The average college football play this year, for FBS teams, has gone for 5.9 yards. There is one team in the country that hasn’t let a team reach 5 yards per play in a single game. That team was eliminated from playoff contention yesterday, when it took its third loss of the year in which it gave up 20 or fewer points. (No other FBS team has lost more than two of those games.)

Yet here Michigan is. The Wolverines’ 13-6 home loss to Indiana was not the kind of moral victory it would usually be for an unranked team starting a true freshman backup QB to take the defending national champion to overtime. Instead, it’s a sad illustration of the wastefulness of Michigan’s season. The Wolverines have built what may well be a historically good defense. It doesn’t matter, because Kyle Whittingham has paired it with an offense that can’t score and may cause eye bleeding.

The sport is going through a moment of intense parity within the power conferences. Oregon and Texas A&M are already out of the playoff hunt, too, despite spending even more on their rosters than the Wolverines are doling out. But those teams are bad in a variety of ways and aren’t really elite at anything. This Michigan team has a championship-level defense that matches up well with the program’s 2023 unit that won it all. For the program to look so lost despite being so dominant on defense is astonishing. It’s the sort of failure that should prompt Michigan not just to fire its offensive coordinator, but also set up a blue-ribbon commission to make sure an offense like this never exists in Ann Arbor again.

Bryce Underwood wasn’t very good as a freshman, but there were reasons not to be too concerned. Most true freshmen do not have nice stat lines. Michigan’s receivers had their bright spots but amounted to a below-average group. The head coach, Sherrone Moore, was never a QB coach and also turned out to be spending a lot of his time on the various human-resources violations he was committing. In a more professional environment run by Whittingham, who had done little but win at Utah for 21 years, it was easy to imagine Underwood getting things together this season.

That did not happen. Underwood stunk and got benched this week. His freshman replacement, Tommy Carr, was a fringe four-star recruit who might not be on Michigan’s roster if his grandfather, Lloyd, weren’t a former Michigan head coach. Michigan doesn’t have any good options right now, but the Wolverines are probably now in the worst of all worlds, having spun up a QB carousel to little benefit. Carr pulled off a few nice scramble drills late against Indiana, but six points in four-plus quarters speak for themselves. So does the lack of a touchdown on either of two trips inside the 5-yard line in regulation.

The QB problems at least make some sense: Clearly, Michigan (and most of the industry) missed on its evaluation of Underwood and struggled to get the most out of him. The collapse of Michigan’s running game is harder to figure out. The Wolverines were 11th in yards per carry and ninth in rushing success rate last year, according to CollegeFootballData.com. This year’s Wolverines are 112th and 106th, despite having the same lead back both years, Jordan Marshall. The offensive line has had substantial turnover and injury problems, and prized freshman Savion Hiter has not produced. Perimeter runs are the team’s biggest problem: Michigan tailbacks are averaging about 4.6 yards up the middle, 3.3 to the left, and 2.6 to the right, according to CFB Data. This disparity has made it all the more perplexing that offensive coordinator Jason Beck, who arrived with Whittingham, has remained so committed to outside runs.

It is weird to have a football team with this big of a ranking gap between its offense and defense. While the defense ranks No. 1 in yards per play, the offense ranks 122nd. Needless to say, the last program to have a gap that big was Kirk Ferentz’s Iowa, which did it in both 2022 and 2023. That would be the Iowa program that beat Michigan with a walk-off touchdown pass at the Big House about a month ago.

Although I love visiting Ann Arbor and would even say it’s the best college town in the Big Ten, I am not a Michigan fan. If I were a Michigan fan, I would be extra chapped about this waste of a season not just because the defense is so good but because the rest of the Big Ten has turned out to be so vulnerable. Ohio State is probably still the best team in the league, but Julian Sayin’s potentially season-ending injury would give Michigan a decent chance in The Game if the offense weren’t so bleak. Oregon is just as big a disaster as Michigan is. Penn State punted on the season when it took too long to hire Matt Campbell last December and found itself importing Iowa State’s nucleus to a Big Ten job with higher expectations. USC remains a paper tiger under Lincoln Riley. Even the defending champs at Indiana have looked lousy three weeks in a row and are just getting by, rather than steamrolling everyone the way they did in 2025. No disrespect to one-loss Northwestern and an undefeated UCLA that is also playing a backup QB, but the opportunity was there.

Even a mildly competent Michigan offense would have this team in the thick of the Big Ten championship hunt, with no ceiling on what it would become. This year turned out to be a golden, squandered opportunity. (Not that Michigan is claiming otherwise, but this wasn’t a time for rebuilding under a new coach. You don’t hire 66-year-old Kyle Whittingham and have him bring over a handful of his best Utah players because you’re expecting to scrap for bowl eligibility in his debut season.)

What Michigan can do about this now is clear but not easy. The program will need a new QB next year, having burned the Underwood bridge and gotten an early look at Carr. Michigan’s 2027 starter should not be on its roster right now. That may well require shopping in the transfer portal, a pipeline that Michigan hasn’t used for its starting QB since 2018, when the disappointing Shea Patterson came over from Ole Miss. The Wolverines have been a developmental program at QB, and that’s great. But Michigan probably should not start another true freshman next year. Needless to say, the person coaching the next QB1 should be a different guy, too. Beck is a man with no answers, and Michigan will need an offensive coordinator who can find some. Plus, it’ll be important to keep as much of this defense together as possible so that Michigan’s reconstituted offense doesn’t have to jump over a high bar.

Michigan doesn’t have to be that far away from contention. Most of the Wolverines’ defensive contributors this season have eligibility remaining, should the program be ready to pay up and keep them. There’s a budget here to attract a better play-caller and quarterback. But no matter how the Wolverines build their roster for 2027, they’ll have to live with the cataclysmic waste that 2026 has become.