Everyone can see the difference Mike Macdonald has made as Michigan’s defensive coordinator this season.
But Macdonald, the 34-year-old assistant and first-time coordinator, says he can hear it, too.
And if you’re looking for a deeper explanation as to why Michigan’s in the College Football Playoff — and why the Wolverines’ defense is preparing to face Georgia in the Orange Bowl — that’s probably a good place to start: By listening.
To the players, for starters. And specifically, some of the starters now who barely played before Macdonald arrived 11 months ago from the Baltimore Ravens, where he’d spent the past seven years working for Jim Harbaugh’s brother, John.
“Personally for me, he just made the game fun again,” said David Ojabo, the edge rusher who played just 26 snaps in an abbreviated 2020 slate but may have played his way into the first round of next April's NFL Draft.
“Man, he just gave me a chance,” said D.J. Turner, who was on the field for only 11 defensive plays a year ago but emerged as the Wolverines’ No. 1 cornerback in the second half of this season.
And then there is defensive tackle Mazi Smith, who played nearly as many snaps in the win over Ohio State last month as he did all of last season: “I don’t know that we’d be where we are without him,” Smith said, before quickly correcting himself. “Well, I know we wouldn’t.”
And perhaps the biggest reason why, they all seem to agree, is the one Macdonald was referencing Tuesday in Miami.
“He gave us the ability to take the reins of the defense,” Smith said of Macdonald, whose predecessor, Don Brown, had a stranglehold on everything when it came to his defense. “In our first meeting, he said, ‘This is your defense. We’re only going to go as far as you want to go. I’m telling you how to get it done, but it’s up to y’all to go out there and get it done.’”
Not coincidentally, that’s what Macdonald hears now. On the practice field, where the ex-Ravens linebackers coach says he knew immediately last spring he had the type of leaders he’d need. And in games, where the Wolverines quickly proved this fall they had the talent, too, leaving opposing quarterbacks dazed and confused with a relentless pass rush and an amoeba-like scheme. Macdonald hears them getting it done themselves, from snap to snap, through alerts and rotations, and ultimately in the collisions that fans cheer.
“When you hear it and you hear a loud defense, you know they understand what's going on,” Macdonald said Tuesday. “When there's not a lot of noise out there and there's not a lot of communication, to me that's a sign of a confused defense that ultimately won't play as fast or violently as you need them to. I think if you came to one of our practices, you'd be impressed with the communication going on.”
Of course, the media isn’t allowed to watch Michigan’s practices, either in Ann Arbor or in Miami. But the results speak for themselves, as the Wolverines rank fourth nationally in scoring defense and in the top 10 in several defensive efficiency categories.
Still, it goes beyond the raw numbers with this defense, because the Wolverines always were near the top of the heap statistically under Brown. His aggressive philosophy overwhelmed all but the best teams on Michigan’s schedule each year. But it would get burned by Ohio State in the regular-season finale, and after last season’s misery, Harbaugh finally decided it was time for a new voice.
“(Beating) the teams we had to play to win the championship and hiring the best defensive coordinator that we could, those are things that I was looking for,” Harbaugh said. “That was pretty much exactly what I said to my brother, and he said, ‘I’ve got the guy for ya.’”
The guy was Macdonald, a whip-smart football junkie who never played beyond high school but actually got his start in coaching while he was an undergrad at Georgia. He took a job leading the ninth-grade defense at Cedar Shoals High School in Athens, before eventually joining Mark Richt’s staff at Georgia as a graduate assistant, where he did anything and everything he was asked.
“We were setting up tables for dinner, you name it," Macdonald laughed. "Back then we didn't have iPads, so we had the playbooks, and I remember just having a really rough relationship with the printer. But, yeah, those were great days, man.”
Those were the days he learned firsthand how you build a football team from the ground up, he says, and about how “doing anything you can to help the team win was really valuable.” Those also were the days he decided coaching might have to be a profession.
Macdonald, a finance major who’d graduated summa cum laude, earned a master’s degree in sports management in 2013. Soon after, he landed a consulting job with KPMG, one of the big four accounting firms. But Rodney Garner, the Bulldogs’ longtime defensive line coach who is now at Auburn, helped land Macdonald an internship with the Ravens — Jay Harbaugh, who is now Michigan’s special-teams coordinator and tight ends coach, also was on that staff — “And I quickly called (KPMG) and said, ‘You’re going to have to rip up that contract,’” Macdonald said.
He felt similarly when the Michigan opportunity was presented to him. Sure, Michigan was coming off a 2-4 season and Harbaugh’s new contract extension came with a pay cut that only raised more questions about his future in Ann Arbor. But Macdonald saw it as an opportunity he couldn’t pass up, and thanks the UM head coach “for taking a chance on a guy like me.”
And now his players are saying the same, infused with fresh confidence that grows out of new ideas, but also enthused about a defense they can call their own.
“It ain’t ‘Coach Mac’s defense,’ but it is,” Smith said. “We all have to take ownership and pride in what we do within his scheme: I think that’s what he was trying to get at.”
Macdonald said it didn’t take long to see the buy-in would be there, either, even as a first-time coordinator.
“The one thing I remember from the first day is just the look on Josh Ross and Aidan (Hutchinson)'s eyes,” he said. “It was like, “OK, we've got two dudes that will literally do anything we ask them to do. These guys are ready to go. They're two guys on a mission.”
From there, the mission was simply to build a broader foundation for success, an idea Macdonald spent some time Tuesday trying to deconstruct during a bowl-week media availability.
"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,” he said. “So we spent a lot of time building that — 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.”
So did a bulked-up defensive line, among other changes. Newfound freedom at the training table was another perk for players like Smith, who “just kind of let loose a little bit.” But whether it was more odd-man fronts, a heavier player rotation during games — “He don’t leave no meat on the bone,” Smith says — or varied zone coverages and blitz packages, the one constant was the noise as it grew throughout the fall.
“He does a great job of putting people in positions to make plays, and he does a great job just relating to his players,” defensive tackle Chris Hinton said. “We understand what he's thinking, he understands what we're thinking, and we're able to bounce ideas off of that, and I think that's paid dividends in our success this year. I mean, we love Coach Mac.”
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No. 2 Michigan vs. No. 3 Georgia
COLLEGE FOOTBALL PLAYOFF SEMIS
— Kickoff: 7:30, p.m., Friday, Hard Rock Stadium, Miami Gardens, Florida
— Records: UM 12-1; Georgia 12-1
— Line: Georgia by 8
