Buckeyes on deck in a few weeks. I don’t feel as strongly anti-Harbaugh as a lot of people do, and I don’t think that his tenure is completely doomed, but this defense is bad news, much more so than the offense. There are fundamental flaws here that seem too significant to overcome without a large shift in recruiting and development strategies, and I really don’t see Michigan making those necessary changes. If it doesn’t, expect more of the same on RPOs and quick-hit passing plays for the rest of this season, and likely for the rest of Brown’s tenure, which seems to be staring down its conclusion right now.