Thanks for posting. I agree with you and don't think we will see a huge drop with the defense. Don Brown has done more with much less in the past.

You aren't helping me keep my 2019 football hype in check.

Can we get an "In Offense of the Offense" retrospective on last season?

Problem is the defense last year was great against the Northwesterns (and to be fair the Michigan States and Penn States) of CFB, but got worked by ND and Florida, and destroyed worse than any Wolverine defense ever at OSU. It's not just the loss of 4 first/second round NFL players that has us worried. It's that PLUS the perpetual vulnerability to the slot fade/slot crossing route constraint keeping us up at night.

I have hopes for the offense. I better, because the defense isn't bailing them out ten games in a row while they try to run against 9 men in the box.

You make good points, but I think it's a mistake to assume that an incoming freshman who hasn't even practiced with the team yet is going to be an immediate upgrade over a multi-year starter. Taking angles against Power 5 guys isn't like taking angles against high school guys. 

Thanks for the thoughtful analysis. Obviously results on the field will determine how accurate it is, but we do have plenty of talent still. And perhaps more than one reason for both the Defense and Offense to prove they can deliver against OSU?

I think the starters compare well. You're right. But the depth at DL is significantly worse. So I partially agree with you but in general have an optimism/realism conflict going on.

Losing Charles Matthews will be felt most on the defensive side....going to be tough to fill his departure 

Part of my concern is that I think what's more important than who is starting at DT is who is seeing the field for significant snaps at DT. We go from Paye and Mone in 2018, a solid pair, to Jeter and Paea, by your estimation, in 2019. Maybe that's fine, but I think it's way too early to be sure of that. Compounding the fear is that our 2018 offense was all ball control and slow pace, meaning fewer snaps for the DTs than what we're likely to see in 2019.

I also think you're underselling the loss of Devin Bush. He would just RUIN the offense's plans over and over and make TD saving plays all by himself when things went awry.

And finally, I believe we need a very solid pass rush for our defense to be truly successful. So even if Hutchinson and Danna are good options (which I'm hopeful about, but it is not guaranteed), are they going to get to the QB with consistency given our DTs may not be able to collapse the pocket?

All in all, I'm not panicking about the defense, but I think there's more than enough evidence, or at least uncertainties, for a step back in production to be expected.

In other (and fewer) words, “we’ll be fine”.

BTW, would your “He did nothing for the team last year, so losing him doesn’t matter” argument apply if Dax Hill got hurt and missed the season? 

I have few worries about the defense.  It will be solid. It will not be invincible, and truly invincible defense doesn't exist in College Football anymore. 

If I have a worry at all, it's the offense. It HAS to be dynamic. It MUST be able to score quickly. It MUST be balanced enough to keep defenses honest. It MUST use tempo to take advantage of mismatches.  It cannot take its foot off an opponent's throat for even one drive, especially against OSU.

Nice recap of personnel .........

Not that it is a problem but no one has mentioned that Don Brown's style of defense - a risk reward conundrum - requires a couple of things:

(1) 4 man pressure up-front, pass or run, that is disruptive. None of the guys returning - no need to single out players by mentioning names - delivered that key ingredient for Brown's defense during 2018 against teams with NFL level talent and elite coaching on offense. Not sure they will do that in 2019.

(2) When Brown wasn't getting decent pressure metrics and his defense got exposed to combo counters such as IZ/OZ runs and then those pesky spread look, 4 receiver, OZ blocked passing plays, he'd dial up a 5th or 6th rusher. In doing that, he put his LBs in a position where, on quick QB releases, they had to cover speedy receivers running crossing routes and fades under man coverage.  We saw how that worked out.

Given the DTs and DEs that will play and the LBs and Ss that aren't going to be significantly better than what was out there on the field in 2018, I'm hoping the offense can score 40+ points on the regular as I suspect were going to see some schematic break downs involving M's D like we did in 2018 against the best opponents M will face.

My issue with the DT's is that the guys we had last year didn't do much, now we have the same guys and the specter of relying on two true freshman in Mazi Smith and Chris Hinton.. yes, highly rated but needing both of the to step into significant playing time, along with Dwumfour who is a liability against the run and Jeter (Mone 2.0) doesn't exactly warm my cockles. 

Lack of an interior pass rush puts a lot of pressure on everyone else, means we need to send LB's to blitz more often leaving the middle exposed and while Ambry Thomas may be good, he's no David Long. And Vincent Gray, well he was an unheralded late flyer that we have as the 3rd CB now.. I think any hopes of another 10-win season and beating OSU relies on the offense being as close to elite as possible. For once the offense will have to carry a sub-par (for our standards) defense. 

