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.

The Michigan Wolverines dropped their first game of the season on Saturday, losing to Texas, 31-12. It was a tough game to watch if you’re a Michigan fan, and the advanced stats from Pro Football Focus (PFF) agree with the eye test.

Let’s get into this week’s player grades and snap counts.

Offense

OL Evan Link – 57 snaps / 27.2 overall player grade

OL Dominick Giudice – 57 / 59.3

OL Myles Hinton – 57 / 55.6

OL Giovanni El-Hadi – 57 / 66.0

OL Josh Priebe – 57 / 65.6

QB Davis Warren – 54 / 76.5

TE Colston Loveland – 44 / 55.7

WR Tyler Morris – 40 / 58.1

WR Kendrick Bell – 39 / 53.1

RB Donovan Edwards – 32 / 71.9

WR Semaj Morgan – 31 / 68.1

WR CJ Charleston – 19 / 62.3

TE Marlin Klein – 17 / 57.8

WR Peyton O’Leary – 15 / 72.9

RB Ben Hall – 14 / 62.8

TE/FB Max Bredeson – 13 / 73.0

RB Kalel Mulings – 13 / 64.5

WR Fred Moore – 7 / 52.3

QB Alex Orji – 3 / 56.6

WR Amorion Walker – 1 / 59.0

Takeaways: After rotating in Greg Crippen with Dominick Giudice last week against Fresno State, Crippen didn’t see the field at all against Texas. It appears that position battle is over, as Giudice played every snap along the offensive line on Saturday.

Additionally, it’s interesting to see Kendrick Bell’s snap counts increase from Week 1 (30) to Week 2 (39). He was a guy that kind of flew under the radar this offseason, with guys like Fred Moore, Amorion Walker and CJ Charleston garnering more attention at the position. The coaching staff seems to trust him the most as the team’s WR3 at this point.

Surprises: It’s a shock that Kalel Mullings and Max Bredeson only got 13 snaps each on Saturday. For a ground and pound team like Michigan is, it’s stunning that these two hardly played at all. But I guess that’s what happens when you give up 24 points in the first half and only put a field goal on the board to counter that. Being down by three touchdowns to start the second half likely had a role with that, but to have two of your better offensive players on the bench more often than not is … not great.

Defense

CB Jyaire Hill – 65 / 57.2

LB Ernest Hausmann – 65 / 43.9

LB Jaishawn Barham – 64 / 43.7

S Makari Paige – 61 / 56.2

DT Kenneth Grant – 60 / 61.7

CB Will Johnson – 58 / 70.3

DT Mason Graham – 58 / 67.9

S Quinten Johnson – 57 / 58.3

CB Zeke Berry – 50 / 63.0

Edge Derrick Moore – 46 / 64.3

Edge Josaiah Stewart – 45 / 75.9

DT Rayshaun Benny – 28 / 74.4

Edge TJ Guy – 26 / 64.6

Edge Cameron Brandt – 25 / 52.3

S Wesley Walker – 21 / 55.8

CB Aamir Hall – 17 / 59.9

LB Jimmy Rolder – 13 / 55.3

DT Trey Pierce – 7 / 60.8

DT Ike Iwunnah – 6 / 82.3

DT Enow Etta – 4 / 62.4

CB Kody Jones – 3 / 60.0

CB Myles Pollard – 2 / 60.0

Takeaways: Kenneth Grant playing 60 snaps and Mason Graham playing 58 snaps could be detrimental for them as the season goes on. They are two of the best defensive tackles in the country, but if you’re playing that many snaps per game, even the best of the best are going to get gassed.

A season ago, Graham played 442 total snaps while Grant played 403 snaps. Through two games, Graham is already up to 104 snaps while Grant is at 101. For them to already be a quarter of the way to what they played all of last year is insane.

Additionally, the linebackers were graded pretty harshly by PFF, with Ernest Hausmann and Jaishawn Barham both grading out below 50. They gave Barham a very good tackling grade of 80.4, but nothing else was graded higher than 52.6. PFF also dinged Hausmann for three missed tackles, and for giving up five catches on five targets in coverage. It was a really rough day for the linebackers.

Surprises: Where in the world was Ja’Den McBurrows? The player to relieve Zeke Berry in the slot was redshirt sophomore Kody Jones, who only had 59 snaps in his entire career until yesterday. Perhaps McBurrows had a last second injury pop up, but that was an interesting thing to see on the player report.

A Lyft driver who says a passenger attacked him in Texas by choking him with his own seatbelt as he was driving him to his destination has filed a lawsuit against Lyft and the hospital where he picked up the passenger.

Driver Kehinde Ayoola said staff at Memorial Hermann Hospital in Houston requested the ride and helped the passenger to the vehicle in February of this year.

“He pulled my seatbelt and wrapped it around my neck, choking me. He was trying to kill me,” Ayoola told Fox 26.

The passenger, Ramiro Vella, was charged with Aggravated Assault in connection with the attack.

LYFT DRIVER SAYS PASSENGER CHOKED HIM WITH HIS OWN SEATBELT IN TEXAS: ‘HE WAS TRYING TO KILL ME’

Ayoola explained the impact the violent attack has had on him since the incident, noting that he is now fearful of falling victim to another attack.

“Just like we’re sitting here, if someone tries to pass behind me, I’m always, so scared, you know. I see it always. Every day,” he said, adding that replays in his over and over again.

He said he has not picked up passengers since the incident because of his fears. He had been a rideshare driver for seven years.

“Because I’m always scared. Even if my grandson is sitting behind me in the car, I’m scared,” Ayoola said.

Ayoola said when he arrived at the hospital to pick up Vella, he observed the man standing with three hospital workers as he was fidgeting and behaving strangely.

TEXAS POLICE DEPARTMENT TO INTRODUCE AUTONOMOUS DRONE PILOT PROGRAM: ‘AN EYE IN THE SKY’

The passenger, Ramiro Vella, was charged with Aggravated Assault in connection with the attack. (Getty)

“When I picked up that passenger in February, I talked to the staff, the Memorial Hermann staff,” he recalled. “I said ‘Hey what’s going on? Is this guy OK?’ They told me, they said, ‘Oh yes, it’s okay.’ I even asked the security guard, and he said, ‘yes, it’s okay.’”

Shortly after Vella entered his car, he started talking to himself before beating his chest and, at one point, slid over in the backseat to the seat behind Ayoola. The passenger then grabbed Ayoola’s seatbelt and wrapped it around the driver’s neck, according to Ayoola.

Ayoola attempted to put his fingers between his neck and the seatbelt, and was unable to unfasten his seatbelt. Vella then used his arm to put Ayoola in a chokehold.

The driver pulled his car over to the side of the road, and Vella kicked the back window until the frame popped out before kicking a dent into the back of the vehicle and opening the trunk, Ayoola said.

Investigators said Vella then ran to a house and began yelling and attempting to enter. The homeowner called 911 and Vella was arrested.

Ayoola said he has not picked up passengers since the incident because of his fears of another attack. (Photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket )

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Ayoola is “an innocent, hardworking man that was simply trying to complete a Lyft journey that was ordered, supervised, and called for by Memorial Hermann Hospital, and he ended up being attacked,” Ayoola’s Attorney, Osayuki Ogbeidet, told Fox 26.

“He expressed his concerns to Memorial Hermann staff, and they reassured him that Ramiro Vella would be OK,” Ogbeide added.

Ogbeide said Ayoola has experienced “very special damages. Not just loss of wages, not just medical bills, but his whole life turned upside down.”

Vella’s next court date is scheduled for Sept. 25.