Michigan football's new coach Kyle Whittingham on team's identity

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — It's not a massive personality change for Michigan football to have moved on from the Jim Harbaugh-Sherrone Moore era to Kyle Whittingham. The former Utah head coach has a similar ethos as his predecessors — be physical up front, at the point of attack, and then work everything else out.

Whittingham's teams might have a bit more panache in terms of skill positions compared to what Harbaugh-Moore brought to the table, but the identities have been essentially the same.

So when Whittingham met with the media for the first time after his Orlando introduction in December, when asked about the strength of his team, he expects that it will be physicality. Thus, should that be the case, the hallmark for Michigan football won't change.

"We’re going to find that out this spring," Whittingham said. "We have a decent idea, and we won’t really get a lot of feedback the first couple days, no pads. You can’t get into pads until the third day, and so that will be a work in progress. But we think that we’re going to be a physical football team. We want that to be our trademark. We want to be mentally and physically tough. And when you come to play us, you know you’ve been in for a physical contest.

"But we’re just looking forward to seeing how these things develop over the next 15 practices. We’ve got a lot ahead of us as far as what we’ve got to get accomplished. We’ve got to figure out the talent level of the players, the scheme. We have to learn scheme. They have to learn scheme and be able to assimilate that. And so there’s a lot of things we’re going to find out this spring that are going to be key moving forward, obviously."

Given that, Whittingham knows what he has — not only in players, but also with the coaches he brought in.

He's particularly excited about what the offensive line is going to be, with six players who have starting experience from a year ago. But perhaps something of a surprise is that he's also enthusiastic about who he has in the middle of the defensive line — a position group that had a lot of attrition from last year to now. As far as what he's seen, he's solid there, but needs some players to step up more so on the outside.

"I think we’ll be good in the line of scrimmage, as you mentioned," Whittingham said. "We’ve got some guys back with experience on offense. Jim Harding, our offensive line coach — there’s no offensive line coach in the country better than him at developing talent. His track record speaks to that. He’ll have two first-round draft choices this year, and so it’s in good hands.

"Like what we’ve seen in the workouts with the defensive line. Got three or four big interior guys that we think are going to be really good for us. Got to develop some edge guys. But based on what we’ve seen just athletically and moving around, I think we’re going to be OK."

Spring ball is set to begin on Tuesday, with eyes on the annual spring game on April 18 at The Big House.

This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Kyle Whittingham sees strength in Michigan football OL, interior DL

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