College Football’s Defending Champions Were Due for a Fall. But This Is Steeper Than Anyone Thought.

Michigan was due for a significant step back. Everybody in college football knew it, including the Wolverines’ millions of fans. The team won all 15 games last year en route to a national championship, then lost 13 draft picks and head coach Jim Harbaugh to the NFL. Some regression was inevitable.

Saturday was still a hell of a jolt, though. The Texas Longhorns walked into Ann Arbor and drew and quartered the Wolverines. Texas, merely a one-touchdown favorite coming in, won by a 31–12 score that didn’t even fully capture the lopsidedness of the performance. This was a match between the nominal defending national champions and a current national championship contender. The score was 24–3 at halftime, and at that point, Texas had controlled the ball for two-thirds of the afternoon. Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers took whatever he wanted as the air gradually seeped out of the Big House, filled with 111,000 humans.

It’s not unprecedented for someone to destroy a defending champ this early in the year. (In 2020, LSU took an arguably uglier home loss in its first game post-title.) Michigan is dealing with many of the same problems that plague dozens of teams every year, including the best ones. Namely, it’s hard to resupply quickly after losing tons of good players and most of a program’s key coaches. But Michigan was also a victim of timing, as Harbaugh’s move to the Los Angeles Chargers clashed inconveniently with college football’s new calendar. Add in a dash of post-championship complacency, and you have a recipe for a rapid (if temporary) downfall that no program has ever quite brewed up before.

Michigan’s most noticeable problem is that its quarterbacks suck. The team had JJ McCarthy, a first-round NFL draftee, slinging and running the ball the past three years. It did not develop a capable backup, however, and an offseason alternating between buzz and worry has now materialized into a season of horrible QB play. The presumed starter over the summer, as far as the public knew, was last year’s top backup, Alex Orji. But most people have never seen Orji throw more than a handful of passes. The job went instead to Davis Warren, a former walk-on who likely would’ve had more scholarship opportunities if he did not have to spend time and energy beating cancer late in high school. Now, it is clear after two games that neither Warren nor Orji has any juice. Michigan’s quarterbacks offer very little—not just compared to the dynamic McCarthy or a star like Ewers at Texas, but compared to any Division I program. There are teams in the lower-level Football Championship Subdivision that can trot out better passers.

There are other problems. Over the previous three years, no team had a more consistent, physical offensive line than Michigan. The Wolverines’ big lads up front were ferocious maulers who enabled an excellent running game. It isn’t a coincidence that Sherrone Moore—the man elevated to head coach during Harbaugh’s 2023 suspensions and after his departure—started out coaching this group. But the line turned over all five starters from the championship team, and it has yet to congeal into a dominant unit. Michigan also lost starting running back and program legend Blake Corum, and while it returned a couple of tailbacks with experience, neither is Corum. The whole operation is a lot less special in 2024. Meanwhile, the team has a mediocre group of wideouts going after passes from a lesser quarterback. It’ll be enough to beat most of the flotsam in the middle of the Big Ten, but not the best teams in the country.

Defensively, the Wolverines should still be quite good. Most of their stars from a dominant 2023 unit are back. But they lost three top-100 NFL picks on that side of the ball, and they lost their coordinator, who rolled out to Southern California with Harbaugh. Texas picked on some of the unit’s fill-ins on Saturday and beat up the Michigan defense worse than anyone had in a few years. There is no area of the game in which Michigan seems better now than it was last year, except perhaps kicker, where they got a stud transfer from Arkansas State. It’s possible that no team in college football history has lost more playing and coaching talent from one year to the next. Things may yet get worse before they get better.

All of these issues flowed downhill from Harbaugh. He had wanted for years to get back to the NFL, where he came within a whisker of winning a Super Bowl with the San Francisco 49ers. The Chargers finally bit in January, finalizing the deal right after Michigan beat Washington to win the college title. Harbaugh is a great pickup for the Chargers for the same reasons he was a great coach for Michigan.

A college team losing its coach to the pros is a sign of a healthy program, but in modern college football, it’s also a massive inconvenience that sets the team back relative to its peers. The NFL’s hiring-and-firing carousel doesn’t get going until January, after most college teams are done playing and after the transfer portal “window,” where teams can go shopping for other schools’ players, is closed. Michigan is not heavily reliant on transfers, preferring to develop and retain its own players. But the 2023 championship team was a good example of how an elite team uses the portal to supplement its roster: Star edge rusher Josaiah Stewart arrived from Coastal Carolina, offensive tackle LaDarius Henderson from Arizona State.

Michigan, then, was always due to have huge roster holes. The program added a couple of players shortly before Harbaugh left. But Michigan, busy with both the College Football Playoff and coach uncertainty, could not be a major transfer portal player after the season. Another transfer window opened in April, but there aren’t many great players available that late in the year. Teams have already gone through spring practice, compensation deals with schools’ outside collectives are already inked, and the coaching turnover that prompts a lot of transfers is in the rear view. Could Michigan’s outside boosters have waved a million bucks in front of a better QB last December, before Harbaugh left? Almost certainly. Could the program have landed someone better in April, though? The answer is still probably yes, but there just weren’t many great QBs available by that point. The pool of talent had gotten shallower, and Michigan may have thought (wrongly) that its existing quarterbacks were a better bet.

It was Harbaugh’s extensive dalliance with the NFL—not karmic payback for stealing signs—that put Michigan in an extra bad spot this season. Wolverines fans would take that trade 1,000 times out of 1,000. Flags, after all, fly forever. But Michigan was due for a decline even if Harbaugh had stayed. And then the lateness of his move made it more difficult for Moore to patch up his team in his first year in charge.

The program’s long-term outlook remains rosy. Michigan will never be dislodged as one of the sport’s blue-bloods, and Moore has every chance to be a solid head coach. He’s already shown hints of that, filling in for a suspended Harbaugh for nearly half of last season. He was Harbaugh’s obvious replacement, and it must have been nice for Michigan to not have to mount a sprawling search.

But things may not be fun for quite a while. The eventual punishment the NCAA metes out for the sign-stealing affair won’t be as bad as the indignity of getting annihilated by Ohio State this November for the first time since 2019. The best course of action will be to keep staring very intently at 2023’s championship trophies. In the best case, they are bright enough to cause temporary blindness.