Michigan football's new OL coach has a plan for heart and soul of team
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The heart and soul of most football teams is its offensive line, and Michigan football is no exception.
The Wolverines have had two Joe Moore Award winning groups as the best line in the nation over the past five seasons and two others that finished as semifinalists, including last year's unit.
The bulk of that group returns, but will be led by a new face. Jim Harding, a former standout at Toledo, who coached at Troy Athens in Michigan before he went to Wyoming and then Utah for 12 seasons, has returned to the Midwest to continue his work under new Michigan coach Kyle Whittingham.
Harding said his first few months has been a whirlwind, which included convincing players like Jake Guarnera and Andrew Sprague − who'd both entered the transfer portal − to believe in him. After conversations with the players and their parents, all relevant parties took the leap of faith to keep U-M's primary group in tact.
Since that time, it's been a process of getting to know one another for the season ahead. Harding told Jon Jansen on program's in-house podcast "Inside The Trenches" that he's been "really pleased" with the early impressions.
"High care-factor, smart, intelligent, ask good questions in the meetings,” Harding said of the players who make up his room. “[There's a] want-to − almost to a fault. Like, they always want to do extra drill-work and things like that. Sometimes, you need to give your body a rest, but I’d rather have kids like that rather than dragging them to get extra work. But I’ve been really impressed with the group.
“The things that you can’t measure right now are our physicality, our toughness, things like that. That’s kind of the next step once we get pads on − who are kind of the alpha dogs in the room that are going to kind of set the tone for the unit?"
In addition to Sprague and Guarnera, U-M returns tackle Blake Frazier, tackle/guard Evan Link (there's an expectation Link may move to a guard spot for the upcoming season), Nathan Efobi and Brady Norton.
Beyond that, five-star Andrew Babalola (who missed 2025) should be back to full health, while U-M also added Houston Ka’aha’aina-Torres (Nebraska) into the mix. There are others who could factor in, like Lawrence Hattar, Avery Gach and Luke Hamilton, but there are two areas of focus for Harding as U-M heads into spring ball in less than two weeks.
First, establishing a starting unit, which includes a swing-tackle as a sixth-man. Next, finding a two-deep at center.
“I’d like to establish the starting five, where you feel good that when you go into fall camp, those are the guys that are working together immediately from Day 1,” Harding said. “Now, we do have a couple guys out that may factor into that starting five. But we had typically traveled 11, so you’re looking for those top five. We do play six O-linemen quite a bit, so we call that guy the ‘Rhino.’ You’re looking for one or two of those guys.
"More depth at the center position; the only guy that’s snapped in a game so far has been Jake, so we’ve got to have some depth there."
In the meantime, Harding wants to spend more time bonding the unit as a group. Harding admits he overlooked this in his first few weeks since he was so busy getting acclimated, working in the portal and generating a plan moving forward.
Now that things have slowed down a bit, he had time to ask a trio of the returners what they wanted from him, and Frazier, Guarnera and Sprague all expressed their desire to bond together as a group beyond just the X's and O's of football.
The group all went out to dinner together last month and posted a picture on social media.
"I’m going to have each kid go up and, even though they know each other, I don’t know them all that well, and just tell whatever you want about yourself for three to five minutes," Harding said. "Just talk about life and things like that in the meetings. ... Still get work done, but it kind of reminded me that I need to make sure that we do that camaraderie piece as well.
"We’ll keep building on that, but it’s a good point that I probably could’ve done a little bit earlier."
Tony Garcia is the Wolverines beat writer for the Detroit Free Press. Email him at apgarcia@freepress.com and follow him on X at @RealTonyGarcia.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Michigan football's new OL coach has a plan for heart and soul of team
