WTKA Roundtable 7/31/2025: The New Phonebook's Here!

Things Discussed:

• Condolences and love to the family of Greg Glenn. If you recall he came here as the glue guy/energy guy friend of Jett Howard who was supposed to make Jett better. When you talk about losing a 22-year-old whose primary scholarship-worthy attribute was he made other people better, that's a big loss. Craig mentions he met him at media day, thought Glenn was naively honest and open for an athlete.
• New rosters/new weights. Bryce Underwood is 10 pounds heavier already than JJ ever got, will need it to be a runner.
• Michigan going to screen and RPO more? Sure but I think you play man on them, put your biggest corner on McCulley, put a safety in the box, and dare Bryce to beat you. Michigan can make that work by having Bryce hit kill shots deep and by making the high safety responsible for stopping Bryce in the run game.
• Kill shots: Chip likes to turn a route combo that he's shown before into a surprise deep shot.
• Jake Garcia? Was ranked around JJ as a freshman after an odyssey, played early at Miami (yes THAT Miami), but threw a lot of INTs, went to Mizzou then ECU, and threw a lot of INTs at ECU too. Got experience.
• Think Mikey Keene is a much higher floor than we got from Davis Warren/Alex Orji last year.
• Oklahoma: They're us. Great defense, I'm not as sold as everyone else on Mateer. I think their system really beat up on Mountain West cornerbacks, and he has a lot of moxie, but I don't know how that "you don't know what we're RPOing!" offense is going to interact with Michigan's "you don't know what our coverage is" defense. Probably going to be a rock fight because Oklahoma's defense is legit. They play aggressive, the LBs fill in the gaps, and they've got a safety who makes everybody right.
• DL dropoff? Think the edges are going to be the superstars, but Benny is very good and they can rotate. Teams are going to try to lock them on the field but good luck surviving the first four snaps against Benny and Williams.
• Derrick Moore: He was winning his pass rushes regularly but other guys got the stats, had a dropoff while injured, played a GREAT bowl game. Sam says Aidan Hutchinson; I try to tamp that down to "just" Brandon Graham.
• Players say there was a meeting before Indiana where Wink had to listen to the players about how they do things and some of the players had to hear some things, and they all really got on the same page. Defense was ELITE after that.
• I'm mad about Cam Brandt switching to #9, which looks like TJ Guy's #4 and Derrick Moore's #8. What are we doing here Cam? Some of us have to chart in the wee hours. We had a 91, 42, and 8, and the fans knew exactly what we were looking at.
• Blake Frazier at 295: His timeline was always 2026 not 2025; I think we were talking about him as an X-factor and he's got to gain more weight before we put him out there at left tackle.
• Sam's OL right now from right to left: Sprague, Efobi, Crippen, El-Hadi, ….?
• LT: I think they have to live with Link (who lost 4 pounds and looks leaner in a grocery store), until Babalola is ready. Note that Sprague came in very well developed needed until the bowl game (though he was injured early in the season).
• Receiver weights: Kendrick Bell is a sneaky pick for breakout player, Fred Moore is as well. Very encouraged by Andrew Marsh coming in at 190 because his thing is he played vs Texas high schoolers bigger than his 175 size; if he's going to make that work against 220-pound safeties in the Big Ten he's going to need that size.
• Center? I think Crippen is smart, knows all the calls, hit his strength/size ceiling and it's lower than they want to move DTs, and Juan Castillo can't add much more than that. What Castillo can do is get Guarnera ready to push Crippen, but with a freshman QB you want to get the line calls right first, not shoot for the stars. Crippen is our guy, he'll give us a senior Kugler kind of year, and we'll live with it.