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Sherrone Moore doesn’t care if Michigan football’s offense is sexy.
He doesn’t care if it makes the “SportsCenter” Top 10 Plays and he certainly doesn’t care who gets the credit.
Moore — now the sole architect of U-M football’s attack after last year’s quarterbacks coach and his co-offensive coordinator Matt Weiss was fired in January amidst an investigation into computer crimes — has a singular vision about how he wants U-M’s offense to look come the fall.
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“Whatever we have to do to win,” Moore explained Tuesday afternoon in Schembechler Hall. “We’re not going to value the opinion of people that don’t understand what we’re doing. We’re going to do whatever it takes to do to win in that game, whether it’s throw, pass, we’re going to do it.
“That’s the vision.”
Last season, Michigan ran the ball on 60.79% of its offensive snaps, the 12th-highest run rate in the nation and fifth-highest among Power Five teams. While it wasn’t always pretty, it was effective.
U-M ranked fifth nationally in rushing offense (238.9 yards per game), which became the primary reason it ranked No. 6 nationally in scoring (40.4 points per game) and finished the season No. 11 in offensive efficiency.
“It’s certainly a recipe for winning,” Weiss said last year of U-M’s offense in November after quarterback J.J. McCarthy had his fifth game in six weeks where he threw for fewer than 175 yards. “We definitely don’t apologize for it.”
While the leadership is different, the attitude is the same.
And if the results are anything like last season — the first 12-0 start in 25 years, first win at Ohio State in more than two decades, the most wins in a single season in program history and a second straight Big Ten championship and trip to the College Football Playoff — that ratio could look similar again.
“There will probably be a game where we will run the ball more and people will be mad at us,” Moore said. “But if it helps us win, we will be OK with it.”
‘Living a dream’
Moore, 37, has more on his plate than ever before.
In addition to serving as sole offensive coordinator, he remains in charge of the offensive line, which was named the Joe Moore Award winner as the best unit in the nation in each of the past two seasons under his tutelage.
The main difference this season is his focus will now spread across the entirety of the offense, but good luck getting him to say anything concrete about how or if his role has changed on game day.
“As far as play-calling duties last year, I’m not going to talk about the specifics, so good try,” Moore joked. “I was part of play-calling last year … but is it a little bit more work (now)? A little bit, but this is something I’ve been preparing for my whole life.
“I don’t come in here and work at all. It’s fun for me. This is just too fun for me. I live a dream right now, so I’m just going to continue to grind as hard as I can and live out this dream that we’re living in.”
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It appears as if U-M’s offensive coordinator isn’t the only one who feels that way about Ann Arbor. Seven starters from last year’s team who had a chance to pursue a career in the NFL opted to return to Michigan for another go round.
Blake Corum wanted to put to bed any concerns about his knee. Cornelius Johnson wants to show he can be more than just a possession receiver. Offensive guards Trevor Keegan and Zak Zinter want to improve their draft stocks, as well.
Yes, it’s also true potential money from NIL deals can be the deciding factor for a college player on the fence between returning and leaving. But as Moore said, it’s about much more than that.
“It’s bigger than really a culture, it’s a brotherhood,” Moore said. “It’s something that’s hard to describe unless you’re around it every day.”
Lots of weapons
Moore has an embarrasment of riches on his side of the ball.
Start with the offensive line, which returns four players who had All-Big Ten honors last season (Zinter, Keegan, Karsen Barnhart and Ryan Hayes), two others who started multiple games (Trente Jones and Gio El-Hadi) and added three starters form other power five schools (Ladarius Henderson, Arizona State; Drake Nugent, Stanford; Myles Hinton, Stanford) two of whom were captains.
“It’s a competition, everybody knows any given day if you have an off day or an off week, your spot is up for grabs,” he said. “We have the depth with guys that know you can’t go about your business in a way that’s nonchalant.
“You have to attack, because we’re striving for big things.”
They will block for Corum, who returns as an early Heisman Trophy favorite. He ran 247 times for 1,463 yards (5.9 yards per carry) and 18 touchdowns before missing the final three games of the season with a knee injury.
His understudy, Donovan Edwards, is also one of the most explosive running backs in America. He ran 140 times for 991 yards (7.1 yards per rush) and seven touchdowns and caught 18 more passes for 200 yard and two scores.
As dynamic as the two are when the ball is in their hands, presumably they’ll be on the field together, right?
“I can’t tell you that,” Moore smiled. “We’ll have to see.”
Then, there’s McCarthy, a junior quarterback who now has a full season as a starter under his belt.
After he was held to fewer than 230 passing yards in nine of his first 10 starts, McCarthy averaged more than 255 yards per game in his final three. That included a 343-yard game against TCU in the Fiesta Bowl which showed what it looks like when McCarthy is unleashed.
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“We knew what J.J.’s capabilities were,” Moore said. “That was a situation we had to do it. So, again, we did whatever we had to do to win at that time and that’s what we felt like was best.”
U-M scored 45 points and had more than 530 yards of offense and showed what a high-flying attack can look like. In an eight play stretch in the second half it scored three touchdowns and tallied 171 yards.
Despite its most tantalizing offensive performance of the season, it was the worst day of the year.
“At the end of the day we lost the game,” Moore said. “It doesn’t matter how good it looked.”
Michigan likes its talent. It knows it returned an experienced group and if it wanted, could likely air the ball out with more frequency and success. But then again, there might not be a need.
U-M and Moore are ready to win ugly again — don’t wait for an apology.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Don’t expect Michigan football’s offense to change much in 2023