Two guys on a mission: What Mike Macdonald saw his first day at Michigan

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — The Michigan defense went from worst to first (not literally, but close) over the course of a year behind new coordinator Mike Macdonald. Fans have gone from asking, “who is this guy?” to “how long can we keep him?”

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And for good reason. He’s become one of the hottest young commodities in football after his work with the Wolverines this year. Michigan ranks fourth nationally in scoring defense (16.1 points per game), 11^th in scoring defense (316.2 yards per game) 20^th in run defense (121.4). 

Macdonald almost wasn’t in position to accomplish it all, he admitted during his Tuesday Orange Bowl presser. He had signed a contract to work in the business world after his work as a G.A. at Georgia ended. 

“It was the spring of 2013. I had signed a contract with KPMG (Financial) and I was fortunate enough — I think Coach Rodney Garner actually recommended me to one of the Ravens’ scouts,” Macdonald recalled. “… Worked up the food chain there and was just really fortunate that John Harbaugh was looking to start an intern program.

“I was able to kind of go through that process and really fortunate enough that Jay Harbaugh, our [Michigan tight ends] coach here, was one of the guys that helped set the whole thing up. … Talk about just luck of the draw. Man am I blessed that that happened. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be sitting here.”

“Here” was at the podium talking about the Michigan upcoming Orange Bowl playoff matchup against Georgia. He still couldn’t believe it, he admitted, when he looked down at the microphone with the Orange Bowl logo. His defense had come so far in a year. 

But he knew when he first arrived at Michigan in the spring he had some pieces to work with. Two in particular stood out during his first meetings with the Michigan kids. 

“You walk in the first day and you’re wide eyed, and there’s a bunch of people everywhere,” he recalled “You don’t know who’s who, trying to remember names and stuff. But the one thing I remember from the first day is just the look on Josh Ross and Aidan [Hutchinson’s] eyes, it was like, ‘okay — we’ve got two dudes that will literally do anything we ask them to do. These guys are ready to go. They’re two guys on a mission.”

From that point they were rolling, he said, and it became simple. They “stacked good days,” as Macdonald always likes to say, and built the foundation. There were certain principles within the defense they wanted to install that would carry weight throughout the season, and they build on those. 

They adapted the defense to the opponents, but those characteristics remained. The result was an accumulation throughout the year, to the point that the Michigan defense was playing its best, most confident football at the end of the season. 

“We’re always making progress,” Macdonald said. “I think the way you see that kind of come into play is … if you can close your eyes and hear everything that’s going on before, during and after the play. You can visualize what happened and how we rotated and how we alerted things and post-alerted things. 

“When you hear it and you hear a loud defense, you know they understand what’s going on. When there’s not a lot of noise out there and there’s not a lot of communication, to me that’s a signal of a confused defense that ultimately won’t play as fast or violently as you need them to. 

“I think if you came to one of our practices, you’d be impressed with the communication going on.”

Or they can just pop in the film of the last two Michigan games of the season, wins over Ohio State and Iowa. Macdonald will get much of the credit, but it started with captains Hutchinson and Ross in the spring. 

“People say you take the personality of your coach. I’m more subscribed to the theory that you take the personalities of your leaders,” Macdonald said. “When everybody decides they want to do it a certain way, that’s a powerful thing. And then we have the right guys to spearhead that charge.

“How I’d describe it — we want to be 11 guys playing for one another. That’s a powerful thing when you play for the guy next to you. We want to have shocking effort when you watch the tape. We want teams to watch tapes on Sunday mornings and know they’re in for a 60-minute battle.”

Mission accomplished, to date. Two more like that and the Michigan kids might be hoisting the National Championship trophy in Indianapolis.