Mike Macdonald walked into Michigan's football facility on his first day in his new job and was bombarded by change. New office, new gear, new staff members, new players, new parking spot; about the only thing that might have seemed the same was the surname on the sign outside the head coach's office. Then Macdonald met Aidan Hutchinson and Josh Ross and found his first bit of certainty, the first thing he could comfortably hang his hat on, in his role as Michigan's defensive coordinator.

Macdonald recounted the encounter for the media during his Orange Bowl press conference. "Again, and I sound like a broken record, but you walk in the first day and you're wide eyed and there's a bunch of people everywhere, you don't know who's who, trying to remember names and stuff, and the one thing I remember from the first day is just the look on Josh Ross and Aidan's eyes, it was like, okay, like we've got two dudes that will literally do anything we ask them to do. Like these guys are ready to go. They're two guys on a mission.

"From that point we were rolling. It was like, okay, how do we want to do this, this is what I see, what do you guys see, all right. It was pretty simple. Just needed to help us put it in motion."

The key point in the paragraph above is Macdonald asking his players what they were seeing. His approach of inclusion helped get his players to buy in to the construction of their new defensive foundation. "I think he does a great job of putting people in great positions to make plays, and he does a great job just relating to his players," defensive tackle Christopher Hinton said. "We understand what he's thinking, he understands what we're thinking, and we're able to bounce off of that, bounce ideas off of that, and I think that's paid dividends to our success this year. I mean, we love Coach Mac."

To put players in position to make plays, Macdonald wanted to be able to use different packages and different players without the chaos of teaching a new defense each week during the season.

"If you build it just on a shallow foundation or a narrow foundation, there's no room to grow where you want it to go. So we spent a lot of time building the foundation of football, how we want it to look, how we want to play, certain principles within the defense that we wanted to install. Those carried weight throughout the season," Macdonald said.

Defensive tackle Mazi Smith was asked why Macdonald has been so successful so quickly at Michigan and his answer illuminates the back-and-forth nature of the success, the way the players feel about the scheme and the way Macdonald uses his personnel. "I think he brings a new version of the game for us to play. I think the way he implements all the things that he's trying to teach us and get us to do, he does it quickly, he does it efficiently. He don't leave no meat on the bone, and I just think using his personnel to the best of our ability, he's got packages for everybody, and he's trying to get the most out of us, and we want to do it."

Players who didn't see the field frequently in past years saw a new opportunity under Macdonald's tutelage, a chance to learn a system from the ground up and find a role within it.

"For me, he did a lot. Man, he just gave me a chance," cornerback D.J. Turner said today while reflecting on what kind of impact Macdonald has had on him. "We do a whole bunch of different schemes, and it's just really good when he came, the knowledge of football he brought with him."

Pondering the same question posed to Turner, defensive end David Ojabo found a more visceral way in which Macdonad has helped him.

"Personally for me, he just made the game fun again," Ojabo said. "Like DJ said, he gave me a chance to play loose and have fun doing it."

Macdonald, however, isn't comfortable with the credit for this defense's success being heaped upon him. He expounded on that during today's Orange Bowl press conference:

"I don't want to take away from guys like Josh Ross, Brad Hawkins, Donovan Jeter, guys in the back end, Vince Gray. I think it's been a team collective effort on what type of team we want to be and kind of our reputation as a defense.

"People say you take the personality of your coach. I'm more subscribed to the theory that you take the personalities of your leaders. When everybody decides that they want to do it a certain way, that's a powerful thing, and then we have the right guys to kind of 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."

It all started with the eyes and, if Macdonald's players can turn in another 60-minute battle of shocking effort, the eyes of one final coaching staff will be forced to pour over their tape on a Sunday morning.

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