ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Four games into his tenure as Michigan’s coach, Sherrone Moore reached a tipping point.
Moore stepped behind a microphone on Monday and did something coaches hate to do: He admitted a mistake. Not with his words, but with his actions.
Naming Alex Orji as Michigan’s starting quarterback was a tacit acknowledgment that Michigan misjudged the situation when it made Davis Warren the starter after preseason camp. Moore might disagree with that assessment, but it’s hard to conclude otherwise after evaluating the results of Michigan’s first three games.
Orji was viewed as the frontrunner throughout most of the preseason, but Warren played better at the end of camp and won the job. Predictably, it did not go well. After six interceptions from Warren in three starts, Michigan is doing what most people expected from the outset and going with Orji.
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“We’re excited to see what Alex is going to do,” Moore said.
Getting the quarterback position right is among a coaching staff’s most important responsibilities, and Michigan’s handling of that position has not inspired confidence. That goes back to the spring when Michigan’s coaches seemed confident that the quarterbacks they had were better than any they could acquire in the transfer portal.
Warren is the type of quarterback every program would want on its roster, but he was miscast as the starter. That Michigan thought otherwise calls into question the entire evaluation process. From the outside, it looks as though Michigan’s coaches liked Orji’s potential but let the competition drag on long enough to talk themselves out of it.
Alex Orji (10) will start at quarterback for Michigan on Saturday against USC. (Rick Osentoski / USA Today)
When the job was still up for grabs midway through camp, Michigan was obligated to go with the player who performed better down the stretch. That was Warren. But the quarterback who finished strongest in camp wasn’t necessarily the one who gave the offense its best chance to succeed, as Michigan learned the hard way.
“I thought he was in a really good place,” Moore said of Orji. “Davis outperformed him in camp at the end. We’d love to see him take the reins and do what he was doing through those first couple weeks (of camp).”
One of two things is going to happen Saturday against USC. Michigan’s offense might look markedly improved, in which case everybody will wonder why Orji wasn’t the starter from the opener. Or the offense might look no better than it did with Warren at quarterback, in which case everyone will wonder why Michigan didn’t try harder to upgrade the position in the offseason.
Michigan fans should be rooting for the first option, even if it reflects poorly on the initial decision. All coaches make mistakes. The good ones can recognize a problem and fix it. If that’s what Moore is doing here, it will be one of the best signs yet that he’s up to the task of leading a program of Michigan’s caliber.
There’s no such thing as a must-win game for a coach who just signed a five-year contract, but Saturday’s game against the Trojans might be as big as it gets for Michigan in 2024. If Orji leads the Wolverines to a win, they’ll be 3-1 with a loss to No. 1 Texas and a stretch of winnable games ahead. If they lose, they’ll have two losses in September for the first time since 2014, and their slim hopes of a College Football Playoff berth will evaporate.
After the success of the past three years, it would be easy for Michigan to implode if the season starts to go south. Moore’s job is to make sure that doesn’t happen. Making the switch to Orji was an obvious move in many respects, but it’s also a sign that Moore feels the urgency to keep Michigan’s season from spiraling.
Moore is being judged on everything that happens this year. That doesn’t mean Michigan should fire him if the season doesn’t go well — that would be deeply unfair to him, given the massive transition that occurred after the CFP championship game. But Michigan shouldn’t throw the results out the window, either. These games are data points to see how a new coach handles a dicey situation.
There’s a big difference between going 6-6 or worse and figuring out how to win nine games with a flawed team. Just look at Marcus Freeman’s first season at Notre Dame. The Fighting Irish started 0-2 with losses to Ohio State and Marshall and were 3-3 in mid-October before winning six of their final seven games. That matters, even if there’s no CFP bid as a reward.
GO DEEPER
Michigan switches to Alex Orji at QB for USC game
This isn’t advice many coaches need, but now is the time for Moore to let his ego show. He has been laudably ego-free since taking over, deflecting credit to Michigan’s players and delegating authority to his assistant coaches. The risk of that approach is that the team’s identity becomes a bunch of ideas smashed together with no unifying vision at the core.
That’s kind of how it looked the first two weeks of the season. Instead of playing to their strengths as a downhill running team, the Wolverines were putting the game in Warren’s hands and asking him to make plays behind a shaky offensive line. After the loss to Texas, it was notable that Moore came out and said Michigan needed to get back to running the ball. That felt like the coach asserting his vision for what he wants his team to be.
Monday’s announcement felt like that, too. Moore could have let the question linger and kept his decision a secret until game time, as if USC would be worried either way. Instead, he made a firm, declarative statement, the kind of statement he never made when Michigan decided to go with Warren initially.
None of this will matter if Orji can’t complete a downfield pass and Michigan gets waxed by USC. It may be that Michigan’s quarterback situation was fatally flawed from the beginning, and Moore is just rearranging deck chairs. But if the Wolverines are going to lose, they need to lose Moore’s way, doing the things he believes in. If that happens, he’ll need to spend the next offseason finding the players he needs to build the kind of team he wants Michigan to be.
It’s not easy to admit a mistake. Fixing one is even harder.
(Top photo of Alex Orji: Rick Osentoski / USA Today)
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Publish date : 2024-09-16 22:00:00
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