Michigan Football's Defensive Coordinator Sets The Record Straight

Michigan's Wink Martindale brings over 20 years of NFL experience with him to Ann Arbor, and he's not interested in unfair comparisons.

Chris Breiler | Jul 2, 2024

Blue Team head coach Wink Martindale watches a play during the second half of the spring game at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor on Saturday, April 20, 2024. / Junfu Han / USA TODAY NETWORK

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Michigan Wolverines

The Michigan Wolverines have been extremely fortunate with their last two defensive coordinator hires. In 2021, Mike Macdonald (who's now the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks) helped restore the Michigan defense into one of the best defensive units in all of college football. From 2022-23, it was Jesse Minter who continued that string of success during his two years as defensive coordinator. With Minter making the move with Harbaugh to the Los Angeles Chargers, Michigan is hoping it has struck gold once again with newest defensive coordinator, Wink Martindale.

Compared to his two predecessors, Martindale brings significantly more experience in his role as defensive coordinator. But along with that experience comes age, and Martindale is already well aware of some unfair comparisons being made to another former U-M DC.

“There’s a narrative out there right now — and one of the things is, I don’t listen to the radio and I don’t read articles or anything else — but there’s a narrative now that some people are afraid it’s going back to the old-school Don Brown system,” Martindale said on the Champions Circle Leaders Series with Jake Butt. “That’s not the case whatsoever. To me, that’s profiling. Just because I’m old and Don Brown’s old, you can’t put us together."

There's no doubt that die-hard Michigan football fans are well aware of who Don Brown is, and it's not hard to see why Martindale would want to push back against that comparison. Brown took over as defensive coordinator on Harbaugh's staff heading into the 2016 season, and the early results looked promising. In fact, Brown had elevated the Wolverines defense to No. 2 nationally after his first year with the program. Unfortunately, that was the peak of his time in Ann Arbor, as his defense continued to decline year after year. The Michigan defense dropped to No. 6 in 2017, No. 8 in 2018, No. 10 in 2019, and bottomed out at No. 56 in 2020 - ultimately leading Harbaugh to make a change at the position.

In order to get the defense right, Harbaugh leaned on his brother, John, and a defensive philosophy that helped make the Baltimore Ravens one of the best in the NFL. That decision led to a string of hires at the University of Michigan that all come from the same coaching tree. In fact, Macdonald, Minter, and Martindale were all part of the Ravens staff at the same time.

John Harbaugh and Wink Martindale /

“I’m proud of the coaches that have come out from underneath this defensive tree and that’s worked with me and that’s gone on. There’s [D’Anton] Lynn at USC — he was with me. Anthony Weaver is the defensive coordinator at Miami — he was with me. Of course, you know Mike [Macdonald] went to Seattle, Jesse [Minter] is the Chargers’ defensive coordinator. Brian Duker is down at Miami. We were all together there, and there are a bunch of guys … Drew Wilkins, who’s at New England now.

“It all started, really, with John Harbaugh. Which no one understands unless you’re in that room, I mean, the Harbaugh family I have so much respect for — and all they do is win, whoever they’re coaching with, wherever they’re coaching. And John, when he hired me as the defensive coordinator, he charged me with, ‘Hey, I want to be more flexible with what we do.’"

From there, Harbaugh and Martindale became central figures in crafting a simplified defensive concept that plays to the strengths of the personnel on the field - the same concept that Michigan has now implemented to much success over the last three seasons.

“And what it was, it was from names of the past of going back Dean Pees, Greg Mattison, Chuck Pagano, Rex Ryan. And it had just become tangled kite string of a defense, where everybody … they couldn’t play as fast as we wanted them to play. And John said, ‘Let’s simplify this thing and yet also make it flexible enough that you can call whatever front you want and have easy ways to close the front.’ We went from that to pressures, from pressures to coverage. And it’s just a bunch of concepts that we can play to the personnel that we have."

Although Martindale intends to bring his own defensive philosophy to Ann Arbor, he also made it clear that it will be a collaborative effort among the staff - noting that head coach Sherrone Moore has assembled a great staff of football minds.

“Even this year with the staff that we have, Sherrone hired a great defensive staff. I have one of my guys with me, Kevin Wilkins, who is an analyst — hopefully they pass that where the analysts can coach, because he’s a great coach. We have LaMar, Lou and BJ as the main guys who all have coordinating experience, so of course I’m going to lean on them heavily going back from pro to college.

"This is gonna be our defense. This is Michigan’s defense. This is Sherrone’s defense. And if you take one of those elements out next year, it’s still the same system, but there will still be another little personality thing to it. And it comes down to who’s calling the games, as well. Which I’ll be calling the games. But the defense has so much flexibility, and we haven’t even talked about the players yet. It has so much flexibility that it shows the personality of who’s coaching the defense — and we’re all coaching it. This is a ‘we’ thing; this isn’t an ‘I’ thing. We’re all coaching it."

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