There's not a lot to gripe about when Michigan has played thirteen games, won thirteen games, and is the #1 seed in the Playoff. But we're going to find a way to do it anyways, because the usage of Donovan Edwards this season has been a consistent annoyance. As good as Harbaugh and his assistants have been about finding ways to crack defenses with tight ends, it's hard to get over the thought that they're wasting a five-star tool in Edwards who could be so much more. This was a point Brian made in the game column:

What are we doing with Donovan Edwards? There were a number of plays on which Iowa showed man-to-man coverage with Edwards split out. Edwards invariably motioned back into the backfield when this happened. They never took a shot at Edwards, or even looked him up on a slant.

Even more frustrating were times when Iowa would show and run man coverage and Edwards would leak out of the backfield and sit down in front of a linebacker. One angle route there and Edwards is running for a million yards. I don't know; it just seems like something is off with him. And the coaches.

He's barely been used in the pass game. #1 must fix before the 'Bama game. Alabama has lockdown corners; Edwards needs to be a factor.

So I thought we'd use this space to talk about this play and some others that have us questioning how Michigan deploys this backfield weapon, and how they could probably do a better job of using his actual skills.

[After THE JUMP: Two gripes.]

WHAT EDWARDS DOES WELL

Well it's not actually playing running back in Michigan's current system, as we've discussed at length. As a ball-carrier, Edwards has good burst and acceleration. What he lacks is that Corum-esque sense of how to get a defender's attention and get him to go in the wrong spot. Edwards is fast and can engage that extra gear to wipe players off the board. This was why he was so lethal at the end of the season last year, as Michigan's superior offensive line put him in positions where that burst and speed could shine, and the gap was the only one.

With Corum taking the bulk of carries, the OL taking a step back, and opponents sanely using safeties as the gods intended, there haven't been as many opportunities for Edwards to jet for all the yards. The moments instead often come from play design and getting him to the edge. He's also been pushing it. This looked more dangerous than it ended up being, and when you go back to look at why you notice he never used AJ Barner's block at all. The yards it gets are the yards he beat #34, Iowa's excellent linebacker Jay Higgins, by in a footrace.

Here's a more bog standard Donovan Edwards run for 4 yards.

Michigan has an RPO read (or a fake one) that holds the field safety in case of a bubble to Morris, but Iowa still has a free hitter in the box, which ends up being the WLB standing on the "V" of the midfield sponsor logo.

Edwards finds the guy he needs to beat easily enough.

And starts to give him a little shimmy. Meanwhile the DE on the top is losing contain to Henderson, and the LB is realizing he's going to have to make that right. Edwards correctly uses that to give the LB a little shimmy, ready to pop outside if needed. The DE is definitely losing that outside contain too. If Edwards sells this he's to the safety, who's just now starting to react to the handoff.

The LB doesn't bite, so Edwards gets closer to the line of scrimmage, but still where he can pop out. The DE is coming inside. The safety is moving down to cover the C-gap. The other MLB has flipped sides on Nugent and is getting to the B gap as well.

And in the end it's B.

Contrast this with Mullings running the same thing, except the threat to the safety is just a McCarthy keeper that he doesn't buy.

Or this other cut by Mullings.

Edwards also is just okay when it comes to bowling guys over. Edwards does have good burst, which shines best on zone reads when the DE is shading inside. Even if the QB misses a keep read, the margin the edge has to get over in time once Edwards has possession is really slim.

But if we were just deciding on a running back to do running back things, Mullings is the far superior player.

HE'S A FANTASTIC DECOY

Of course, that's not the end of what Edwards does. We've seen him play receiver as well as any college regular wideout, and he's too fast for linebackers to carry in man. We all remember the one time Purdue was misaligned and sent "#47" out on him.

Michigan's passing game has incorporated this threat somewhat. Purdue mostly matched him with a safety all game, which made the rest of their coverages predictable and exploitable as Michigan found ways of putting them in footraces with their receivers. Other teams are going to play a lot more zone however. Ohio State and Iowa are both excellent zone passing defenses, and both got a little over-extended trying to account for Edwards when he went a-wheelin'. The TE delay when Zinter was hurt was one such play.

