After the Colorado State game, I had questions about Michigan's rushing attack. I felt the scheme looked different in the Wolverines' first game so I decided to take a look at the numbers in a few categories to see if I was right.

What we discovered was Michigan was zone-heavy in the run game compared to the previous season. Against Colorado State they ran zone 42% of the time compared to 26% of the time in the 2021 season.

The Wolverines also favored the left side of the line, running it 20 times for 137 yards and 2 touchdowns.

With week 2 against Hawaii in the books I wanted to take a look to see if any of these trends continued if there was a bend back to average, or a complete reversal of strategy. Still, only two games against weaker opponents, I don't think any concrete conclusions can be made, but the results from the game against Hawaii are very interesting.

Blake Corum and Donovan Edwards are RB1 and RB1B for the offense. In their first action of 2022, the two backs had remarkably similar games.

Each played 14 snaps while Corum had 13 carries and Edwards had 12. Corum finished with 76 yards while Edwards had 64, good for a 5.8 yard per carry and 5.3YPC respectively. Both backs found the end zone against Colorado State and each caught one short pass.

Pro Football Focus rated Edwards slightly higher than Corum in the run game. Edwards had slightly better yards after contact average and was a more consistent runner, while Corum had three runs over 10 yards compared to Edwards one.

CJ Stokes had an intriguing debut. He had roughly half the snaps and carries but had an identical YPC to Corum. He looked good in the zone read with McCarthy and showed some burst on an 18-yard run. Michigan would be a very strong position if as a freshman Stokes can be a solid RB3.

Saw a swing to gap scheme against Hawaii.
Here is where the game stacks with last week and last season;
2021 Season: 26% Zone
2022 vs CSU: 42% Zone
2022 vs HAW: 33% Zone

The number for Zone % goes down to only 25% when you look at the top three backs of Corum, Edwards, and Stokes.

Here is how it broke down with Michigan's three main backs.

Edwards only had three carries before he was pulled for his injury so not much can be taken from that.

Corum saw a big shift to gap scheme in this one. Again, 25% of his carries in 2021 were zone so only 1 out of 8 is interesting, especially after nearly a third of his carries were zone last week.

Stokes saw more action in this one and saw a quarter of his carries come in zone scheme compared to a third in the previous week.

With Edwards potentially being held out against UConn, we could see increased carries for Corum and Stokes. Will be interesting to see what happens scheme-wise if we get a larger sample size.

Ryan Hayes was back in this one, so the left side of Hayes and LG Trevor Keegan was back to normal. Giovanni El-Hadi ended up playing the most snaps at LG along with Trente Jones at RT. This was the first time we saw Raheem Anderson getting snaps at center. Jeffrey Persi and Tristan Bounds saw action at their respective tackle spots.

Against Colorado State, the Wolverines favored the left side, specifically the LE gap with TE Luke Schoonmaker blocking.

When running to the left Michigan continued to favor the outside scheme with Schoonmaker. Aside from CJ Stokes 21 yard run over the LG and Roman Wilson's end around, Michigan's only rushing to the left was to the TE and resulted in 7 carries for 55 yards and a touchdown.

There was a swing to the right side bias in this one. The Wolverines had 12 carries to the left and 19 to the right. Again, Michigan favored the outside with 9 carries for 102 yards and a touchdown over the RT and TE.

What sticks out to me this week more than the left vs right is the outside vs inside. Michigan had 16 of its 31 runs go outside, while only 15 were in rushing lanes. 6 of Blake Corum's 9 runs were outside. 7 of CJ Stokes' 8 runs were to the outside. Donovan Edwards had a short TD over the RG but his 25-yard run was outside right.

I still don't want to make any conclusions in terms of identity for the season, but there are definitely some interesting things happening here. My gut reaction is the zone vs gap scheme will start to find level. With JJ starting, maybe more zone reads will skew those numbers, but we will have to see.

UConn will provide us more data, but that will still have the hedge of a weaker non-con opponent with Michigan likely pulling starters early again. We'll revisit next week and then start seeing what trends continue into conference play.

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