Michigan Football: Jim Harbaugh needs to make some coaching changes

After back-to-back embarrassing losses, Jim Harbaugh foolishly still hasn’t made any coaching changes.  Michigan football fans deserve better.

I don’t know what it will take for Michigan football head coach Jim Harbaugh to make a coaching change to his staff.  Defensive coordinator Don Brown should have been kicked to the curb at the end of last season, but here we are in 2020 with Brown retaining his defensive play-calling duties.

The Wolverines have been owned by their archrival Ohio State Buckeyes during Harbaugh’s tenure as the school’s head coach.  Even when the Wolverines were having tremendous success entering that Ohio State game, things have turned south in a hurry.  Brown’s man-to-man defense is very reminiscent of what Matt Patricia runs with the Detroit Lions.  Like Patricia, Brown struggles to adjust, whether it is an ego thing or merely a case of bullheadedness, whatever it is, it’s become problematic and hampering their teams’ success.

Things will not get better anytime soon because Aidan Hutchinson is set to have surgery to repair a leg fracture.  Sure, Hutchinson doesn’t cover receivers, but he’s vital to aiding the pass-defense due to his ability to rush the passer.

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Michigan football’s pass defense ranks a whopping 104th in the country.  It’s a group that is consistently getting beat over the top.  The Michigan State Spartans, who laid an egg in their first week of the season against Rutgers, torched the Wolverines, throwing the football all over the yard.

Michigan followed that embarrassing Michigan State loss up a week later by getting burnt by Indiana through the air for north of 300 yards again.  Things won’t get any easier for the Wolverines as they are set to square off with Wisconsin Saturday night in primetime on ABC.

Things are a bit better for offensive coordinator Josh Gattis.  The Wolverines rank 26th in the nation averaging nearly 290 passing yards per game along with adding 140 rushing yards.  The 140 rushing yards appear like a substantial number, but that ranks 81st in the country.

While the passing numbers are becoming much more par for the course considering it is 2020.  We all know Harbaugh would prefer to be a top ten rushing team, and he’d love to go back to his power run style of offense.  Gattis is not perfect, but he’s clearly a better coordinator than Brown at the moment.

Despite being 1-2 and embarrassingly losing the last two games, Harbaugh recently mentioned he feels his team is ‘close.’  Unless the word close has a new definition that I’m not aware of, I’m convinced Harbaugh is living in a fantasy world.

Harbaugh is currently coaching on the final year of his deal, and things are not looking good at the moment regarding his future at Michigan.  He needs to do something soon to shake things up, and firing Don Brown would be a good start.