60 takeaways on 60 players: A closer look at the deepest U-M football team in decades
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A note at the top: Apologies for the lack of content lately. This is usually the part of the offseason where there’s a bit of a lull, but it was definitely not intended to be this lengthy. For those unaware, my “day job” consists of running the Dallas Morning News’ Breaking News team. And given last month’s mass shooting right in our backyard, it’s been a tough/busy/draining handful of weeks, both personally and professionally.
The good news: We’re good to go moving forward. I have a preview plan mapped out for the next ~12 weeks leading into the season, with a lot of the usual favorites (Big Ten positional rankings, preseason expert roundtable, drafting the roster from scratch) penciled in to return, plus some new ideas — like this one — also in the mix. I’ll also be sending out my annual “U-M football fan survey” in the next week or so, and the results of that typically lead to multiple posts, too: (last year’s yielded Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3). And I just submitted a deep dive on Michigan RB duos for the MGoBlog “Hail To The Victors” Season Preview Magazine (click the link to reserve a copy via pre-sale) that I intend to make available for premium subscribers once that magazine launches, too. So fun times are ahead. I appreciate everyone who continues to support this newsletter and I’m really excited for Season No. 4 — let’s get to it.
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Last month I took part in an informal poll where roughly 40 Michigan media members/fans ranked their top 10 players on the team heading into the 2023 season. You can view the participants and the resulting aggregate rankings here, courtesy of @BBsBigHouse1.
When coming up with my top 10, I thought to myself “wow, this is more difficult than I thought it would be.” But very much in a “that’s a nice problem to have” type of way. Keep in mind that we’re just a year removed from Cade McNamara being in the top 5 of the reader-generated top-25 player list from last year’s offseason survey.
So for my newsletter, I decided to expand those rankings to a top 60 in an effort to flex the insanely impressive depth that has been built up within this program over the last few years. For each player, I’ll also share a sentence or two of why they appear where they did — good for about 5,500 words total.
Feel free to chime in with your own comments at the end and let me know who’s getting snubbed and who is getting too much respect:
