And just like that, the unofficial kickoff to the 2024 college football season has arrived.
The Big Ten’s media days are scheduled to begin on Tuesday morning at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, a city that has become a second home for Michigan football as the Wolverines have claimed three consecutive outright Big Ten championships in that very same building.
The Wolverines, who are 40-3 since the start of 2021 and the defending national champions after their first 15-0 season, have been the class of the league this decade, but things appear to have gotten even more difficult this time around.
Not only has the Big Ten officially expanded to 18 teams this year with the additions of Oregon, USC, Washington and UCLA, but U-M has to replace nearly two dozen contributors who left from last year’s group, as well as half the coaching staff.
Even still, U-M remains a trendy pick to have a decent shot at a fourth consecutive College Football Playoff berth, however it will need to answer some questions in order to do so.
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Here are the top five questions facing the Wolverines — who will be represented in Indy by running back Donovan Edwards, safety Makari Paige and fullback Ben Bredeson — as they head into the 2024 season.
No. 1: Who will be the starting quarterback?
Michigan appears to be debating between three options for the new field general of the offense. The front runner, at this moment, feels like Alex Orji. He’s carried himself like the expected starter all offseason and now is the time to win the job in fall camp, much like his predecessor J.J. McCarthy had to do in 2022.
Orji is a 6-foot-3, 235-pound dual threat athlete who’s run 21 times for 115 yards and three touchdowns across his career and thrown just one pass, which was completed for five yards. Earlier this offseason when asked if he’s ready to show he can move the ball down the field with his arm, not just his legs, he said “it’s pretty hard to play quarterback if you can’t throw,” implying he’s more than ready for the challenge at hand.
He will need to beat out a pair of more-senior passers in seventh-year graduate student Jack Tuttle and senior Davis Warren. Tuttle, who has starting experience from his time at Indiana, is the only player in the room who’s started a game. Across his career, Tuttle has completed 119 of 199 passes for six touchdowns and six interceptions. Last year as a back up, he was extremely efficient for U-M, completing 15 of 17 attempts for 130 yards and a score and running four other times for 35 yards.
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Last but not least, Warren, who threw a pair of touchdowns in the spring game and told the Free Press in the winter shortly after U-M’s national title that his intention was to return and compete for the starting job. He didn’t complete a pass last season, going 0 for 5 with an interception, but the year prior he did connect on 5 of 9 passes for 89 yards.
Junior Jayden Denegal was also said to be in the competition, however based on experience and the spring game as sample size, he figured to be on the outside looking in.
New offensive coordinator Kirk Campbell will need to decide what he wants this new offense to look like, and which player will do the best job of getting them there
“They got to be low-turnover, high-completion players,” Campbell said of his main criteria for picking the starter. “But there’s stuff off the field that we’re looking at. I mean, all of them are great leaders. But who is the great guy, the best guy to go out there and lead this team?”
No. 2: What does running game look like?
Now six months removed, it feels safe to say Blake Corum was somehow taken for granted.
A unanimous All-American in 2022, Corum ran the ball more than 500 times in just the past two seasons alone as he racked up more than 2,900 yards of offense and 47 touchdowns. No U-M player has scored more rushing touchdowns in a single season (27) or career (58) than Corum, and now it’s up to Donovan Edwards and Kalel Mullings to try and replace that production.
Edwards is far from a new face. The man with the nickname “Big Game Don” ran six times for 104 yards and two scores in last year’s national title game and in the final three games of the 2022 season amassed 520 rushing yards and three scores as the full-time replacement for Corum, who was out with a season-ending knee injury — but last year was far from consistent.
In his first 14 games, Edwards ran 113 times for 393 yards (that average of 3.4 yards per carry which was the worst mark in the Power Five among ball carriers with at least 100 rushes) and just three scores.
Even his work in the pass game (where he’s 89 yards away from setting a U-M record for receiving yards any a running back) took a step back with 30 grabs for 249 yards (8.8 yards per touch) and no scores.
As for Mullings, who ran 36 times for 222 yards and a score last year, the senior…
Detroit Free Press
