Michigan football's Jay Hill explains his complex defensive scheme

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ANN ARBOR, Mich. — Earlier in the offseason, new Michigan football defensive coordinator Jay Hill said that he has the most complicated scheme in all of college football. However, on Tuesday, head coach Kyle Whittingham noted that his goal is to have the schemes he runs to be simple enough that they can be learned quickly.

Considering those notions appear to be diametrically opposed, which one is it?

We met with Hill for the first time on Thursday, and WolverinesWire asked him how those two notions work together. And he noted that it's more about buy-in than anything that allows the players to learn and play fast.

"So, the better we own it, the more we can do," Hill said. "It's always a fine line of – I mean, you can outsmart yourself. So, we've got to be careful with that as coaches. But I don't want to be so simple that the quarterbacks, they're getting ready to take the snap, and they know exactly what we're in. So, we're going to change up the fronts. We're going to change up the coverages. We're going to change up the pressure looks that we're giving them. The better we own it, the more we can do. I think that's the best way to answer it."

So what does his actual scheme look like?

In a way, the returning Wolverines, especially the older players, will have a lessened learning curve. Because if there's an ideological sister to Hill's system — which had been started by Kyle Whittingham's father at Utah, according to Whittingham on Tuesday — it's the system implemented by former Michigan defensive coordinator Jesse Minter in the 2023 season.

"I had a press conference type thing we did a couple weeks ago, and I compared it a lot to the 2023 defense that was here at Michigan," Hill said. "The reason I was familiar with that one is we had a common opponent in 2024 that Michigan had played — the offensive coordinator. And so, I was studying film on this offensive coordinator. Well, sure enough, they had played Michigan in '23. And I'm watching them. I'm like, 'Oh, my gosh, that defense looks just like us.' So, I spent the next couple weeks studying the Michigan film. I think that's a really good idea of what it looks like. 

"But we want to be multiple in the fronts, three down and four down. We want to be multiple with our coverages, and we want to be multiple with our blitz packages, man pressure, zone pressures, two high pressures, three high pressures. And like I say, the better we own it, the more we can do. It's not a grab bag. We're not just grabbing stuff out of a bag, but it's intentional, and we're calling things for a specific purpose. And done correctly, I think we can have a ton of success here with the caliber of players we have."

The coordinator he faced that the maize and blue had played against was Jay Johnson, who was at Michigan State in 2023 (the Spartans went scoreless against the Wolverine defense) and was hired by Wyoming the following year. Hill's defense gave up 14 points against the Cowboys.

It will be interesting to see how Hill deploys his defense, especially if it is similar to that which the Wolverines ran in 2023, when they had the No. 1 overall defense in the country.

This article originally appeared on Wolverines Wire: Michigan football's Jay Hill says defensive scheme similar to U-M 2023

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