Watch the MLB, "1st team all-Big Ten" Tommy Eichenberg as he turns his back on Loveland to help a cornerback already on top of Edwards.

A similar thing happened against Iowa, though Higgins is a much better linebacker than the defender Michigan was picking on a week earlier. Even a little step outside to worry about Edwards coming into his zone is enough to get Loveland across #34's face.

Michigan's become so used to defenses having a guy come down on Edwards that I believe Iowa was able to scout this and exploit it, which led to some Edwards dump-off opportunities being screamingly open in the first half.

I plan to get into JJ's progressions later this week with Demorest, but one major disconnect between fans and the people who play and coach the game is the concept of "Oh that guy was WIDE OPEN!" The fact of passing games—and the reason they're so effective when run by excellent pros—is that there's almost always somebody with leverage, because you don't have enough defenders to bracket every receiver and still get enough pass rush for it to matter.

Quarterbacks can't have eyes everywhere, however. They use patterns, read progressions, and defensive clues to figure out where they want the ball to go. When facing a primarily zone team, that means identifying the coverage, finding the guy stretched between two zones, and fitting the ball where it needs to go. Much of Michigan's passing offense in this game was using motion to identify Iowa's coverages and zinging it into quick outs near the sideline where Iowa's zone defenders were out-leveraged. If JJ caught one of those, he was going for the five-yard out and never looked to see whether they were backing way off Edwards the other way. But they were.

Here's an early from Michigan's first drive.

JJ ends up zinging it over Loveland's head, and Edwards ended up being open for a dump-down that probably gets 7-8 yards, and fans like me end up yelling "dump it to Edwards GAWD!" when that happens.

But from JJ's perspective he sees the SAM (#37) widening when they motion Bredeson across,

…which is a cue that the SAM is going to be pulled wide of the hash mark and Loveland will find a spot to sit down between that guy and #34 Higgins.

When Loveland cuts behind Higgins, the window is there and he throws it.

It's an inaccurate pass, yes. But I'm not sure you can call it a bad read when the LB he was reading wasn't getting there. You can when you consider that SAM should have been on Edwards, and there was quite a lot of room for a catch and run to the running back.

This is Complaint #1:

HE'S NOT A PRIORITY IN JJ's DECISION-TREE.

The passing concepts are there to create reads for McCarthy to hit NFL windows to other future NFL players like Loveland and Wilson. But Edwards is a future NFL player himself, and if you get the ball to him in that kind of space against Iowa's 5'11"/233 walk-on OLB Kyler Fisher, I'm sorry, but your chances of success are higher than trying to fit it into Loveland in that window.

This was true on the rollout that ended up getting Trente Jones flagged for a pathetically weak holding call.

I drew this one up because the route combos get off-screen quickly. Remember how we talked about the Dagger route combo and how Michigan was chewing up their early season opponents with it? That's the combo in the middle that McCarthy is reading between Morris's post and Loveland's dig but with a slot fade to Johnson that should spring open if Iowa switches to man coverage. That means for the first few second's the quarterback's eyes are going to be on that left seam.

I color-coded McCarthy's reads from hot to cold to emphasize the issue. Against a soft cover 2 team like Iowa you should be coaching McCarthy to look for that checkdown to Edwards when he's reading the scissors on the left.

You want him to be reading the nickel's deep drop and hit Edwards under that. But J.J. really likes that Dig route.

J.J. takes a couple more bounces, looks at Edwards for like…A FRAME (he's open)…and then his timer goes off and he starts rolling, finding Barner underneath. Edwards just isn't a priority. This became an issue that Iowa was able to exploit. They got a BS holding call out of the one above.

Iowa kept leaving Edwards so open underneath that Michigan finally got word down and dumped it to him for a chunk:

Watch #30, the boundary safety, who starts at the 50 yard line.

WHEN YOU GET HIM IN MAN YOU HAVE TO EXPLOIT IT.

