The Michigan Wolverines will be taking on the Washington Huskies in Monday night’s national championship game, and three-time national champion head coach Urban Meyer thinks they have one key advantage in the game: their linemen on both sides of the ball.
During a recent appearance on the Urban’s Take podcast with Tim May, Urban Meyer explained that Michigan’s dominance this season “starts and stops with the line-of-scrimmage.”
“I think the front-seven on both sides of the ball. On both sides. It was on display in the last game against Alabama. It was really, really good,” Meyer explained. “I think it all starts and stops with the line-of-scrimmage, especially when you start getting into — I used to say talent equated. That was a term we used all the time. In talent-equated games. Everybody is going to have really good skill. When you go out and recruit skill, there’s a lot of it.
Meyer explains that while there are a lot of elite skill players to go around, there just aren’t that many truly elite offensive linemen.
“You say, ‘Give me the top 25 wide receivers,’ they’re all really good. Now obviously there’s Marvin Harrison — you can find, if you say, ‘Give me the top 25 offensive tackles,’ there’s not that many. When you say, ‘I want to go find the top — give me the top 25 centers,’ there aren’t any. There’s not 25 guys. So it’s a fistfight for those top four, five guys,” Meyer said.
“That’s what I see, when I watched them play. They’re developed, but they’re really, really good players. They’re a well-coached team. They play hard as [heck].”
We’ll have to see whether or not the play in the trenches proves to be the difference for Michigan on Monday.
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