Grading Michigan’s coaches through nine games

Head Coach Sherrone Moore: C+

So far in his tenure, Sherrone Moore’s best attribute has been recruiting. Michigan is recruiting as a top 10 program with him at the helm and that’s in large part due to measures he’s taken to beef up the recruiting staff and operations side as well as his willingness to use the NIL resources at his disposal. I give him credit for that but the other aspects of his leadership so far have been pretty lackluster. 

As far as in game coaching, he’s been clearly overwhelmed. He routinely messes up the end of half situations and doesn’t understand when to use his timeouts to give his offense time to score in those types of scenarios. The team also came out very flat and looked out-coached and out prepared in road matchups against Oklahoma and USC. Not all of that is on him but at least part of it is, so I do hold him accountable for that. The coordinators you hire and fire are ultimately a reflection on the head coach and the offensive coordinator hire he made last year to elevate Kirk Campbell to OC was clearly a bad choice and to his credit he cut bait after not even a full year with him leading the offense but he still made the bad hire in the first place. As for who he’s hired for his coordinators since then, you can see the grades below in relation to how good of hired they’ve been so far at Michigan.

Offensive Coordinator Chip Lindsey: B

The Chip Lindsey hire has been fairly good in my opinion. He’s come in to make this offense more consistent, explosive, and ultimately productive and he’s done all three of those so far through nine games. Now, that’s not saying a lot because last year’s offense was among the worst in recent program history, but it is a big improvement from last year. Michigan is 12th nationally in rushing offense. They're also 43rd nationally in passing yards per completion which considering he has a true Freshman quarterback and a fairly mediocre wide receiver core outside of another true Freshman in Andrew Marsh, is pretty good. They're right behind Oregon in that metric and right ahead of Ohio State and it shows that when they do complete passes they go for decent yardage so he does a pretty good job of scheming stuff up downfield. Overall considering what he has to work with, I think Chip Lindsey has gone a pretty good job so far as Michigan's Offensive Coordinator. My only complaint is I'd like to see a little bit more improvement down the stretch of the season from Bryce Underwood. If he's able to do that in these last three games, his grade would go even higher up.

Defensive Coordinator Wink Martindale: B-

Wink Martindale was a good hire by Sherrone Moore. He brought a ton of (NFL) experience as a coordinator and also runs the same scheme as Michigan’s been running since 2021. It took a while for him to adjust to college offense last year, but since the mid way point last season, he’s coached this unit to a top 10 type level on defense. It’s not #1 level defense nationally like former Defensive Coordinator's Mike McDonald and Jesse Minter were arguably able to do, but it has been really close to that.

My biggest negative with Wink is that he is too aggressive for my liking and hangs his secondary out to dry too often especially considering the youth that’s been back there the last two years. He likes to live and die by the blitz and it's served him well over the course of his entire career, I just think in college you need to protect your secondary a little bit more than he seems to want to do. Ultimately however; it is a top 10 level defense according to my favorite set of power ratings in the KFord Ratings so it's hard to grade him much lower than a B- like I did.