Greg McElroy believes Michigan needs to add depth, size to wide receiver room

Things are going to look different for Michigan football in 2024, from head coach on down. And that includes the receiving corps.

While Michigan has plenty of talented players returning, starters Roman Wilson and Cornelius Johnson are both off to the NFL and leave the Wolverines with a somewhat unproven and quite diminutive stable of returning receivers. And that left ESPN college football analyst Greg McElroy offering up that he thinks the Wolverines should be seeking a big, ball-winning receiver out of the transfer portal.

And while that’s unlikely for myriad reasons, McElroy would love the complementary skillsets if Michigan did bring in a big bodied wideout.

“Tyler Morris, Fredrick Moore, Semaj Morgan, I think they’ll be OK at that spot, but to add a guy that’s a go-getter, that’s maybe 6-2, 6-3 that can be a factor in the red zone to take some of the pressure off of the tight ends would be really valuable,” McElroy said.

That trio of receivers — Moore, Morris and Morgan — are 6-foot-1, 5-foot-11 and 5-foot-10, respectively, according to the Michigan roster. And while Morris and Morgan have shown flashes of playing a bit bigger than their listed height, there’s little substitution for a truly dominant physical presence outside.

The one area Michigan does have big, ball-winning pass catchers is at tight end, with Colston Loveland headlining the group.

“Now, you look at some of the guys they had last year, how often did you see Michigan lined up in 10 personnel with four wide receivers on the field?” McElroy said. “Very rarely. What Michigan mostly lived out of was two wide receivers with Roman Wilson and Cornelius Johnson, those two guys were basically the only two wideouts that you saw with crazy amounts of playing time, you saw multiple tight ends on the field and knowing that they might even be moving in the direction of kind of a run centric quarterback, maybe they feel pretty good about the pecking order at wide receiver right now.”

But McElroy would like to see some red zone pressure relieved from that position.

The remaining question, then, is who Michigan could be in a position to add this late in the process. The transfer receiver market is not chock full of options early in May, and as is often the case with the Wolverines, finding a player who has the proper transfer credits to be admitted isn’t a guarantee. This makes graduate transfers attractive options, too.

There are a handful of options that would satisfy the size and ball-winning role that McElroy wants filled, but whether Michigan goes out and adds one remains to be seen.

“So I think Michigan, probably looking to the portal and there’s a few different positions that Michigan would like to add but receiver, I think, needs to be of the highest priority,” McElroy said.