Blitz-heavy DC Martindale vows to ‘find the right mix’ at Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — They may share the same first name, role on the Michigan football coaching staff and desire to blitz.

But new Wolverines defensive coordinator Don “Wink” Martindale has done his best this offseason to quiet the skeptics who suggest he’s just another polished, more successful version of Don Brown.

“It’s ridiculous,” Martindale told reporters Tuesday ahead of training camp. “As I see it, it’s ridiculous. You have defenses that are ranked No. 1 in the NFL, in the top 5 three years in a row, and you come into a new system in New York and you go into the playoffs and what do they want to talk about?

“All they want to talk about is last year, the last year (in Baltimore).”

Martindale was referencing his 2021 season with the Ravens, the low-point of his career as a coordinator in the NFL. Not only did Baltimore fall to 19th in yards allowed per play that season, but did so blitzing at an uncomfortable 31.1 percent rate. Uncomfortable for Martindale, anyway.

In four of his seven seasons as an NFL coordinator, Martindale-led defenses were No. 1 in blitz rates — including three of his four seasons in Baltimore, where the Ravens chased after the quarterback on 39.6 percent of dropbacks in 2018, 54.9 percent in ‘19 and 44.1 percent in ‘20. It wasn’t until his final season, after which head coach John Harbaugh elected to move on from the longtime assistant coach, that he let off the gas.

More: Martindale reassures U-M players upon arrival: ‘I’m the OG of of this system’

“Am I an aggressive playcaller? Yes, I’m an aggressive playcaller,” Martindale, tasked with taking over the No. 1-ranked Michigan defense, conceded. “We’ve won a lot of football games calling games aggressively. When it doesn’t work, that’s when everybody comes out and says, ‘He’s blitzing too much.’ You don’t hear that at all when you win. You hear about how creative you are.”

The task this fall for Martindale, 61, who inked a massive three-year, $7.5 million contract to take over for the departed Jesse Minter. Martindale knows the Michigan defense well for someone who’s been absent from the college ranks for more than two decades; he helped build it in Baltimore, where Michigan’s two previous coordinators (Minter, Mike Macdonald) learned under him.

But the Michigan fanbase still has flashbacks to the Don Brown era circa 2016 to 2020, when the Wolverines owned top-10 defenses through a healthy dose of blitzing that never seemed to work against high-powered offenses. The approach eventually fell apart in 2020 and Brown was dismissed from his post.

His successors, Macdonald and Minter, installed and adapted the Ravens’ scheme in Ann Arbor to the modern complexities of college football, where no-huddle, fast, pass-heavy offenses rule the land. To be successful, it is imperative that a unit be mendable in order to get off the field in a timely fashion. And they did, to great success. Minter was lauded for masterfully mixing up fronts, working in zone coverages on the back end and simulating blitzes to confuse opposing offenses.

Martindale, speaking Tuesday, said he believes in a healthy balance of both — man-coverage from the outside corners, a unit that includes All-American Will Johnson, and safeties who do it all — including bull-rushing the quarterback.

“When you start out teaching the principle of man (coverage), which we’ll do in the first practice, you can play zone to win games,” Martindale said. “Zone teams that play nothing but zone can never play man to win the game. Teams that don’t pressure when they have to pressure, it don’t usually look right because they don’t practice it enough.

“If they know that you’re just going to be a four-man rush coverage team, you don’t have a very high success rate.”

During an appearance on the “GM Shuffle” podcast with former NFL general manager Michael Lombardi earlier this summer, Martindale described his defense as “flexible,” “player-friendly” and “position-less football” while acknowledging the different nuances in the college game.

“There’s more simulated pressures that you see watching tape that work just as effectively as sending them all,” Martindale told the podcast. “I think it’s going to be a wait-and-see as we get through fall camp and everything else, but let’s make no mistake about it: I’m more aggressive than probably both of those guys (Macdonald, Minter) — sometimes to a fault.”

Helping matters, Martindale will be armed with a healthy dose of elite playmakers and experience on all three levels of the defense. Defensive tackle Mason Graham is a preseason All-American while his tackle partner, Kenneth Grant, is among one of the best in the Big Ten. Edge rushers Joasiah Stewart and Derrick Moore both saw extended playing time during the Wolverines’ national title run last year. Linebackers Ernest Hausmann and Jaishawn Barham both started games at their previous stops. Throw in Johnson, returning safety Makari Paige and a group of four transfer defensive backs with starting experience elsewhere and Michigan has the needed depth to make it work on the back end.

The situation is primed for Martindale to succeed, even as Michigan is set to play a difficult schedule in the expanded Big Ten. He’s chosen to keep the four “pillars,” or points of emphasis with the players — block destruction, effort, ball disruption and communication — in an effort to boost turnover numbers.

“We’ll find the right mix of pressure and simulated (blitzes) and all that,” Martindale said Tuesday. “We’ll find the right mix. That’s what training camp is for.”