The problem is that if you apply this same logic to Michigan's opponents, suddenly the prospects for the season don't seem so bright.  For example, Ohio State is replacing four Offensive Linemen, which should prevent them from doing what they did last year on that side of the ball, but... the four replacements are three 5*s and a 4*.  Oh, and a honorable-mention All Big10 transfer from Rutgers that may plug in there somewhere.

So if you push the whole, "Well this guy is highly rated so he'll work out, and this other guy is highly rated and had those 3 great games when he had to fill in last year..." narrative, suddenly games against Ohio State, Notre Dame, and to a lesser extent Penn State seem very daunting, nevermind the bowl game or playoff games.

You can't have it both ways.  Michigan has some very real question marks, and you're hand-waving them away with things like an incoming transfer DL who got 4 of his 9.5 sacks against FCS opponent Maine, a total of 0 sacks and 1 QB hurry in his 3 combined games against mediocre P5 schools, and who is scored highly by a Pro Football Focus measure that doesn't adjust for quality of competition.  That's not a player to count on; that's buying a lottery ticket and hoping it hits.

Could it all turn out for the best?  Of course it could.  But even 5* recruits routinely don't meet expectations, or sometimes even manage to become starters.  Happens all the time.  Roughly 50% of 5* players don't even get drafted, and I can assure you that almost every one of them had earned that 5* rating just as much as Daxton Hill did.

This is a very different situation than it was last time arround, when players like Gary and Winovich were ready to step in.  They had already played real minutes and already showed that they were solid.  That's just not the case this year, with players like Ambry who have played minutes but struggled. ("All indications are he's made the jump"... what indications are those?  His being so far from ready to play that he couldn't even get into the Ohio State game when the player ahead of him was being beat like a rented mule?  Surely you're not placing very much faith in what the coaches are saying this Spring, because you know that they are going to say nice things about him regardless of how he performs, right?)

It's not all doom and gloom and certain failure, but confidently asserting that the defense should be roughly on par with last year's is unwarranted.  You can hope for it, but predicting it is a bridge too far.  

Just catching up to this diary OP - thanks for a reasonably optimistic take - there's plenty of things to be pessimistic take, but until they take the field, we won't know who was right. 

I'm confident DB will coach these guys up and put a good system in place that can handle the bulk of the offenses we face this year. Given so many teams replacing so much talent at key positions and hopefully an accelerate offense that can score more points on our side, I think there's plenty to be optimistic about. By the time we take on the hardest stretch of our schedule, these guys will be experienced enough and ready if they're healthy. 

The key measurement for improvement will still be how we face up against top-end talent on our schedule vs OSU and ND, however. I can see a strong argument for PSU, UW, and MSU struggling offensively this year. I think there's a strong sentiment that if we won all our other games and lost those two that the season would be a failure and DB would have "failed" - fair or not, that's how we're judging our seasons these days.  If OSU and ND regress a bit from last year and we hold steady and/or improve a bit those games become tractable. If they hold steady or improve and we regress slightly, it's tough to win those games.

I hope I'm wrong but I see more than a small fall-off on defense.

We will have to win some high scoring games this fall.

Thanks for this post, DelhiWolverine.  Respectfully, I have to agree with some of the other commenters that you are downplaying the issues facing the defense.  As others have pointed out, we can't assume that guys who haven't shown us much yet are going to be able to match the production of 5 departed starters.  And even if guys like Danna, Hutchinson, & Ross are good, it's still a tall order to expect to match them the production of potential 1st round draft picks in Winovich & Devin Bush (I agree with you about Rashan Gary not being much of a loss because he was playing hurt so often).  Depth is also a big concern. 

With Aubrey Solomon, the loss hurts not because he's been any good so far( he hasn't) but that Michigan needs an every-down interior lineman who can generate pressure, and Solomon was the most likely to become that dude. I'm no expert on defensive schemes, but Brian has argued that Brown's defense depends on having an interior DL who could generate a consistent pass rush.  Last year we saw the lack of consistent pressure from the interior line allow opposing OLs to double both Winovich & Gary. With Solomon gone, I guess we're hoping that Dwumfour becomes that dude.     

What I'm hoping is that even with the likely struggles on defense (and maybe I'm seeing this through my own rose-colored glasses...) the combination of a a)likely big improvement on offense, b) our opponents having their own challenges with replacing returning production, c) a favorable schedule, & d) the OSU coaching change allows us to weather those struggles out.