I think there's been a major disconnect at Michigan between what Edwards is actually good at, and what they want him to be good at. What they envision is the sort of good-in-traffic jitterbug that Semaj Morgan has demonstrated himself to be. They scheme up end-arounds and bubble screens for him. Not only are these a huge tell whenever they're doing it, but Edwards has not shown himself particularly adept at turning those opportunities into yards. As a runner he is impatient, and doesn't have a great feel for setting up his blocks. When those blocks are wide receivers against safeties, the margins are smaller.

This got into brain-melting levels of frustrating against Iowa, because sometimes they would get Edwards matched on a linebacker when they went five-wide and motioned him to the backfield.

This doesn't happen at the playcalling level. It needs to be installed, practiced, prepared. The reason we're talking about it now is because they went into the season knowing Edwards was one of their best weapons on offense, and thirteen games later this stuff isn't installed, practiced, or prepared. Unless they're saving it.

Michigan isn't completely blind, and they do have some things planned for when they get an Edwards-in-man read. But again, the ways they are getting him the ball don't emphasize his skills. The first drive of the 2nd half they went back to the empty 5-wide look.

And when they motion, sure enough, Higgins is in man.

And there is much pointing.

Huzzah! We do have a check for this. But look what they're running:

This isn't a "Let Edwards be fast" play other than the motion, which is not in a particular hurry. Bubble screens are about setting up the blocks and then jitterbugging through them. Edwards's acceleration should help, but only if he has the vision, and his receivers have the blocking, and the linebacker doesn't see exactly what's happening and use the "not in a particular hurry" part of the play to make up all the ground he Edwards might have gained from speed.

If that's Semaj Morgan, whee, we're in business. All that space is deadly. It is exactly why NFL teams like to use motions from empty sets to exploit LB vs RB matchups, and why they're also all drafting safetyish linebackers regardless of whether those guys can read a gap. This particular run gets beat because Loveland loses to the nickel, Castro, but that's not the intended gap. The intention of this play design is to get the space you see above and let a space player do something with it.

That isn't Edwards. Edwards is the guy who does this to linebackers.

Not the guy who Semaj Morgans his way around them.

There were other opportunities of a similar vein, when Michigan was in a passing down and a more creative use of Edwards's ability to flatly outrun the athletes they assign to him was never used. Iowa got a sack out of this one:

This is man coverage with a five-man pressure. Edwards is covered by the safety who's down in the box on the left hash. Iowa gave a Cover 1 read and Michigan got Cover 1. Loveland is going to come open on the drag and follow if the protection is good. And if not…

See all the space to the right? Edwards, looking into the backfield, knowing the direction of the coverage, should be off like a cannon to the right.

No, it's not in the playbook. Edwards is doing what he's supposed to in this offense. It is a tag you see all the time in the NFL, and most college teams don't bother with, because it's kind of complicated, and usually any safety is going to be a match for your running back. The reason you see it happen in the NFL however is because they've gone with backs who can function as wide receivers. The route that Edwards is running here makes sense in college if you don't have a particularly dangerous threat—if they blitz their brains out you can dump it to him. But if you have a real weapon there, you want him running an angle route opposite the direction of the play.

You can also put it in the playbook as an angle route. Michigan used to run these in 2021 and they looked frightening every time. For some reason since JJ became the quarterback, Edwards angle routes are out of the offense.

Or are they? Because near the end of the 3rd quarter we got this silly play that Brian highlighted.

Michigan is in a trips 4-wide formation, which spreads out the coverage and has Edward for a chunk if he's running, you know, the typical route that West Coast offenses use when they have a good running back. Instead he stops at the umpire then ducks. I don't know where he was supposed to be—I have a guess—but it's probably not where he ended up.

So I agree with Brian. Something is off, either with Edwards, or Michigan's offensive brain trust not being sure what to do with him. Unless they've been saving all the good stuff for "Georgia", there should be time before the Rose Bowl to rent some recently released OC as an analyst, and put him in charge of gaming up ways to attack Alabama with Edwards. It's just two things I want to see: Move Edwards up JJ's priority tree, and attack players who can't match his speed, acceleration, and catching ability in man coverage.